SCATTERED IN EUROPE - HUNGARIAN JEWS IN THE NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS

​During the Holocaust in Hungary, more than half million Jews and thousands of Roma and political prisoners were deported to the Nazi camp system. The SS and the collaborating Hungarian authorities transported them to hundreds of different concentration and labour camps or armaments factories throughout Europe: from the ghetto in Riga (Latvia) and Theresienstadt (Czech Republic) to KL Natzweiler-Struthof (France), from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen (Poland) to Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen. Most of them were killed, starved to death or perished due to lethal diseases. More than 70 years have passed since the liberation of the Nazi camps. Yet, in most cases, the number of victims in different camps are still uncounted, their fates and burial sites are still not known to their relatives either. This project aims at fully documenting the story of Hungarian inmates and victims, revealing and recording their fate.
 
In the framework of the project, the Hungarian Jewish Archives performed archival researches kept in different locations inside and outside of Hungary. Cooperating with Gedenkstӓtten in Germany (Dachau, Flossenbürg, Mittelbau, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen etc.) hundreds of transports and tens of thousands of prisoners and victims have already been identified. On the basis of this joint efforts, Hungarian and German archivists and scholars are correcting and completing digital databases of former inmates and victims, exchanging data and documentation, preparing commemorative events. In the second part of the project in 2016, research activities will be completed, selected results will be published in a scholarly volume. Thematic digital data bases, online materials will be developed and made available to students and their teachers, survivors' relatives and descendants and to the general public as well. Commemorations will also be held at former camp sites in memory of the victims.