Holocaust Documents Trove Unearthed in Budapest Apartment
Source: AFP/MSN
A vast and historically valuable trove of Holocaust era documents, long thought destroyed during World War II, has been found in a wall cavity by a couple renovating their Budapest apartment. The haul of 6,300 documents are from a 1944 census that was a precursor to the intended liquidation of the Hungarian capital's 200,000 Jews in the Nazi death camps. Brigitte Berdefy, co-owner of the apartment overlooking Hungary's parliament, said that in August a worker detected paper after jamming a screwdriver through a crack in the wall. "We thought we'd ruined the neighbor's wallpaper," Berdefy told AFP. But then her husband Gabor peered through the crack and saw what looked like handwriting.
Carefully removing each brick, the couple eased out some 61 kilograms (135 pounds) of dusty papers, many with bits of plaster caked on, but all more or less in tact with the ink still readable-- thanks to a lack of air in the cavity and nicotine from the heavy- smoking former owner-- the yellow papers were given to Budapest City Archives. Istvan Kenyeres, head of the Archives, was amazed. Most wartime papers are more faded or rotten than medieval documents, on bad quality paper due to rationing he told AFP. "The content and scale of the finding is unprecedented," he said. "It helps to fill a huge gap in the history of the Holocaust in Budapest. - Ironing history - Since September, restorers at the archives have been literally ironing the papers to study them, pausing occasionally when they spot someone famous among the scrawled names.
The May 1944 Budapest census was to identify houses to serve as holding locations for Jews before moving them to a planned walled ghetto in the city's seventh district. Two months earlier Nazi Germany had occupied Hungary and deportations in the countryside to the gas chambers of Auschwitz began almost immediately. The forms found in the Budapest apartment contain names of each building's inhabitants, and whether they were Jews or not, with total numbers of Christians and Jews marked in the corners. "Jewish people filled in the forms honesty, they refused to believe where this might end up," said Kenyeres. Shortly after the census, around 20,000 Jews were moved into some 2,000 selected buildings, "Yellow Star Houses" with the Star-of-David Jewish symbol painted on the doors. "Thanks to the Berdefys we know that if a lot of Jews lived in abuilding then it likely became a Yellow Star House," Kenyeres said.
In late 1944, they were crammed into the ghetto where some died of starvation or were shot next to the river-- a poignant memorial of abandoned iron shoes today marks the spot. The arrival of the Russian Army in Jan. 1945 saved the rest though, unlike the Jews from outside the city, most of Budapest's Jewish population survived. An estimated total 600,000 Hungarian Jews perished in the Holocaust, most in Auschwitz. Kenyeres said that an estimated 23,000 more documents may still be out there which would give further valuable insight into what happened in 1944 and would also be digitalized and made available to the public if they turned up. "People should look behind their walls, you never know in Budapest what could be there."
Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/holocaust-documents-trove-unearthed-in-budapest-apartment/ar-BBnh3NN?li=BBnb7Kz
A document dating from 1944 that is part of around 6,300 census forms of Budapest's then Jewish population is pictured in Budapest City.
A large group of Jews, escorted by soldiers of the SS, are taken to a concentration camp before the eyes of the crowd along the road.
= new reply since forum marked as read
- THE NAZIS' LAST VICTIMS: THE HOLOCAUST IN HUNGARY, Edited by Randolph L. Braham, Scott Miller, 1998.
http://www.ushmm.org/research/publications/academic-publications/full-list-of-academic-publications/the-nazis-last-victims-the-holocaust-in-hungary
- RUDOLF VRBA & ALFRED WETZLER, 1944 prisoner escapees of Auschwitz provided contemporary accounts of the camp to officials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Vrba
- RAOUL WALLENBERG, Hero of Budapest, Swedish businessman & diplomat to Hungary aided wartime Jews of Budapest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg
- NAZI SS- SCHUTZSTAFFEL, composed of elite, Aryan troops, the foremost Nazi agency of surveillance and terror within Germany and the Nazi occupied countries of Europe.
As part of its race-centric functions, the SS oversaw the isolation and displacement of Jews from the populations of conquered territories, seizing their assets and transporting them to concentration camps and ghettos where they would be used as slave labor.
