As soon as the Germans entered Hungary, members of the underground Zionist Youth Resistance Movement (ZYRM) began their rescue operations. The tiyul (Hebrew for hike or outing) was a wide-scale operation for the smuggling of thousands of Jewish young men and women to Romania, from where they could make Aliyah to Israel. The ZYRM’s workshop for the production of forged documents supplied the fleeing youths with the necessary documents. Accompanied and instructed by ZYRM operatives, the youths left in small groups during the day, boarded trains from Budapest to towns near the Romanian border, and from there they were smuggled across the border at night. Inspired by the tiyul operation, many more thousands of Jews and their families made their way to Romania, and their lives were saved.
