In the middle of this square lies a bronze disc of four square metres. That was the space allotted to one person in during the winter of 1944, and so the disc is sized to match exactly.
The square was already the centre of the neighbourhood before all that. In 1897 a market hall opened here with three hundred stalls, one of five the city built at the same time in those years, and the only one with a section for goods. A tram ran across it, there were benches, there was a park.
When the ghetto was set up, this became the distribution point. On the corner by Nagy Diófa utca, the people driven inside were told which dwelling they would be living in. More than seventy thousand people, on a hundred and fifty grams of bread a day.
From 3 January 1945 the open stretches of the ghetto were used to lay out the dead, because the morgue was full and so were the empty shops. At on 18 January, around three thousand unburied people lay in the streets and on this square. Three mass graves were dug here, cleared again in April, after which the dead were moved to the Jewish cemetery on Salgótarjáni út.
After that it became a square again, with a market and a playground, and for eighty years nothing here recalled any of it. The disc holds three thousand nail impressions, one for each unburied body. The nails themselves are set into the pavement along the old ghetto boundary. We walk now towards Dob utca.
Sources. Story: Erzsébetváros, municipal records on Klauzál tér and the monument to the ghetto's dead; Válasz Online, on the use of the open grounds from 3 January 1945 and the clearing of the mass graves in April; Zsido.com, on the distribution point by Nagy Diófa utca; We Love Budapest, on the market hall of 1897. Photos: Klösz György, via Fortepan / Budapest Főváros Levéltára, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
