Debrecen, the capital of Hajdú County, is located in eastern Hungary, approximately 195 kilometers (121 miles) east of Budapest. The situation of the Jews deteriorated considerably in the wake of the antisemitic agitation and the increasingly harsh anti-Jewish measures of the 1930s and early 1940s. Students in higher education and the middle and lower classes were hit particularly hard. Beginning in 1939, an increasingly large number of Jewish males of military age were conscripted into the forced labor service system, which became much harsher after Hungary’s entry into the war two years later. According to the census of 1941, the last taken before the Holocaust in Hungary, Debrecen had a Jewish population of 9,142, representing 7.3 percent of the city’s total of 125,933. The German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, brought to an end the once flourishing Jewish community in Debrecen. Many leaders were arrested on April 9 and taken as hostages to the Hajdúszentgyörgy camp. On...