A document dating from 1944, among some 6,300 census forms of Budapest’s Jewish population at the time, is pictured in the city’s archives, Nov. 12, 2015. (Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images)
(JTA) — An “unprecedented” cache of documents on the Jewish population of Budapest in 1944 before its liquidation by the Nazis was found hidden in a wall during the renovation of a city apartment.
The 6,300 documents that comprise a census of the Hungarian capital’s Jewish population that year were uncovered in August, the French news agency AFP reported over the weekend. The documents were believed to have been destroyed during World War II.
The papers have been turned over to the city’s archives.
“The content and scale of the finding is unprecedented,” Istvan Kenyeres, director of the Budapest City Archives, told AFP. “It helps to fill a huge gap in the history of the Holocaust in Budapest.”
The census forms found in the Budapest apartment contain names of each building’s inhabitants and whether they are Jewish or not, with the total numbers of Christians and Jews marked in the corners, according to AFP. The Jews listed on the forms were later moved into apartments set aside for Jews, who were later moved into the city’s ghetto.
About 600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust, most of them in Auschwitz.
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