GENOCIDE IN TRANSYLVANIA

Genocide in Transylvania

Typewriters Declared "Deadly Weapons"

July, 1983
The Transylvanian Quarterly

In the first week of April, Dictator Ceausescu declared a new law, which stands unique in the history of mankind. Every typewriter in the country in the possession of private individuals had to be taken to the local police station, where it was recorded and "fingerprinted". "Loyal citizens" received permits for the possession and use of their typewriters, while to those who are regarded by the police as "enemies of the regime", permit was denied and their typewriters confiscated without any recompense. As the Orlando Sentinel expressed it in its April 15, 1983 issue, "Rumania is banning possession or use of typewriters by citizens...who pose a "danger to public order or state security".
The first known "victim" of this new law in the city of Kolozsvar (ClujNapoca) was an 84 year old widow, Mrs. Ilona Bartha, whose husband, once a free lance journalist, left behind a big, old fashioned typewriter stored in the attic of the old Bartha home, now shared by six families. Mrs. Bartha, who has only one room left to her use in her old home, walked over to the police station and reported her husband's old typewriter, collecting dust in the attic. "You must bring it in", the SECURITATE officer in charge told her. "I can't," she replied, "it is much too heavy. Send somebody to get it. You can have it for good."
One week later the police came to the house on the Monostori Street, took the typewriter and arrested Mrs. Bartha as the "illegal owner of an unregistered typewriter". She was sentenced to three months in jail.

Amnesty International Reports on Rumania

Apri4 1980
The Transylvanian Quarterly

Amnesty International, a worldwide organization, honored with the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize, has consultative status with the U.N., and the Council of Europe. In a 45 page report recently published on Rumania, Amnesty International discloses the deplorable situation of the Hungarian minority in that country. We quote:
"At present there are no Hungarian language universities in Rumania. Three old Hungarian universities, Kolozsvar, Marosvasarhely and Nagyszeben have only some Hungarian language facilities left. Nevertheless, even here discrimination operates. In 1976 and 1977, 1,206 students enrolled at the Kolozsvar (Cluj Napoca) University. Of these 269 were members of the Hungarian minority, but only 20 students were allowed to attend lectures in the Hungarian language."
"In the Csangoregion there were 72 Hungarian language schools in 1958. Today there are none. Ethnologists predict that the Hungarian minority is threatened with cultural and linguistic extinction, as a result of the Rumanian government's discriminatory policies."
"A number of persons who have criticized official policies have been detained. Some have been maltreated. Some have died under mysterious circumstances."
Some of the cases listed by Amnesty International are those of Zoltan Zsufka; college professor, Jen6 Sziksza; teacher, Lajos Kuthy; Teacher, T. Sim;, teacher, Karoly Kiraly; representative of the Hungarian minority, Janos Torok, Bela Niszly and many others.

Transylvanian Delegation Invited to Berlin

Dated May 5, 1980, several invitations were sent out from the Bundeshaus in Bonn, Germany, to leading Transylvanian Hungarians, among them to Mr. Istvan Zolcsak, associate editor of the Transylvanian Quarterly, and Mr. Karoly Kiraly, silenced spokesman of the Hungarian minority in Rumania. The delegation will represent the oppressed minorities in Rumania at the European Conference For Human Rights and SelfDetermination.
It was Dr. Felix Ermacora, chairman of the Hearing Committee, the venerable champion of Human Rights, who personally insisted on the presence of Mr. Kiraly. It is doubtful, however, that the Rumanian government will grant him permission to participate at the conference.
Members of the Transylvanian World Federation all over the world are waiting to see Mr. Ceausescu's reaction to this significant step in the right direction taken by the European Conference For Human Rights and SelfDetermination. The finding of this conference will be presented later in the fall to the signatory powers of the Helsinki Agreement, in Madrid.

