Wartime Budapest was a haven, then a hell, for Europe’s Jews

One day in May 1944, in the Nagyvárad ghetto, Sándor Leitner saw an elderly man struggling to walk towards him. His face was swollen from beatings and he was barely able to stand. It was his father, returning from his interrogation by the Gendarmes. The Nagyvárad ghetto (now Oradea in Romania) was the largest in Hungary. Around 27,000 Jews were incarcerated there before being deported to Auschwitz. Leitner, a senior community leader, escaped to Budapest and survived the Holocaust. His post-war account of the fate of his fellow Jews is one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of the savagery of the ghettoisation and deportations.

Between ten and fifteen people were crammed into each room, starving, fearful, lacking water and medical care. But the true horror began on 10 May when Jenő Péterffy, a lieutenant colonel in the Gendarmerie, took control.