History of the Building

Prehistory: a small house, a great house

At the turn of the century, a small building stood on this corner — home to the studio of the photographer Béla Sinayberger.

The current five-storey corner palace was designed and built in 1910–11 by Jenő Schwarcz, an architect and building contractor who also lived here. It is a closed corner-bay Art Nouveau apartment palace with the inscription »Anno domini 1911« still visible on the façade.

The ground floor is decorated with allegorical reliefs, the stairwell with beautiful coloured stained-glass windows, and the half-landing arch with glass mosaics. A glass-roofed photo studio — a so-called 'daylight studio' — operated in the attic toward Király street: first by Béla Sinayberger, then from 1917 to 1944 by Pál Kis.

Every original element of the interior survives: the ceramic floor of the gateway and courtyard, the vine-bordered mettlach tiles of the stairwell and galleries, the wrought-iron railings, the entrance doors and even the ornamental grilles of the cellar windows. (Perczel Anna)

1944 Budapest: Yellow-Star House, Ghetto I

From 5 April 1944 Hungarians defined as Jews had to wear a yellow star, and from 21 June they were forced to move into designated 'yellow-star houses' marked with a canary-yellow Star of David above the entrance.

According to the 1941 census about 21% of Budapest's population — 187,000 Jews plus 35,000 converted Jews — was affected, roughly 220,000 people. The yellow star had to be placed on nearly 2,000 buildings in Budapest, a fact almost forgotten today.

The mayor's decree of 16 June 1944 designated the buildings. Király utca 51 was on the list. The owner, Dr. Tibor Jakabffy, petitioned the Minister of the Interior to exempt the house — 'the most beautiful, most monumental house on the street' — but the request was denied.

'On the morning of 20 October we awoke to loud shouting: All men to the courtyard! Line up with 3 days of food and a blanket… Within minutes we had to be down there. My poor wife packed the rucksack — only minutes were available — quite incompletely. I could not even say goodbye to the children.' (From the diary of Pál Kis)

1944 Budapest: Yellow-Star House, Ghetto II

After the Arrow Cross takeover on 15 November 1944, a list was drawn up of so-called 'protected houses'. Within weeks the Pest ghetto was set up.

According to the diary of the Jewish Council, the Pápal-protected and Christian Jews were assigned to the area bounded by Csányi, Dob and Nagyatádi Szabó (today Kertész) streets — which included this house.

Király u. 51 was granted Papal protection. About 30 residents lived crowded into the family's flat. 'A protected house — and still I did not feel safe… I feared the Arrow Cross gangs.' (From the diary of Pál Kis)

Around 26–27 December 1944 the Kis family moved here as bombed-out refugees. The house was a so-called 'Papal-protected house' under Vatican protection, separated from the formal ghetto by only one house — divided by a two-metre wooden fence down the middle of the street.

From the Akácfa-street back gate (then numbered Akácfa 64) carts came in to take away the Jews gathered for forced labour in autumn '44. Many tried to hide in the stairwells and gateway, but those without papers were taken to the ghetto. (From Varga László's memoir)

A forgotten resident: Pál Kis

Pál Kis (Budapest, 1 Nov 1890 – Buchenwald, 24 Jan 1945) — photographer, silver-laurel master (1926), amateur painter.

From 1917 to 1944 his glass-roofed daylight studio operated in the attic of the building. His advertising plaque read: 'KIS PÁL FÉNYKÉPÉSZ MŰTERME — Budapest, VII. Király u. 51.'

'I rode the tram tattered, sick, broken in spirit, with a several-day stubble, the caricature of my old self… No one could believe this is Pál Kis, who won the greatest prize in Hungary, was the country's first silver-laureate master — who now flees the scene of his own work like a robber-murderer…' (from his diary)

'We have Swiss letters of protection, but we did not go to the designated house. I just heard they will be shipped to Germany, good will they be as hostages for exchanges. Our flat is a ghetto-house, but we cannot go there either — twenty-seven years of sweat: looted. My wife and I hide in my brother's shop and flat, trying to find lodging with Christian papers like refugees.' (from his diary)

The studio's ruins were sealed in 1959 — a mine had destroyed it in 1945. The glass roof was replaced with a regular ceiling, and the studio ended with nationalization.

Pál Kis's drawings and diary

In November 1944 Pál Kis escaped from forced labour service, hid in Pest, but during a raid was captured together with his wife and deported to Buchenwald. His diary and drawings — saved by his daughter and delivered to the Hungarian Jewish Archives — testify to his humanism, courage and love of life.

'In February 1945, shortly after the liberation, I found my father's diary, the well-known Budapest photographer Pál Kis, in which he recorded the events, thoughts and feelings of mid-October 1944 over roughly one and a half months… He sensed the coming end. During a raid he was captured with my mother — Christian papers were no help, the Arrow Cross men inspected not only papers but the men themselves. In December they were deported on the last train that managed to leave Budapest before the Russian ring closed, to Germany, from where neither he nor my mother returned.' (Sopronyi Sosanna, née Kis Marianne)

'Because he began the diary in the labour camp, the first pages and drawings were written on W.C. paper, for there was no other. The letters are tiny and crowded, the paper yellowed. To make it readable I enlarged the writing and typed it out.'

Pál Kis's drawings from the labour service were made on scraps of toilet paper.

After the war

'I was the shabes goy.' — Memoir of Varga László (b. 1939), a Király utca native now living in Los Angeles.

Many small shops and workshops were on the ground floor of the house; after the war they were merged into a textile factory, the Béke Ktsz. There was a delicatessen (Ádám), a hairdresser (Marsi), the Kerekes 'fine-confection' and the Vogel spice shop. A pen workshop in a street-facing cellar was hit by a small Russian bomb in '45.

Dr. Lénárd, a famous venereologist, lived on the first-floor corner; after the war only one room remained. Magaziner the art dealer moved into his flat — Father Balogh used to come buy from him ('there comes the big fat shit-barrel,' my grandmother always said). Then one day a young man in English uniform came looking for the Magaziners: it was their son, returned from Mauthausen.

Weisz the dentist also lived on the first floor — he committed suicide in late '45 or '46. Aladár Blau, third floor, married after the war a woman whose son Tomi Hirschler still lives here today.

'Hartmann Miklós, cantor of the Jewish orphanage, also lived here. I was the shabes goy: every Friday I collected the pots from the corridor, took them to the baker on Dob street to be kept warm in the salt, and on Saturday after school I distributed them back. They taught me to say boruch ata Adonaj. This went on until about 1950–51, then slowly it ended. One could no longer speak of these things.' (Varga László)