Marika: Blog # 3

Marika from the novel Marika was a Jewish girl living in Hungary during the Holocaust. Hungary was also a country that dealt with the Holocaust. After Germany occupied Hungary, everything changed for the Jewish people living there.

In April, 1944, Hungarian officers ordered Hungarian Jews to be placed into small communities throughout cities. Those communities were referred to as ghettos. In some ghettos, people weren’t even living inside buildings and had barely enough supplies to survive. The Hungarian officers guarded  the Jewish people and did not allow them to leave the ghetto. In May, 1944, with help from the Germany Security Police, Hungarian officers began to deport the Jewish people from the ghettos. Nearly 440,000 Jewish people were forced onto about 145 deportation trains to be taken to concentration camps. Most went to Auschwitz, but some went to the border to be deployed at digging fortification trenches. By July, 1944, the only Jewish community left in Hungary was that of Budapest, Hungary which was where Marika lived.

During the Szalasi Regime, groups called the Arrow Cross gangs invaded the Jewish community in Budapest. Hundreds of Jewish people were violently killed. Many others died from the labor the Arrow Cross gangs made them do. In November 1944, the anti-Semitic Arrow Cross regime ordered the remaining Jewish people, which were nearly 70,000 people, from the Budapest community into a 0.1 square mile ghetto. Others were marched to the Austrian border throughout November and December. Those who were marching, but too weak to continue on were shot along the way.

From about 825,000 Jewish people living in Hungary in 1941, about 63,000 died or were killed before the German occupation of March 1944. Under German occupation, just over 500,000 people died from mistreatment or were killed. About 255,000 Jews, less than one-third of those who had lived within Hungary in March 1944 survived the Holocaust.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "A Forgotten Suitcase: The Mantello Rescue Mission" Online Exhibitions. http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/mantello/. Accessed on December 1, 2011.