The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1983-01-01 / 1. szám
í Tb« contents of the following letter reached Hungarian newspapers in the Western World, written in Hungarian by an anonimous person, postmarked in West Germany. ‘7 would like to preserve my Hungarian Being”! I am Magyar/Hungarian, Transylvanian Hungarian, and I would like to preserve my Hungarian being from now on too, here in Transylvania. But is it possible in Transylvania today to preserve our Hungarian being, which is inseparable from our European ness, and from the European Hungarian, Rumanian, Slavic, Slovanic ideal of nation/culture, from József Attila’s ideals of the peoples of the Danube? Is it possible for a Magyar/Hungarian to be a Magyar in Erdely/Transylvania? Can a “minority” such as this preserve its language, culture, ethnic sence of belonging, national conciousness and collective rights as a people amidst the leaping flames of the Rumanian chauvinistic atmosphere? The fate of the Jewish and German minorities of Transylvania has become commonplace knowledge. Jewish beings were bought by Israel, and the government of West Germany has done the same for the Transylvanian Germans/Saxons, who were declared “without a country” in Rumania/by Rumania. This is good business for the Rumanian government: 6,000 marks per head plus the real estate left here. And who puts a stigma on this kind of “trade in human beings”? How unbelieveable and sad all this at the end of the Twentieth Century under the egis of Human Rights! HUNGARY IS QUIET Anyway, who will buy Hungarian beings? After all there are 2.5 millions for sale! Money talks — yet Hungary is silent. In the midst of Earth shaking, enormous contraversies, who cares that one nation perishes? There are questions concerning the Palestinians, the Kurds, the Basque, but is there a question concerning the Hungarians? Yes, there is, in Rumania. Except that the sphere of Soviet interests are more important than the lot of the Transylvanian Hungarians. Ceausescu is quiet about the Russification of the Rumanians in Beserabia. By the understanding of “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”, Russia could not care less about the minorities of Rumania. America is grateful to Rumania for its “anti-Russian” politics. Who benefits? “The one who milks two goats at once”: Ceausescu. It is true that in Rumania only the “dynasty” lives in the land of milk and honey, the population does not. Still, who cares if this small group of a few million people torn from its nation perishes? Can the Hungarians be rescued from being pulverized, ground down? Can anything be done about the arbitraryness of a national chauvinism, gone wild? Is it possible to successfully combat an entire operation, a maffia-like system which has only one goal, (beside proving the willow-the - whisp image of its own past) and that is, to assimilate, to swallow up all non-Rumanian ethnic entities. Mankind is unshakéably unconcerned and uncareing. So is public opinion. Is there no means available whereby we can bring to their attention that the Hungarians are being ground between millstones; that they are perishing; that there is modem day genocide going on in Transylvania? And so, will it come to pass what Rumanian politics so openly and shamelessly advertizes: that in a short time, by 1990 or 2000, the creating of a “unitary Roman-ian nation” will succeed? The deliberate assimilation of the “minorities” already began immediately after 1918. To speed up the process, every means was used, be it moral or spiritual terror, physical intimidation and outrage, or as more often than not, masked murder. The power of the State and and every method available to dictatorship was also at disposal for this process of assimilation. The great end santified every means. Let us look at a few tell-tale examples of this: The young people of the “minorities” who reach military age were and are the ones best able to experience on their own skin, at every step, the most varied forms of discrimination due to national origin. They cannot use their language even among themselves. They cannot listen to or watch, Hungarian Language Radio or T.V. broadcasts, and it happened at military base in Bucharest that a soldier of Hungarian national origin was taken to hospital after being beaten for this. They are not allowed to write letters home in the Hungarian language, since — so to speak — “such language does not exist in Rumania”. Those boys who profess to be Magyar/ Hungarian are bozgorized (“bozgor” in the Rumanian language meaning “one without a country”), and are put through special training. The young recruits from Transylvania are shipped off to entirely Rumanian environs such as Buzau, Constanta, Piatra Neamt, etc., and the Transylvanian barracks are filled with Rumanian youth brought in from far distances. Tourists from Transylvania to Moldavia or Oltania, or to other Rumanian inhabited areas; and those who get stationed there, such as newly gradu-IV THE TRANSYLVANIAN QUARTERLY
