Roughly 2,500 gold and silver coins, many from the Roman Empire, were discovered by homeowners in the Hungarian town of Keszthely during a house-repair in February, The Forward reported.
Who owned this buried treasure? The answer is likely to be Jewish residents of the Jewish ghetto of Keszthely, from which many Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
As these Jewish victims were not clearly registered and were later murdered, historians are still looking for material evidence for their names and identities, hence the importance of the finding.
The family gave the coins to the Balatoni Museum in Keszthely, which discovered that jewels were also enclosed in the collection.
These might solve the issue of who the owners were – the Pollak family were important traders in that town before the war.
The Hungarian authorities are now looking for a descendant of the Pollak family to return the found treasure. Should they fail to find one, the state will become its owner.
Half of the coins are from the Roman province of Pannonia, which was in what today is Western Hungary. The other half includes coins from pre- and post-revolution France, Imperial India and the USSR.