A daily ration card for forced laborers. Hungary 1942

A daily ration card for forced laborers. Hungary 1942

A daily ration card for bread in the Labor Battalions on the Hungarian army fronts [Állami kenyérpótjegy nehéz testi munkás részére 1942], April 1942. Rare.

The Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry began relatively late. After Hungary's accession to the war with Germany was a fait accompli, and Hungarian soldiers fought alongside the Germans in the Soviet Union. In August 1941 a law was enacted in Hungary to prevent intermarriage between Jews and Christians. The equal rights granted to the Jewish community in 1895 were abolished, and the process of marking the Jews as an inferior race whose blood was permitted was completed. In addition, Jewish agricultural estates were expropriated on the grounds that the Jews were a foreign race that had nothing to do with Hungarian soil. In July 1941, the Hungarian authorities began deporting foreign Jews from their territory to the Germans. These Jews were citizens of Poland and the Soviet Union who fled to Hungary after the outbreak of the war, Jews who could not prove their Hungarian citizenship even though they lived in Hungary for years, and Jews from Carpathos. The deportees, who numbered between 14,000 and 18,000, were exterminated with local Jews between August 26-29, 1941, at the massacre in Kamenets-Podolski, the largest Aktion until that time.

Among the other Hungarian Jews, many were sent to the "labor battalions" which were in fact forced labor units under difficult conditions on the fronts fought by the Hungarian army. About 42,000 Jews died in these battalions. Before us a daily ration card that survived those labor battalions.

Size: 21x7 cm. Very fine condition.