The Eighth Tribe, 1980 (7. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1980-01-01 / 1. szám
-His short outburst was shouted down by Ceausescu himself, who called the aged delegate an “intriguer, a provocateur and a foreigner in our country”. Pirvulescu was immediately stripped of his mandate, and taken to a “hospital”, for “his own good.” The incident was remarkable for a congress that has been stage-managed throughout, the London Telegraph concludes, and indicated that Ceausescu was well on the way to becoming the most egocentric of an East European Communist leader. His portraits are on display everywhere, and Bucharest looks very much like an old-fashioned Communist police state, with its police and security police keeping a careful eye on foreigners. A special museum has room after room devoted to Ceausescu and his wife. THE SARMAS MASSACRE TWF, Geneva, Switzerland — A refugee from Sarmas, Transylvania, residing now in Switzerland, whose name cannot be made public for well-known reasons, testified in front of a Geneva judge concerning the “Sarmas Massacre” of October 1944. Here is part of his testimony: “I was fourteen years of age when my entire family was killed. We lived in a town named Sarmas, in Transylvania. My father was a tinsmith. We were Hungarians. Sarmas was a Hungarian town...” “The Rumanians came back on a Sunday. It was in mid-October. I don’t know the date, but it was Sunday. My mother wanted us to go to church, but father said no, we better stay home. There may be some trouble, he said. We heard shots from the direction of Bald. Many shots. We saw some German trucks coming down the highway, rushing through the town and disappearing Northbound. I remember my father saying that the war was over... “Then we saw the Rumanian soldiers coming at us from everywhere. Along the highway, across the meadows, across the cornfields, and even from the hilltop they came, across the pastures. They were firing shots everywhere. I couldn’t see any enemy in front of them, but they were still firing . . . “They chased the Hungarians out of their houses, and herded them down toward the market-place, like sheep. We hid in the house, and locked the door, but they broke it down. Mother begged them to leave us alone but they kicked her in the belly. My father got mad and reached for the axe. One of the soldiers shot THE HUNGARIAN “CHANGO” SETTLEMENT IN MOLDOVIA by István Zolcsák Probably the most downtrodden, yet the hardiest and most resistant Hungarians in the world are those people known as CHANGOS, who live in the Rumanian province of Moldova (Moldavia). Against all odds they have preserved their ethnic heritage for seven centuries, surviving many invasions from the East, dozens of despotic rulers of invading nationalities, and finally the ruthless efforts of a hostile Rumanian government to assimilate them. The Changos live East of the Carpathians, along both banks of the river Sereth (Siret), and its tributaries. They moved into the area at the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the Hungarian kings were in the process of convertng the Kuns (Cumanians, Kumans, Comans — a Scythian Nation related to the Hungarians and Huns) of Moldavia to Christianity. The Kun state was subsequently annihilated by the Tartar invasion, but somehow the diocese founded there survived. During the Hussite persecutions even more Hungarians escaped into Moldavia, and the trickle of immigrants continued during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The land was sparsely populated, and could accommodate new settlers without strain. The last major exodus of Hungarians went to Moldova (Moldavia) in 1764, seeking to avoid Habsburg oppression. Today there are about a quarter of a million Changos. They have remained Roman Catholic in an Orthodox country, and have clung to their Hungarian identity, though only about half of them now him, and he fell. Then we were chased out of the house, my mother, my grandmother and my five brothers and sisters. My youngest sister was only three, and she was holding on to mother’s skirt, screaming. Mother was screaming, too, and everybody else... “I fell into a ditch. The ditch was full of weeds and nobody could see me. I was just lying there in the weeds. I was trembling... “Then I heard the shots, down at the marketplace. Many shots. Screams and more shots. And then everything was quiet. I have never seen my family again. The soldiers ordered the rest of the Hungarians to dig a huge big hole in the Szász cornfield and bury there all the dead. There were 134 buried there, that day...” THE TRANSYLVANIAN QUARTERLY V
