Yellow-Star Houses 1944–2014 (2014)

Yellow-Star Houses

The project and website of the Blinken OSA Archivum commemorate June 21, 1944, the day when Budapest’s Jewish population was officially ordered to leave their homes and move into one of the buildings marked with a yellow Star of David.

The Archivum remembered this tragic and shameful chapter of Budapest's past by exploring the history of the “yellow-star” houses. This is the Archivum’s dedicated yellow-star houses website, launched as the first event in a year-long series of public programs focusing on Budapest 1944.

At the heart of the project is an interactive map that shows the current state of the marked buildings. The map is supplemented by a range of archival sources (textual, photographic, and moving images), a chronological timeline of events, a historical glossary, a district-by-district list of the buildings, personal recollections of former residents, and two online exhibitions.

A shocking number of buildings in wartime Budapest were marked with the yellow star—an aspect of history that has almost completely faded from public memory. As our map shows, nearly 2,000 such buildings were scattered across the entire city. The Blinken OSA Archivum commemorated this tragic and shameful chapter in Budapest’s history through the story of the “yellow-star houses.” On our website, we aim to provide as much related content as possible and encourage everyone to share any documents or stories connected to these buildings or the families who lived in them.

On June 21, 2014, the Archivum organized a commemoration in front of approximately 100 still-standing buildings, inviting former and current residents of these houses and their families to participate, either as attendees or volunteer organizers—facing our shared past with honesty and dignity.

Historical Background

In the summer of 1944, during the final months of Miklós Horthy’s governorship, and having nearly finished deporting Jews from the countryside, Hungarian political leaders decided it was now the turn of Budapest Jews to be forcibly expelled from their homes. On June 16, the mayor of Budapest issued a decree that marked out almost 2,000 apartment buildings in the city, into which 220,000 targeted individuals were obliged to move: 187,000 Jews and a further 35,000 converted Jews, subjected to a series of “Jewish laws”, and forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. They had to leave their own apartments by midnight on June 21, and move into one of the 1,944 designated apartment buildings also marked with a yellow star, the “yellow-star” houses.s served the same purpose as the ghetto, a preparatory stage for deportation.

For the Budapest of the time, an astonishingly large number of apartment buildings bore the yellow star, but barely a trace of this remains in public memory. For half a year, every passer-by in the city could see precisely who the persecuted Jews were, and where they lived. In the following months, tens of thousands of them died on death marches, thousands were shot to death on the banks of the Danube, and thousands died during the siege of Budapest. Still, Jews in Budapest who went into hiding in the city, or who ended up in the ghettos from December 1944, had a better chance of surviving the Holocaust than those in other parts of the country.

The Blinken OSA Archivum commemorates this tragic and shameful chapter of Budapest’s history through the story of the star-marked houses. On our website, we strive to provide as much related content as possible, and we encourage everyone to share documents and stories connected to the families or the buildings.