The Story of Borika Bodo

July, 1983
The Transylvanian Quarterly

It happened on a warm, sunny afternoon, June 28,1979 in Transylvania, today a province of the Socialist Republic of Rumania. Three young Hungarian girls from the Hungarian village of Szek were singing old Hungarian folk songs while working in the cornfields. Though the Rumanian supervisor of the governmentowned "people's farm" admonished the girls not to sing Hungarian songs because they were in the land of the Rumanian people, the three teenagers continued singing in Hungarian.
In late afternoon a police vehicle arrived at the scene, picked up the girls and took them to the police station in Kolozs (today call Colocna) where they were stripped, beaten and raped. Next morning two of the tortured girls were released, but the parents of the third girl, Borika Bodo, age 16, were told by police Sergeant Marariu that their daughter had "behaved rather poorly" and had to be transferred to Kolozsvar (Cluj) in order to stand trial. However, when the parents inquired from the Kolozsvtr authorities, nobody seemed to know anything about the girl. She had simply disappeared. As time went on, the parents were told to keep their mouths shut, and foreign organizations inquiring about the case were advised that no person by the name of Borika Bod6 had ever existed.
The appalling, but by Rumanian standards not unusual, story of Borika Bod6 was first published in September 1979 by Amnesty International in England, and in October the same year the Transylvanian quarterly reported the case. In March 1980 two French journalists, Jean Boutier and Pierre Bertrand, working with the International Red Cross, visited the village of Szek with the purpose of looking into the disappearance of Borika Bodo. They were told by the Rumanian village authorities that no family by the name of Bodo has ever existed there. When trying to ask the minister of the Hungarian Calvinist Church, the two journalists found the doors of the parsonage locked and all the curtains drawn on the windows. When they went to the police station in Kolozsvar looking for Sergeant Morariu, the sergeant in charge told them that his name was Muresan and that no police sergeant by the name of Morariu had ever served there. Every trail had been carefully and systematically covered up.
More than a year had passed, when in September1980 a young Hungarian refugee, having escaped from Rumania, arrived in Italy. According to his testimony he had spent three years in the Kolozsvar dungeon as a political dissident and was transferred from there the spring of 1980 to a "mental clinic," where he was subjected to different experiments. He recalled seeing there a girl by the name of "Bori," who, together with other young girls, was used for the sexual pleasures of the staff. Sometime in May, the young refugee recalled, Bori had committed suicide by an overdose of drugs and was buried in the cemetery behind the institution.
Since "Bori" and "Borika are the same name, it was assumed that the missing Borika Bod6 was the one who had put an end to her life afready destroyed by her captors. The Transylvanian Quarterly reported her death in January, 1981, and in the minds of those who try to keep a close watch over Rumanianbeleaguered Transylvania, the sad case was closed.
Then suddenly, two years later, in January 1983 news came to the Transylvanian World Federation that Borika Bodo is alive, at least in a physical sense. She is "working" in the kitchen of a mental institution somewhere at the edge of the illfamed Dobruja swamps, where most of the still existing forced labor camps are located. She was seen and talked to by one of the young Hungarians who were arrested in November 1982 in Nagyvarad (Oradea). He was charged with publishing the underground newspaper ELLENPONTOK (Counterpoints) and sending through "secret channels" a memorandum to the United Nations in the name of the Hungarian Worker's Federation of Transylvania, listing their grievances and their demands against the Rumanian government.
As these massarrests were widely publicized in Austrian, German, French, English and American newspapers, the Ceausescu government, in order to appease public opinion in the West from whence they are expecting more financial aid, released several persons whose role in the crimes against the communist state" were minimal, and who were not too badly beaten up or tortured. Among those released was a young pharmacist by the name of Sandor Molnar, who succeeded soon in escaping from Rumania into Turkey.
Mr. Molnar testified under oath in a written affidavit that while he was an inmate at the Bardagoci Mental Research Institute, where political prisoners are held, tortured and experimented upon, he was taken by the guards several times in December 1982 into the kitchen to peel potatoes or wash dishes. There he met a Hungarian girl who claimed her name was Borika Bodo. She lived in the Institute, Molnar testified, doing kitchen work. She was a quiet, docile girl, walking around like a robot, without any expression on her thin, pale face. She knew her name, but could not remember anything else.
Could this Borika Bod6 be the same girl who was happily singing Hungarian folk songs in the cornfields of Szek? We will probably never know, though the name is not the kind you run into every day. Any attempt to investigate is greatly hampered by the fact that Rumanian communist authorities flatly deny the existence of a "Bardogoci Mental Research Institute," and Dobruja, as such, is forbidden territory to foreign visitors.
But whoever that poor girl may be, we pray to God that the curse which lies heavily today over the land of Transylvania may be lifted soon, so that girls who feel like singing under God's blue sky may do so freely. While those who are hellbent on murder, torture, destruction and genocide will be swept away by the broom of Divine Justice.

