Thousands of Holocaust papers found in Budapest apartment
Documents cataloging residents of Hungarian capital in 1944, just before Jews were packed into a ghetto and shipped to death camps, found inside wall
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on Google
Renovations at an apartment in Budapest uncovered thousands of documents from 1944 cataloging the Jewish population of the Hungarian capital, according to a recent report in the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung.
The 6,300 documents were found in a wall of an apartment in Budapest that had recently cracked. When the landlord started fixing the wall, the bundles of paper were found stashed inside.
The papers date from just before the confinement of Hungarian Jews to the Budapest ghetto in 1944. In May of that year, city officials drafted a list of the city’s population, differentiating between Christians and Jews, detailing addresses, identities and cost of rent. The newfound documents detail residents from just four of the city’s districts.
A month later, 220,000 Jews were forced into a ghetto, then sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.
An estimated 600,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust.
Municipal archivists were working to determine the history of the building, located near Budapest’s iconic parliament building, in order to shed light on who squirreled the documents away.
Istvan Kenyeres, head of the archive, said the documents were of “historical significance.”
The Times of Israel Community.