I check into the MensRights Reddit fairly frequently to keep up to date on news items concerning mens issues, and every now and then someone comes up with something very interesting. Yesterday, someone posted a number of links concerning a long-running spate of poisonings in early 20th century Hungary, and I’m glad I checked today because feminists have invaded the Mensrights subreddit to vote down any posts they don’t approve of* and I probably would have missed this piece of history otherwise.
Some time during WWI, men in Nagyrev, a village south-east of Budapest, began dying in disproportionate numbers. The local midwife, a witch named Julia Fazekas, had arrived in 1911 with Susi Olah (presumably her lesbian lover), and was the only person in the area with any medical expertise. Fazekas was arrested on numerous occasions for illegally performing abortions, but sympathetic judges let her off the hook each time. The abortions may have been desired because the local women allegedly shacked up with allied POWs who were drafted into farm labor in the town while their husbands were away at war.
When the men came back from war and demanded their wives give up their lovers, some of the local women complained to Fazekas, who advised them that it would be a simple matter to poison the men with arsenic, which she extracted from fly paper. Soon thereafter, husbands, children and other inconvenient family members began dropping like the flies the arsenic was intended for. Because Fazekas’s cousin was the local clerk, the deaths were not recorded as suspicious, and the murders escaped notice for years.
Finally, a medical student found a corpse in the river, and upon testing it discovered high levels of the poison, which led to suspicion. Then, in 1929, an anonymous letter to a newspaper located in a nearby town revealed the mass poisonings, and eventually 26 women went to trial. When police initially went to investigate Fazekas, she committed suicide with her own poison, thereby foiling justice and escaping the noose.
Of the 26 women tried, eight were sentenced to death, but only two were eventually executed. Of the remainder, 12 were sentenced to prison.
The story is a good reminder that we face very ancient passions, and that the line between barbarism and civilization is very thin and easily crossed. It also clearly demonstrates that darkness can dwell in the hearts of women just as in men, and that their own aggression can be tied to sexuality as well. But perhaps what it illustrates best is how a malicious woman like proto-feminist Julia Fazekas can sow discord in a community with deadly results. Where in early 19th century Austro-Hungary such a woman was relegated to the backwaters of the empire, today one can find them in universities, major publications and political office doling out their own version of poison to the women of our society.
* Apparently, the feminists are upset over the fact that the men’s Reddit is so much more popular than their own, so, as one might expect, they’ve abandoned their own unpopular subreddits to harass men. This is the main problem with Reddit, which encourages this kind of petty “activism” through allowing outsiders to vote on posts in subreddits and push them down.