New Victims of AntiHungarian Terror

November; 1982
TWF, Transylvania

On November 6, 1982, Geza Sz6cs, Hungarian poet, was arrested by the SECURITATE in Tirgu Mures Marosvasarhely, for sending a "complaint" to the United Nations. He was so severely beaten that a hospital statement dated November 30 still listed him as "critical".
On November 7, 1982, the well known actor, Attila Kertesz, was arrested in Oradea Nagyvarad. He was accused of holding secret meetings in his apartment and taking part in the publication of the underground paper ELLENPONTOK (Counterpoints). On the same day Attila AraKovacs was also arrested under the same pretext.
Both men were seen for the last time on the day of their arrest.

On November 8, 1982, Professor Karoly Toth and his wife were arrested in Cluj (Kolozsvar) and accused of taking part in the publication of the ELLENPONTOK, and being responsible for an article dealing with the situation in Poland. They were both beaten and tortured and released into "house arrest" on November 15. Since then nobody is permitted to talk to them or enter their home, which is under constant surveillance.
ELLENPONTOK (Counterpoints) is the name of the underground newspaper published "somewhere in Transylvania" by the Young Hungarian Socialist Workers' Coalition. The first issue appeared in December 1981 and the ninth issue in December 1982. The two last issues contained a memorandum addressed to the Madrid Conference on Human Rights and also a draft dealing with suggested solutions of the minority problems in Rumania.
Civil engineer Geza Koos Szant6 of Sepsiszentgyorgy, Puskas Str. 32 A II. 11, was arrested together with his wife on May 28,1982 and accused of organizing a dance group among the Csango Hungarians of the Moldova province. They were both hung by their wrists and beaten for hours. The next day they were released with the threat that if they ever get involved again in any Hungarian cultural action, they will get more beatings.
On December 2, 1982 the young couple was arrested again and since that day no one has seen them.
In April 1982 metal worker Dezso Demeter, age 22, Vasile Alexandri Street 17 in Szekelyudvarhely was arrested by the SECURITATE and beaten until he was willing to sign a "confession" implicating several of his Hungarian coworkers with antigovernment activities. On May 13 the young Hungarian worker hung himself. The Reverend Istvan Hegyi of the Hungarian Reformed Church was ordered "not to make any speeches at the funeral". Nevertheless, on November 6, 1982, Rev. Hegyi was arrested and accused of "speaking to a group of demonstrators at Demeter's grave on memorial day, November 1. His whereabouts is still not known.
On September 15,1982 Dr. Janos Vincze age 41, professor on the medical and pharmaceutical faculty of the University of Cluj (Kolozsvar) was arrested and accused of "bribery in University admissions." He was convicted on November 14, 1982, to four years of forced labor.
His real "crime" was that he insisted on registering deserving Hungarian students into the medical school against government policy. Dr. Vincze's name is well known in American medical circles by his many English language publications in the field of medical science.
Reverend Father Janos Ecsy, Father superior of the Franciscan Monks in Transylvania was for several years the organizer of the famous Csiksomly6 pilgrimage. Under his authority the yearly event became a unique Hungarian folk festival. His popularity became a thorn in the eyes of the Rumanian authorities, and he was warned several times to keep the pilgrimage on a strictly religious level with no Hungarian cultural overtones whatsoever.
On April 17, 1982, Father Ecsy became the victim of a hit~andrun accident. More than 3,000 peopIe and about 400 priests attended his funeral. On November 11,1982, Trajan Puscas, truckdriver for the government operated lumber mill was crushed by a rock slide and confessed on his death bed that he was the one who ran down Father Ecsy with his truck at the order of Lt. Andrei Tarnaveanu from the district office of the SECURITATE.
Father Ecsy's predecessor, Father Benedek, died in 1978 from the tortures he suffered during his fourteen years of imprisonment.
The last inhabitants of Hostat (Kolozsvar) were evacuated on November 23, 1982. Twentysix Hungarian families, remnants of the famous vegetable growers, who settled there in 1411 to supply the fort of Kolozsvar (Cluj) with food, were removed by the Rumanian authorities from their homes. They were loaded into trucks and dumped outside the city, on the Felek ridge, without food, without shelter, in freezing weather. When they asked where should they go, there were told to "go to hell, that's where all Hungarians belong." Nearby Hungarian villages took them in temporarily to save them from frost and starvation. Their future is one of the many unsolved problems with which the Hungarians of Transylvania are faced.
In 1957, according to the census figures, there were 187 Hungarian families still living in Hostat. With most of their vegetable lands expropriated to accomodate the government's housing project and with no other income available, these families engaged themselves in the most intensive gardening effort the world has probably ever seen in their small backyards. It was called a "miraclett by several specialists and an outstanding German magazine, the Gartenwissenschaft published a fourpage picture report on the "great achievement of the Hostat gardeners in the 1961 July issue.
The aim of the government's housing project was to build modern apartment buildings for the

