The chronicle of Eger Tobacco Factory

The cigar factory

of employees back up to 610 by 1929. However, this was to be a flash in the pan. The improved position lasted a brief two years. Owing to changes in the economic situation, the number of staff began to fall off again from 1932, and coupled with this productivity dwindled. There were no mass redundancies, but jobs which fell vacant were simply not filled again. A general order came out in 1933 which restricted Adorján Oltványi’s employment powers in the following way: “Situations falling vacant are henceforward not to be filled due to a lack of requirement for personnel. At the same time we deem it necessary to inform you, in the strongest terms, that it no longers lies within your authority to hire staff even for temporary or seasonal work.”

Let us pause for a moment here, one third of the way through the twentieth century.

When was the last trouble free day that the factory had known? Probably the roof-raising ceremony. Since then it had been as if the future had begun afresh with each new day. The first generation of factory workers were now in their fifties, the factory had become an adult. Together with the nation it had come through a war and a dictatorship. Anyone who cared to look around him could have discerned three distinct points on which the past and the future came together: the buildings, whose rosy brick innards were peeping through the cracks in the battered plasterwork; the tobacco leaves which were woven daily into a cocoon of the future; the women in their white headscarves, whose tobacco knives carved the factory’s lifeline deep and long into their palms...