ABSTRACT

During the spring and early summer of 1944, a series of territorial solutions were planned and implemented for Budapest's “Jews.” These amounted to a thoroughgoing remapping of the city along racialized lines, with the separation of “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” space. The end result of this history of manipulating the spaces of the city was that by early July 1944, the city's “Jews” were housed in a ghetto made up of thousands of apartments in 1,948 “Jewish” apartment buildings, each marked with a large yellow star affixed by the entrance. In many ways, Budapest's “Jews” were lucky.While ghettoization had been planned and implemented in the capital, ghettoization had already been implemented in the remainder of Hungary, swiftly followed by deportations. Within a period of less than two months (15 May–9 July 1944), a total of 437,402 “Jews” were deported from ghettos across Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau.