Reports reaching here from Hungary today told of an anti-Jewish reign of terror sweeping that country, with mass arrests of Jews proceeding in all cities and house-to-house raids conducted in the dead of night with entire families being seized.
Thousands of persons have been arrested in the last ten days and have been taken to concentration centers for deportation to Galician districts in Nazi Poland. Already more than 7,000 Jewish deportees have been put to forced labor, mainly building roads, in the districts, which are now held by the Hungarian Army.
(A cable from Budapest quoting the censored press there reported today that the Hungarian government is determined to deport at least 55,000 Jews into Nazi-held Poland from the district of Transylvania which was regained from Rumania. The majority of the Jews there have never been Polish citizens.)
The raids are being directed not only against refugees and foreign Jewish residents, but even against Hungarian citizens whose grandparents were not Hungarian.
Well-informed private sources told this correspondent tonight that more than 15,000 Jews had been deported up to July 31, with the raids continuing unabated. They said that Jews who consider themselves subject to action were afraid to leave their homes since they might be raided in their absence and the remainder of their family taken away. All local efforts to intervene with the authorities in cases of special hardship were said to have failed.
The plight of the deportees was said to be desperate. They were dumped over the frontier unceremoniously, with no preparations made for housing and maintenance except in the case of those slated for forced labor. They find themselves among people impoverished by war and in a devastated territory.
A correspondent of the Berlin newspaper, Boersen Zeitung, describing the widespread purge conducted by the Hungarian aliens control authorities for the past fortnight against Jews and foreigners, particularly Polish and Russian nationals, writes that 18,000 have already been deported.
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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.
