The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1983-08-01 / 8. szám

THE STORY OF BORIKA BODÓ

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 Szék were singing old Hungarian folk songs while working in the cornfields. Though the Rumanian supervisor of the government-owned “people’s farm” admonished the girls not to sing Hungarian songs because they were in the land of the Rumanian people, the three teen-agers continued singing in Hungarian.

In late afternoon a police vehicle arrived at the scene, picked up the girls and took them to the poKce station in Kolozs (today called 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 Bodó, age 16, were told by police sergeant Marariu that their daughter had “behaved rather poorly” and had to be transferred to Kolozsvár / Cluj in order to stand trial. However, when the parents inquired from the Kolozsvár 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 Bodó had ever existed.

The appalling, but by Rumanian standards not unusual story of Borika Bodó 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 Szék with the purpose of looking into the disappearance of Borika Bodó. They were told by the Rumanian village outhorities that no family by the name of Bodó 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 Kolozsvár 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 September 1980 a young Hungarian refugee, having escaped from Rumania, arrived in Italy. According to his testimony he had spent three years in the Kolozsvár dungeon as a political dissident and was transferred from there in the spring of 1980 to a “mental clinic”,

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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 Bodó was the one who had put an end to her life already 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 Rumanian-beleaguered Transylvania, the sad case was closed.

Then suddenly, two years later, in January 1983 news came to the Transylvanian World Federation that Borika Bodó is alive, at least in a physical sense. She is “working” in the kitchen of a mental institution somewhere at the edge of the ill-famed 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 Nagyvárafl / Oradea, and charged with publishing the underground newspaper ELLENPONTOK (Counterpoints) and sending it 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 mass-arrest 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 Sándor Molnár, who succeeded soon in escaping from Rumania into Turkey.

Mr. Molnár testified under oath in a written affidavit that while he was an inmate at the Bardagoci Mental Research Institute, where political prisioners 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 Bodó. She lived in the Institute, Molnár 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.

THE TRANSYLVANIAN QUARTERLY