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On Király street, there were many shops that sold a huge assortment of goods. Customers came here to buy textiles, leather, antiques, silverware, or to see a tailor. (Traces of this can still be seen walking down the street. One can find fabrics, home textiles, furniture, and clothing stores.) Back then, attached to the shops were small warehouses (small windowless rooms), and some bigger shops even had an additional building in the courtyards. At the beginning of the street, there were cafés on both sides, eg. Orczy and Herzl, where locals would come, sit and even do business. One-third of the residents on this street, in some blocks even one-half, were Jewish.
If you look through the gate to Király utca 15, you can see a stone wall separating two courtyards. This is a reconstruction of the wall, which previously marked the ghetto boundary in 1944. This wall was demolished when the buildings around it were renovated. In 2010, it was reconstructed as a memorial when an NGO called ÓVÁS!, or "Protection" in English, mobilized to reconstruct the wall.
On the stone wall, you can see a plaque with a map showing the boundaries of the former ghetto, borders that were designated in November 1944 by the Interior Minister of the Arrow Cross, Gábor Vajna. In the second half of the 19th century, stone walls were built to separate the interior courtyards of the houses, and you can see that this wall was built for this purpose. In the last days of November 1944, after the ghetto was set up, barbed wire was installed on the top of these walls. By December 10, 1944, the area was completely closed so no one could leave, and it became a prison in the city for the remaining Jewish inhabitants of Budapest. The four gates were guarded by armed Arrow Crossmen and SS soldiers, to ensure that no one was able to enter or exit. This quarter, which had been associated with so many sites of Hungarian Jewish life and community, by 1944, became a site of terror, starvation, disease, and death.
On the plaque, you can see a quote from the book of Moses.The quotation "... and you shall tell your son" reminds us to learn, teach, and talk about what happened during the Holocaust. It should also be remembered that passing on the stories of survivors (through education, memorialization, these walks), helps ensure that what happened here in 1944-45 will never happen again.