Jews first settled in the town of Rákoscsaba in the early 1800s. The Jewish population established an official community organization in 1868 and by 1910 the town counted about 225 Jewish residents.

In the 1920s and 1930s most of the Jews of Rákoscsaba worked as traders and craftsmen. Survivor Al Marks remembered that he “grew up in a very poor neighborhood” where his father worked at the local railroad. Marks added, “Life was relatively simple for Hungarian Jews.”

However, the Jews of Hungary had already begun to face antisemitic discrimination even before World War II began in 1939. For example, in 1920 the Hungarian parliament introduced a “numerus clausus” law that placed a quota on the number of Jewish students allowed to study at universities.

In 1940 Hungary joined Hitler’s Axis alliance. The Hungarian government enacted discriminatory race laws based on anti-Jewish legislation passed in Germany. Marks recalled how the antisemitic Arrow Cross party gained power and “we had to start to wear yellow stars.” Additionally, Jewish men were conscripted into forced-labor service under inhumane conditions. Despite this persecution the Hungarian government resisted German pressure to begin mass deportations of Jews to the concentration camps.

The situation for Hungarian Jews changed drastically after Nazi forces occupied Hungary in March 1944. The next month Jews began to be forced into crowded and unsanitary ghettos. Marks recalled how in June 1944 Hungarian police forced all the Jews of Rákoscsaba, including 13-year-old Marks and his family, to a school building in Hatvan about 20 miles to the northeast. From there they were crowded onto cattle cars bound for the death camp at Auschwitz. The final transport of Jews left Rákoscsaba on July 20, 1944.