When the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, Leon Blum was a young man living in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș in present-day Romania). In the late spring of 1944, Hungarian authorities took him and other Jews living in the region to the ghetto in Marosvásárhely. Many days later, he and other Jews who had been confined in the ghetto were crammed into railcars and deported to Auschwitz. There he was judged fit for forced labor.