Remembering the Kastner-train

The Budapest City Archives presents an exhibition named „Fates cemented in walls, Houses and People, 1944. Budapest-Bergen-Belsen” on the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust- reports MTI.

One part of the exhibition lets the visitor to take a look at the lives of Jews just before they were moved together, based on historic name lists.

Some thousands of documents were found about this period in 2015 during a renovation of an apartment on Kossuth square and the documents were given over to Budapest City Archives. All the names of the Jews that were forcibly moved from their homes into something called “starred houses” (houses marked with a star saying they were occupied by Jews), the names of the landlords, owners and other information was listed on these 7000 forms.

“The date of the division of our apartment was approaching, which was the most horrible time I could remember. 3 families moved in with just as much stuff as we had. I did not find my space in my own home anymore.”

That is when Mrs. Gábor Munk, née Irma Gruber made the fateful decision:

„Our lives was not worth anything anymore. Nothing mattered, we just needed to get out of this hell”

The Munk family was lucky, they were accepted in the Kastner-group, which left Hungary in June of 1944 and while „spending” a few weeks in the Bergen-Belsen death camp, they finally arrived in Switzerland.

The visitors can follow the fates of 10 families from the Kastner-train.