During the Second World War, Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany. It was the first modern European state to introduce anti-Jewish laws. Three years before German troops arrived, it had deported 17,000 of its people to Kamenets-Podolskii to be killed. The German invasion in 1944 served as an excuse for officials to confiscate the valuables of its Jewish population and ship the citizens to Auschwitz, where most were murdered. Historian Kristian Ungvary called the monument “a living horror” that denies the half a million Jewish victims even their right to be victims. Soon after it appeared, survivors and families of Holocaust victims began laying small stones in front of the monument with the names of some of the nearly 500,000 Jews who were expelled to Auschwitz — with the compliance, they say, of Hungarian officials — in one of the most sweeping deportations of the war. The humble items — letters, prayer books, worn photographs — collected at the base of a new state-sponsored monument to World War II reveal a contentious dialogue with Hungarian authorities over the right to define the public memory of historic events.