20,000 Rumanians from old Rumania to be settled into the city of Kolozsvar (Cluj) in order to change the ethnic ratio of this ancient Hungarian city. After the planned buildings were finished and the new "first class citizens" brought in, it turned out that the newly established industries could accomodate more Rumanians if the Hungarians would be moved out. Thus, in 1976 the Hostat section of the city was condemned as "unsafe," and the Hungarian population, rooted for five and a half centuries into the rich garden soil, was moved out forcibly, street by street in order to yield space to imported Rumanians. On November 23, 1982 the last leg of this well planned government project took place, ending one of the most heroic, and at the same time, one of the most tragic epics of our age:
THE HOSTAT SAGA.

Our Reports Reviewed in Europe

Apri4 1983
The Transylvanian Quarterly

The EUROPA ETHNICA, a Quarterly for Problems of Nationalities and Organ of the "International Institute of Nationality Rights and Regionalism "in Vienna, Austria, published in its 38th Volume, No.4,1981 the following review of our work:
"The Transylvanian World Federation publishes the Transylvanian Quarterly and in a number of this quarterly we find very interesting articles about the Transylvanian Magyars, but in the issue of July 1981 also a statement of this organization and its affiliated groups addressed to the Committee on Ways and Means of the United States House of representatives on the subject of ternnnating the previously granted most favored national treatment to the Socialist Republic of Rumania by the U.S.A. The Statement underlines the fact that the Rumanian Government adopts an extremely brutal ultranationalistic policy in a multinational country, this especially against the Hungarians. During the World War II and after, more than 200,000 Transylvanian Hungarians were killed or died in the forced labor camps in Rumania. This was growing more after the rise of Ceausescu, the new Rumanian dictator who transformed the postwar Marxist regime into a nationalsocialist (NAZI) dictatorship by declaring at the Ninth Communist Party Congress in 1965: Rumania is an uniform national State, its territory occupied by one nation which was formed by concrete historical events, and which resulted in the Rumanian Socialist Nation. Then follows a long list of crimes perpetrated by the Rumanian Government against the Magyar ethnic minority in Rumania. The U.S. House of Representatives is begged to terminate the treatment of Rumania under the rule of the clause of the most favored nation on the grounds of extinguishing the ethnic minorities."

Legalized Wage Discrimination in Rumania

January, 1984
The Transyluanian Quarterly

The TWF News Agency reports: The new wagelaw introduced in this country by dictator Ceausescu abolished the hourly wages and wages by piece work. Instead, a meritsystem was introduced, giving full authority to the "overseers" who are appointed by the local communist parties to every work unit. It is their job to decide, on the basis of "cooperation and political behavior," who gets full wages at the end of the week and who gets 50% or less.
At the end of the second week of December 1983 in the Kolozsvar (Cluj) shoe factory, the 24 Hungarian workers still employed there received only half of their usual pay because they were talking in Hungarian among themselves during the lunch break, which is regarded as very "unpatriotic behavior".

