HUNGARY’S “POISON VILLAGES”

Evening Star, Issue 20422, 1 March 1930, Page 6

HUNGARY’S “POISON VILLAGES”

MURDERS CONTINUED FOR YEARS DEMONIC “ AUNT SUSIE " HOW THE CRIMES WERE PERFORMED. “ I never heard of the Ten Commandments. I never heard anything about ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” This is only one of the astonishing revelations during the trial of Hungary’s thirty-one peasant women poisoners, “ on whose conscience lie from fifty to one hundred deaths, and whose orgies of murder revive in one’s mind the strangest pages of medieval history.” The trial, we learn from various European journals, took place in the small, picturesque, and peaceful Hungarian city of Szolnok. In its first proceeding's, it appears that one ot the women poisoners was condemned to death, and three others to life imprisonment at hard labour. But, we are informed, the trial of these poisoners created such a scandal in Hungary, and drew to quiet Szolnok such enormous crowds of society men and women, professional men, aristocrats, and peasants, to say nothing of a host of newspaper correspondents, that the Hungarian authorities decided to postpone the arraignment of the remaining twenty-seven accused until the excitement abated. The story of these strange, poisonous murders, whose disclosure belongs to 1929 and not to a past barbarous age, is told in ‘ Rul,’ a Russian-language daily of Berlin, as follows: “ In two Hungarian villages, Nagirev and Tisakurt, nicknamed in the district ‘ the poison villages,’ mysterious death traveled over a long period of years, from house to house, and the number of graves in their cemeteries increased with unbelievable speed. “The fact is that for getting rid ot old husbands, of inconvenient lovers, or of undesirable children, or well-to-do relations duo to leaye a fortune after their death, the women of these two villages resorted to a simple and radical method. They addressed themselves to two midwives who had Avon for themselves the dark and horrible fame of poisoners. “ For the comparatively small sum of from one hundred to five hundred--4 ponges,’ the midwives handed to their clients arsenic which they had extracted from sticky fly-paper. (A pengo equals 7i cents.] To this they added detailed and eflective explanations as to how the poison was to be used, iho result was that husbands, lovers, fathers, mothers, and children, including new-born babies, passed away suddenly and strangely., “Astonishingly enough, these crimes remained undiscovered for years. In truth, almost all tho women of these villages were bound to one another by tho bond of crime, and they preserved their dark secrets masterfully. . “ But in the latter months of 1929 certain charges were sent to the authorities. Tho police Bogan an investiga-

tion. At Nagirey fifty graves were opened, and tho bodies in them were analysed chemically. Ip forty-two cases out of fifty the physicians established the fact that death had resulted from 'poisoning by arsenic.” The real demon of the whole bloodcurdling epic, ‘ Rul ’ goes on to say, was “ Aunt Susie,” alias Susanne Fasekas. This midwife settled in Nagirev about forty years ago, we are told, and it is conjectured that she probably began her terrible activities at that time. At first, it . seems, she merely specialised in malpractice, but soon passed on ,to wholesale murder. ‘ Rul ’.continues: “She was a woman jof unusual gifts and personality, and; wielded a truly demonic power and authority over the ignorant inhabitants of these remote Hungarian villages. She was tried ten times for malpractice, but _ each time managed to escape conviction. This time, too, she evaded ‘earthly punishment.’ As soon _as the investigation began, she commited suicide. But the other ‘witch.’ Julianne Lipka, who poisoned her mother .and six strangers, found herself on the bench of the accused, and was sentenced to death. ‘ Some strange frenzy seems to have seized the female inhabitants of these villages. Women poisoned, people not only for material reasons, but merely' out' of the thirst for killing. The indictments which were read in the court abound in descriptions of cruelty and sexual perversity.” ‘ Posslyednia Novosti,’ a Russian daily in Paris, quotes some of the statements which the woman-poisoners made in court during these cross-ex-aminations. For instance ;■

“Lidia Olah, seventy years old, who is guilty of . ‘ only ’ one murder, said challengingy : “W© are'not assassins! We did not stab our husbands. We did not hang or drown them either. They died from poison, and this was a pleasant death , for - them! ” ... Another accused, Rose Glyba, to the Judge’s question whether she knew the Ten Commandments, answered emphatically ‘No!’ ‘Do you know the Commandment, Thou shalt not kill’? the Judge asked again. ‘ I have never heard of it,’ she retorted; and sat down with a gloomy and angry air.” This paper tells us further that now “ the epidemic of poisonings has ceased at Nagirev. But tho feelings of fear continues to live in the village. Husbands fear their wives, parents their children, and travellers those in whose homes they stop. One can not make one hundred steps, in the village without encountering a dejected figure—h relative of some of the accused women. We read, then : • “The inhabitants of the village look like the ostracised, or like lepers among healthy people. The peasants of the neighbouring villages have solemnly sworn never to marry the girls from Nagirev. On Sunday, the, day. when the sentence passed by the court became known in the village, dramatic scenes took place in its church. Tho pale faces of the parishioners- were bowed in gloom when the priest began his sermon with. the words. ‘We all are guilty, you and I.’ Cries, sobs, and hysterics broke out in the church, when, following the priest’s example, all knelt and began to repeat after him: ‘Lord| forgive our sins! * ”