Immediately after the German Army occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, German SS officers and local Hungarian collaborators began rounding up the Jews of Hungary. By July, they had assembled 437,402 people — nearly every Jewish person in Hungary outside the capital city of Budapest. After being confined for a short time in ghettos, these people were transported on 148 freight trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau and its gas chambers. Sol, his father, and his uncle were among the few who survived these deportations.
Under pressure from the Allies, the Hungarian leader, Miklos Horthy, ordered an end to the deportations on July 7, 1944. By then, only 200,000 Hungarian Jews remained, nearly all of them in Budapest. Three months later, Horthy’s government was overthrown by a German-allied fascist organization called the Arrow Cross, which resumed the campaign to render Hungary “free of Jews.” They quickly executed thousands of Jewish people, and sent 76,000 more on death marches toward Germany. The Arrow Cross and the Germans scheduled the total elimination of the city’s Jews for mid-January 1945, but the Soviet Army liberated Budapest before the final plans could be carried out. Thanks, in part, to the efforts of hundreds of rescuers including Raoul Wallenberg, 120,000 Jews were still alive in Budapest when the Soviets arrived.
