An unofficial survey disclosed today the presence of approximately 25,000 Jewish refugees in Hungary. Many of these are actual fugitives from Nazi persecution; how many are merely unfortunates who lost their citizenship in the Hungarian reoccupation areas is difficult to determine.
Jewish circles believe, however, that about one-third of the so-called refugees belong in the latter category. These include persons who lived in Hungarian provinces before the World War, who were transferred to Czechoslovakia by treaty and who returned to Hungary following dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and reoccupation of the Carpatho-Ukraine and Tatra regions.
Many of these persons considered themselves Hungarians until called upon to prove their nationality, whereupon they discovered that they had none. By Hungarian law, an individual must prove that his grandfather or great-grandfather was a resident of Hungary in 1851 in order to be considered a citizen.
Thus far, few Jewish refugees or aliens have been molested by the Hungarian police, so long as Jewish friends or charitable institutions guarantee their support. But there is no assurance that the present attitude of the Government will not change at any moment and they will not be thrown into prison or sent back to sections of the Reich from which they escaped.
The few hundred financially independent refugees are being treated surprisingly well. The only restriction on their freedom is that they must all register in the same Budapest hotel reserved for refugees and report to a police officer at the hotel once a day. Otherwise they are free to live as they please, so long as their money lasts.
The poor Jewish refugees are mostly maintained in camps operated by the Jewish communities of various Hungarian cities. In Budapest, 1,200 refugees from Austria and Czechoslovakia are maintained in seven camps. Expenses of the Budapest camps average more than $10,000 monthly. Even so the refugees must be considered fortunate in that the Hungarian Government, for reasons of economy, has released them from police custody into camps under custody of the Jewish community.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