October, 1981
The Trans ylvanian Quarterly

"Exterminate the Hungarians"

Even before the illfamed speech of Dictator Ceausescu on May the 10th, 1983, in which he declared all the ethnic groups and especially the Hungarians "slaves" of the Rumanian masterrace, his regime launched a concentrated attack against the native Hungarian population of Transylvania. It was first reported by the Vienna, Austria newspaper DER KURIER, April 29, 1983: "We have received placards and posters sent to us from Transylvania, with the text: "Rumanian Brothers, Let us clean up our land from the Hungarian parasites in order that we alone be the owners of this beautiful land! The Hungarians are our enemies! Squash them, exterminate them, anywhere you can find them!"

Through May and June several newspapers all over the world reported this new antiHungarian action of the Ceausescu government. These placards and posters are printed by the government's printing shop in Bucharest and sent to administrative agents all over Transylvania with the order to display them in railroad stations, bus terminals, railroad cars, buses, post offices and other public places.
Anyone who is caught removing such posters receives, besides the usual beatings, jail sentences up to three years.

"If One Hungarian Pig Dies..."
In the village of Noszoly, Central Transylvania, two brothers by the name of Janos and Ferenc Tokes, age 16 and 14, were arrested on May 18,1981, and taken to the police station in Kekes, where they were both kept for two days and savagely beaten. The charge against the two Hungarian boys "malicious act against the Rumanian state." The Tokes brothers, whose names were arbitrarily changed by the Rumanian authorities to the more Rumaniansounding Tochesiu, protested when their distorted names were called from the roll of the local communist youth organization. Since this happened during the May 10th parade, commemorating the "union of all Rumanians," it was regarded as a demonstration against Rumanian unity.
The two boys were taken home by their widowed mother and her sister in a cart pulled by the two women, because neither of them was able to walk due to the beatings received from the police. Janos Tokes, 16, was unconscious for five days, he lost half of his teeth, four of his fingers were broken and in midJuly he was still uanble to speak clearly. When the mother asked for medical attention on behalf of her son, it was denied by the county administrator with the words: "If one Hungarian pig dies, we have one less to get rid of!"

Amnesty International Reports

Hungarian "political prisoners" in Rumania are kept in prisons which are way below the minimal requirements set forth by the United Nations. These are mostly clergymen, churchelders, educators and factory workers who dared to protest against discrimination. They are forced to work under abominable conditions twelve hours a day, including Sunday. Those who collapse are transferred into socalled "mental clinics," and used for experimental purposes.
Amnesty International was also informed that members of the boxing team in the DINAMO SPORTCLUB, an organization of the Security Police, are commissioned with the beating of these political prisoners as part of their training program. The Rumanian Boxing Team, representing Rumania in the Olympics, is composed mainly of members of this organization.

