Cache of Holocaust-Era Documents Found Behind Wall of Budapest Apartment

A couple living in Budapest, Hungary, decided to renovate their apartment, and hired a workers to get the job done. One contractor took a screwdriver to their walls and discovered papers with handwriting on it. “We thought we’d ruined the neighbor’s wallpaper,” Brigitte Berdefy, one of the owners of the apartment, told the AFP. But it was so much more: 6,300 documents “from a 1944 census that was a precursor to the intended liquidation of the Hungarian capital’s 200,000 Jews in Nazi death camps.”

The ink from these documents were still legible, too, since minimal air could get in the walls and previous of the owner of the apartment smoked (apparently nicotine preserves), and they were handed over to the Budapest City Archives. “[These documents] hel[p] to fill a huge gap in the history of the Holocaust in Budapest,” said Istvan Kenyeres, the head of the archives, who received the historical trove in September.

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