One large component of the SS was the TOTENKOPF Verbande, the DEATH HEAD Units that ran the concentration and extermination camps where Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, German and foreign political prisoners, dissidents and trade unionists were imprisoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel
- NAZI SS INSIGNIA
- RUDOLF HOESS, Commandant of Auschwitz where more than a million Jews and others were murdered. Hoess introduced the pesticide Zyklon B containing cyanide to the mass killing process that reached 2,000 people an hour.
One of his 5 children, Brigitte Hoess has lived and worked in the Washington, DC and NoVa area for 35 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss
Last edited Sun Nov 22, 2015, 03:48 PM - Edit history (2)
In spite of the Holocaust and tragedy and misery of the war, there were heroes who exhibited great courage to save others like Raoul Wallenberg I noted and thousands of other brave soldiers and civilians who fought with determination and honor to preserve Europe from fascism.
In WWII my father was a 24 year old, awarded 7th Army 1st Lieut. in the Rhineland Campaign and at the Liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp outside Munich. He stayed on with the US Army of Occupation in Bavaria after the war. I remember some things he told us and have his uniform insignia, Deutsche mark coins and SS patches that he gave me in college. God knows what he and thousands of others saw and experienced and what the victims of the war endured.
A friend from college whose parents, Hungarian Jews who survived Auschwitz, showed me on his arm where his parents camp tattoo numbers were located. I worked at the National Archives of the United States which holds the official US collection of Captured German Records from the Second World War. One day the head archivist of that division walked by holding an historic object and asked if I knew what it was. I said it's a canister of Zyklon B, the poison with cyanide used to exterminate people at the camps. I'll never forget that experience and other documents and objects I saw there.
- Four of five children of Josef Hoess, SS Commandant of Auschwitz and official at other Nazi concentration camps. Hoess, his wife Hedwig and their children lived comfortably at Auschwitz in a villa with a garden and prison servants.
- Jewish women and children walk toward the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944.
- The main gas chamber at Auschwitz, near where SS Camp Commandant Josef Hoess was hung as a war criminal in 1947.
- Zyklon B pesticide canister with cyanide poison used to murder millions in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps.
- Brigitte Hoess' story as reported by writer Thomas Harding in 2013 including her Washington, DC Jewish employer who fled Nazi Germany after the 1938 Kristallnacht attacks. In the photo above, Brigitte is the girl on the top right. She was b. 1933, the third of five children of Rudolf and Hedwig Hoess.
Washington Post, "HIDING IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA, A DAUGHTER OF AUSCHWITZ" by Thomas Harding, Sept. 6, 2013.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/hiding-in-n-virginia-a-daughter-of-auschwitz/2013/09/06/1314d648-04fd-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html
others is not surprising. It's a shame that her life couldn't stand for something more, but of course I also understand that it would take a lot of courage and depth of character to openly look at the horrors of what he did.
Thank you for posting that, it was a very worthwhile read.
especially about why must there be a Holocaust Museum in DC, (where she lives) and so much more. That Holocaust memorial and all others are essential to learning of and remembering the Nazi atrocity. I know from a museum colleague who worked in curatorial collections at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington even more about the enormous holdings there of personal effects which is so tragic.
Brigitte Hoess' denial of realities and her obliviousness and ingratitude about living and working freely in the US, in the capitol city for decades blows the mind. I also wonder which fashion salon she was employed at in DC for years, since there are only so many places like that downtown. It's so important that Thomas Harding wrote the article on her and also a book on the capture of her Auschwitz war criminal father Rudolf Hoess with the help of his uncle in 1946. Unbelievable.
Sorry to reply so late and glad you found the Post article worthwhile. 
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC established in 1993 for the study, documentation and interpretation of Holocaust history. Photo of entrance to the Memorial from Wallenberg Place with Dwight Eisenhower Memorial in foreground. The site is located adjacent to the National Mall.
The Holocaust Museum offers invaluable exhibits, educational programs and receives millions of visitors a year.
I live near DC so have visited, but it has been a number of years... you are making me feel drawn to return.
Nice to see Obama there, good pic.