Hungarians in Transylvania Forced into Extreme Misery

December 14, 1982
Transyluanian World Federation

While in neighboring Hungary people are preparing for Christmas and the usual feast that goes with it, letters reaching the West from Transylvania as well as reports of recent visitors render a bleak picture of the situation in this Rumanian occupied Hungarian land.
Most of the food is available only on coupons, and in very limited quantities, Government offices issuing those coupons use the "merit system":
Persons with Rumanian names are given one "merit" for the name alone. Another merit is added for a "letter of recommendation" from the local communist party office, and a third for a letter of approval from the office of the workforce, to which the person requesting the coupons is assigned.
Three "merits" entitle a person to coupons for 1 kg. (2.2 pounds) of meat, 3kg. bread and 1/8 kg. of lard or sunflower oil per week. An average Rumanian family with two working members and two children and no demerits will have enough food on the table and not go hungry. Hungarians, on the other hand, if they don't change their names, can have only two "merits" to begin with, and even those only if they "behave properly." This means that they do not offend anybody with the "provocative use" of their mother tongue and do not get involved in any kind of activities their Rumanian rulers frown upon. Thus, even the most humble Hungarian is handicapped at the very beginning. One wrong word spoken forfeits the "merits1' for an entire month. Another handicap is those retired members of the family who do not receive any retirement pay because forty years ago they happened to be "serving the wrong party": the Hungarian government, the Hungarian army, Hungarian institutions or they were independent "capitalists" owning their own business. For example: a woman, no matter how old now, if she served as a cook in a Hungarian upper or middle class household, can not claim retirement benefits from the "socialist treasury." Not that those benefits would make an old person independent and free from poverty. We read in one of the letters:
"My widowed mother retired four years ago from the local coop. Her retirement pay is 87 lei each month. Exactly the price of one kilogram of meat. A retiree who worked for 36 years on the fields from daybreak to sundown receives one kilogram (two pounds) of meat as a month's compensation. I must add, that meat can be purchased only once a week perhaps if you get up at four o'clock in the morning to be close to the head of the line when the shop opens at eight."
Another letter was written by a grandmother who is lucky to live in Budapest, Hungary, while the rest of her family is in Transylvania. In November 1982 she went to visit her children and grandchildren in Nagyvarad (Oradea), under Rumanian occupation. She carried a suitcase of edibles: ham, bacon, sugar, butter, salami, etc. On the border the Rumanian custom officials confiscated everything. Even presents, like sweaters and shoes for the children.
"First time in my life I had them all together," she writes, "my son and his wife, my daughter and her husband, and my nine grandchildren whom I've never seen. I was so happy! But my happiness was thwarted by the terrible poverty I have found there and by the Rumanian officials who robbed me from all the presents which would have made their lives easier for a few days."
"Way back during the war I suffered hard times, too. Lack of food and so on. But it was never like this! Everybody was hungry all the time and there was no way to get anything. The shops were closed most of the time, and even when they were open what we were able to buy on coupons to feed 14 people was not enough for seven. At dinner time the children had to be fed, and what was left we divided amoung ourselves."
"Once," the letter goes on, I went with my daughter to get some potatoes. The word was out in the neighbourhood that a whole truckload came in, and coupons were not needed. When we got there the line was already about two hundred meters long on the street. After two hours of waiting in the cold rain there were only about twenty people ahead of us. My daughter told me before we went there never to open my mouth because I can not speak Rumanian. So I kept quiet. But then I just had to go somewhere and whispered to my daughter where the restrooms might be? The woman behind us began to yell in Rumanian, then others were yelling, too, and the policeman at the door came over and told us to get out of there and go home, we are foreigners, we don't belong...'

Newest Statement of the Transylvanian Underground

September, 1983
Ellenpontok (Counterpoints)

The illegally printed organ of the Transylvania underground named ELLENPONTOK (Counterpoints) thought to have been eradicated by the Rumanian Political Police (Securitate) after a chain of arrests, beatings and tortures at the beginning of this year, suddenly reappeared again with the following statement:
"Those in the outside world who have preserved the sensitivity of their conscience watched with disbelief and helpless consternation all that happened to us, Transylvanian Hungarians, during the last decades. Their disbelief and anxiety was not just for our sake alone, but for the future of the Rumanian people also.
"We Hungarians were forced to reach the conclusion, which the outer world is only now beginning to realize, namely that the existing Rumanian regime can not be accepted anymore as partner in an attempt to reach any kind of decent corrective resolution toward a politically sober cooperation between government and people. The deteriorated morality of this government makes it unfit for any kind of orderly operation and its powerlogic is motivated by factors which makes it dangerous toward its own people as well as toward the survival of minorities under its rule.
"We find that a new consensus has arisen within the entire Transylvanian Hungarian nation. Regardless of ideology, regardless of differences in class or in functions of each individual within the system, the immediate danger and the feeling of mutual responsibility has united all of us in the desire for a radical change in our situation. We will have to try again, as so many times during our history, to create a new world out of nothing. To restore our equality with the rest of our fellowmen in this world, and try to achieve that common good, which lies in the effective denial and rejection of the system established today above and against us.
"It was indeed a positive experience for us to learn that the supportive attention and the justified concern of the people of the Hungarian People's Republic, and presumably of those in other Socialist States are on our side in this struggle, within the limits of diplomacy, of course, and within the framework of the presentday political structures.
"In our judgment this international concern and sympathy toward our cause c~n in no way be regarded as an "intervention" into the internal affairs of our country or as an "infringement" of Rumanian sovereignity Infringement of sovereignity can come to exist only where a government carries out responsibilities entrusted to it by the people it rules. Not only that the Rumanian government has never done anything for us, Transylvanian Hungarians, but it exerts an unprecedented terror upon the Rumanian population also."

Signed: "Editors of the Ellenpontok."

July, 1984
The Transylvanian Quarterly