Even at 10 a.m., the tourist throngs on Király utca in Budapest’s Erzsébetváros (District VII) frequently spill onto the street to move forward, such is the popularity of this inner-city location, known as the capital’s “party district.”
Amidst the many cafés, bars, hostels and escape rooms, a relatively new attraction has sprung up: at number 15, sharing the premises of the High Fives bar-cum-night-rave venue, a large sign invites guests to visit the Ghetto Wall Exhibition, including the opportunity to see the last section of the wall surrounding the short-lived wartime Budapest Jewish ghetto.
Your reviewer, unexpectedly stumbling upon the location in October after a gruelling interview, thought it was worth a proper visit. Better still, a meeting was arranged in early November for the international press corps with the team behind the exhibition to glean the full story.
Created in late 2024, the opening of the exhibition was timed to act as a small memorial to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in the first winter days of 1944, tour guide Ádám Botta, one of the team behind the project, told the assembled reporters on Nov. 5.
The exhibition room is only moderately sized, with tables featuring information pages and books on Hungarian and broader Holocaust history, as well as on notable Hungarian inventors.
A wooden kitchen cabinet, owned by the grandmother of one of the exhibition team members who lived in and survived the ghetto, holds artefacts and books typical of the era. The surrounding walls display large, colorful information posters that give a potted, general 1,000-year history of Hungary, along with an outline of the historical Jewish interaction with the majority-Christian Hungarian population.
“The motivation behind this was, of course, the 80th anniversary [of the establishment of the ghetto]. Also, as guides, we have been finding it important on tours to give a comprehensive picture about Hungarian history before we start talking about WW2 and the events preceding it,” Orsolya Mira Végh, tour guide and a member of the project team, told journalists by way of introduction.
Access to the former ghetto wall, the primary object of the project, is gained via a corridor whose walls are covered with historical photos of Budapest (all uncaptioned).
The section, perhaps 20 meters in length, boasts a small memorial plaque placed centrally, and has what is believed to be an original barbed-wire topping dating from the ghetto era at one end. The ghetto itself lay on the other side of the wall.
Végh invited the party to hold a one-minute silence while at the wall in memory of its associated victims, a custom she initiated when guiding visiting groups.
A short film focusing on the contributions of Hungarian-Jewish scientists to the development of the atom bomb in the United States during World War II is the final, third element of the exhibition.
So how does it all stack up? The consensus on the day could be summed up as “middling.” Martin Fejer, a German photo-journalist, long resident in Budapest, pointed out that the section of wall in the courtyard was not “discovered in 2010,” as claimed, nor is it precisely in its original form.
Rather, it was the center of a battle between preservationists and property developers before 2006, when the developers won out and demolished the original wall to enable construction of luxury apartments nearby.
“The occupants of the building collected the stones, and due to public outrage, it was later re-erected,” according to Fejer, though the restored section is in a more picturesque condition than previously.
“It’s tame. I’m not sure if there was anything about the ghetto in the film,” said Mike, a retired American journalist, after a solo visit to the site. He nonetheless defended the exhibition, to a point. “It is all there, if you read the texts and look at the various books on the table about the Holocaust,” he insisted.
This is a fair summary. The problem is that most visitors who come upon Király utca 15, whether weekend party-goers or mature tourists, will have no knowledge whatsoever not only of the ghetto, but of the entire Hungarian Holocaust.
As Botta, who guides parties in both Italian and English, admitted: “Many Italians have come here, and they only learned from me that it was a [Nazi] concentration camp ghetto, it’s not a quarter of a town, like in Rome, Florence or Venice […]. They are not well-informed. It’s not taught in school in many other European countries.”
Moreover, most visitors are prepared to spend only 15-20 minutes perusing the exhibition, including viewing the film, which is probably the most memorable element of the entire show. On checking, the film indeed fails to mention the ghetto and has just one half-sentence on Jewish persecution in Hungary.
For your reviewer, this will mean not only that the vast majority of visitors know nothing of the ghetto on arrival, but they may well exit in almost the same state of ignorance.
With an entrance fee of HUF 1,500, the price of a coffee in the area, the charge that it is a “tourist trap” is over the top. But as another retired editor commented after the visit: “It’s vague.” For your reviewer, it’s a missed opportunity.
Professor Paul Marer, former academic dean at the Central European University Business School at the turn of the century, entered the ghetto as a child hand-in-hand with his grandmother one day in early December 1944. He was oblivious to the purpose: for him, it was just another forced move.
In his memoir, published in 2024, Marer recounts, “When we first moved into the ghetto, water came through the pipes, very slowly. Soon, however, no water came at all. Therefore, a large hole was dug in one corner of the basement for use as a latrine. The stink was unbearable.”
He slept, along with his grandmother, in a tiny room of five square meters, shared with 12 other people. Marer estimates that the small building housed 200 people.
“In [sic] most days, some residents died, and new ones arrived,” he writes, estimating (after research as an adult) that by early January 1945, 70,000 Jews, the population of a decent-sized Hungarian town, were crammed into the area of just 0.3 square kilometers. This contained 291 buildings, which had previously housed 3,600 inhabitants.
The dead lay in the streets, with bodies piled up in Klauzál tér, the ghetto’s only open space. In a matter of three months, the Jewish population of Budapest was reduced from 200,000 to some 90,000 in total at liberation in mid-January 1945.
Marer survived until liberation and later emigrated to the United States. He does not feature in the Ghetto Wall exhibition.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of November 28, 2025.
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