District VII – Király utca 15 is a photographic work, where the images are paired with the verses of a self-written poem.  It captures traces of the past and present Jewish life in the former Jewish ghetto in Budapest.

At first sight the streets of this neighborhood seemed very touristic but the more time I spent in various important places of Jewish history, the more I was able to empathize with the past and importance of these places and people. I wanted to capture these traces of Jewish life then and now and preserve the aura of the neighborhood to let yourself immerse in these places and their stories for a moment.

The seventh district, also known as Erzsébetváros, was the center of the city’s Jewish community before the Second World War. When the War started about 60’000 Jewish men were forced to join the labor service group and nearly all of them died. Only in 1944 local authorities set up a ghetto in Budapest, where they herded all the local Jews, and this is also when the deportation started in Hungary. Within six weeks they deported 437’000 people, which was the fastest deportation in the Second World War. The ghetto only existed for 1.5 months, but as it was wintertime and there were too many people in one place, a lot of people died within the ghetto, even if they were not deported.