During Rákosi’s regime, the basin of the river Rába – the Rába Valley – wasan especially sensitive region due to its geopolitical position (the border triangle between Austria and Yugoslavia), while the Slovenians living there were an especially vulnerable social group. Due to Yugoslavia’s exclusion from Cominformand the »war hysteria« aimed against Tito, the territory near the borderwas often the focus of the terror carried out by the Hungarian authorities. This was also evident from the numerous procedures initiated against people dueto suspicions of »spying« and »people smuggling«. Police surveillance of the population was in place and many people were exiled. South Slavs living in Hungary became the potential enemies of the regime. In order to remove these people from the area near the border, twelve closed work camps, operating from 1950 to 1953, were established in the provinces of Hortobágy, Nagykunság and Hajdúság in the east of Hungary. The first large-scale deportations, »cleansings« of the border area, including the Rába Valley, took place on 23 June 1950, and two more followed on 6 December 1951 and 29 May 1952. According to the information gathered to date, 68 families or 210 people were deported from the Rába Valley. Most families were exiled from the villages lying directly on the border with Yugoslavia (Gornji Senik, Števanovci, Verica). The deportations were usually carried out in the middle of the night by the State Security Service (Államvédelmi Hatóság – ÁVH) and the police. The families were only given a short time to pack their most basic necessities. Then they were taken to the nearest railway station, stuffed in cattle wagons, and transported away. The entire property of these families – their houses, apartments and land – was confiscated. In the camps they resided in outbuildings in inhuman conditions. Under police surveillance the deportees laboured on whatever work was assigned to them. This mostly involved agricultural labour. After Stalin’s death the camps were closed. When they were released from the camps, the deportees were forbidden from returning home for another three years, and they had to get on with their lives elsewhere, outside the border area. To date Hungary had still failed to officially acknowledge the deportees as a special group of the population, suffering a great injustice in the past at the hands of the regime. I based my presentation of the developments at the time on the testimonies of the deportees still alive today, as well as on the archive resources kept at the archives of Železna županija (Vas Megyei Levéltár) in Szombathely, in the Historical Archives of the State Security Service (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára), and in the State Archives in Budapest (Magyar Országos Levéltár).