In the summer of 1929 the gendarmerie in the Tiszazug, a district of small farming villages on the Tisza in central Hungary, began opening graves. The remains went to Budapest for testing, and arsenic was found. More than forty people were arrested, nearly all of them women, and the case of the "Tiszazug poisoners" was reported across Hungary and then across Europe. At the center of the newspaper stories stood one person: Fazekas Gyuláné, born Oláh Zsuzsanna, the elderly midwife of Nagyrév. The press called her the head of a criminal ring. Women under questioning said she had given them the poison and told them how to use it.
She never answered those accusations in court. On July 19, 1929, when gendarmes came to take her in, she was found dead at her home; the Nagyrév death register records that she had taken her own life. She was never charged before a court, never tried and never convicted, and no court ever ruled on what she did. The poisonings attributed to her circle were tried against others between 1929 and 1931, and three women were executed.
The historian Ládonyi Emese, who studied her life in the county archives and the parish registers for the social history journal Korall in 2007, concluded that the midwife was a central figure in the poisonings but not the only one, and that the village and the press found it convenient to load the guilt onto a dead woman with a questionable past. What is known of her own story comes from parish registers, court files and the testimony of the women who blamed her.
In Hungarian the family name comes first, and a married woman was traditionally known by her husband's full name with the suffix "-né". The midwife's maiden name was Oláh Zsuzsanna. In 1884 she married Fazekas Gyula, and from then on she was Fazekas Gyuláné, "Mrs. Gyula Fazekas". In the county press of 1929 she also appears as "özvegy Fazekas Gyuláné", the widow Fazekas Gyuláné, and one report printed her name as Oláh Gyuláné. Hungarian writers often call her simply Fazekasné. In English order her name is Zsuzsanna Fazekas.
Many English-language accounts call her "Júlia Fazekas". That name appears to be a misreading of Gyuláné, the form built on her husband's first name; she was not called Júlia in the Hungarian records that historians have published.
Nagyrév lies on the Tisza in the Tiszazug, in what was then Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county. In 1928 it had 1,568 inhabitants, most of them members of the Reformed church, according to Ládonyi. Land holdings were small. The years after the First World War brought hunger and poverty, and the region was occupied by Romanian troops in 1919.
The village had no pharmacy. The writer Móricz Zsigmond, who reported on the case in 1929 and 1930, wrote that a doctor came only once a week. In a village like this the midwife did far more than deliver babies. Ládonyi describes the range of tasks midwives took on in such places: care before birth, reporting epidemics, examining the dead, bloodletting, advice on sexual problems and, illegally, abortions. That work gave a midwife independence, standing and knowledge of every family's secrets, but it also set her apart from the rest of the community.
Roads were poor and there was no public transport, Vice's Spanish edition reported in 2020, and trust between neighbors was low. Married women had little say in their own lives.
Oláh Zsuzsanna was most likely born in Nagyrév in 1862, according to Ládonyi, who adds that other sources give 1861 and that the parish baptismal register for 1862 and 1863 is missing. She was not a newcomer to the village. Her parents were local people, and she had an older brother and an older sister. The sister would later play a part in the case.
She married on November 22, 1884. Her husband, Fazekas Gyula, born in 1860, was a day laborer. The couple had four children. The first, a daughter, died as a baby. A second daughter and two sons grew up. The daughter later became a midwife herself, and her husband served as the village's examiner of the dead.
The midwife's husband died in October 1928. The death register gives heart failure as the cause. Rumors in the village said he had been poisoned, Ládonyi writes, but nothing in the records she examined settles the question.
The records first name her as a midwife in 1893. Witnesses later said she had practiced healing from around 1900, though their accounts differ. Ládonyi found no evidence of formal training: none of the Nagyrév women who worked as midwives appear in the Semmelweis University lists of trained midwives for 1885 to 1910. Other women delivered babies in the village too. In 1893 to 1895 one midwife handled about nine in ten of Nagyrév's births. Bodó, Ládonyi writes, estimated that about a dozen women worked as midwives in Nagyrév over the years, and Fazekasné was the most successful of them.
She was not a typical village wife. She smoked, she went to the tavern, and she was known as a gossip. One witness at the trials called her a "tudósasszony", a wise woman who used charms and folk remedies. Her wealth, Ládonyi concluded, was not exceptional, although Móricz described her house as one of the largest in the village.
She was prosecuted more than once for performing abortions. One case ran in 1920 and 1921 and ended in acquittal; during that investigation she reportedly admitted to several abortions. A lawyer from the district defended her successfully, by Ládonyi's count in seven cases. In 1921 she was suspended from her post as midwife. Her daughter was officially appointed in 1925, but the mother went on working unofficially. Abortion was in demand, Ládonyi explains, because an unmarried mother had no way back into the community.
What the investigation of 1929 uncovered was not one crime but many, spread over close to twenty years and over several villages. Women obtained arsenic by soaking it out of flypaper and gave it in food or drink to family members. Ládonyi's summary describes the victims as relatives who had become, in the miserable conditions of the time, a burden that could not be borne. Bajánházy István, who examined the case for the Miskolci Jogi Szemle in 2021 from the gendarmerie reports and the court files, found that of the 101 victims named in those reports, only five had no family or work ties to the people accused.
The killings did not begin with the midwife, according to the court record. The county paper Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok megyei Lapok reported on August 15, 1929, that the first case went back to 1911, the death of a man named Takács Lajos, and connected it with poison from Fazekas Gyuláné. Ládonyi, working from the files, found that the woman convicted in the 1911 case blamed the midwife, but that the midwife's name first appears in the files in 1918.
Ládonyi stresses that the deaths came one by one over nearly two decades. Most of the dead were elderly, sick or disabled, so that the deaths did not always look suspicious. Some cases were presented as mercy killings. Others, she writes, grew out of desperate situations, among them violent husbands and sexual harassment within the household. The court in one case observed that poisoning had become so widespread in the village that moral restraints had loosened.
In 1923 an anonymous letter reached the authorities about a death in the district, according to the historian Bezsenyi Tamás, but the inquiry was closed when doctors found the death natural. In 1925 an elderly widow from Nagyrév was found dead; arsenic was later found in her remains and proceedings began against her daughter-in-law. These cases were not connected with one another at the time, Bajánházy writes, and they did not lead to wider action.
The inquiry of 1929 was set off by anonymous letters. Accounts differ on the details. Bajánházy writes that in July 1929 three anonymous letters reached the Royal Prosecutor's Office in Szolnok, each accusing a woman of Nagyrév. Bezsenyi, who studied the local and county newspapers of that summer for the media journal Médiakutató in 2014, found that the poisonings had reached print earlier. The Kunszentmárton és Vidéke wrote about them first, on June 9, 1929, in a report by Nyikos László; the Szolnok és Vidéke reported on June 16 that an investigation had begun; and on July 7 the opposition weekly Kunszentmártoni Híradó ran the headline "Méregkeverők a Tiszazugban", "Poisoners in the Tiszazug". Vice reported in 2020 that a villager's letter complaining that the authorities did nothing was published in a Szolnok newspaper in June 1929. Local memory, recorded by the researchers Bálint Angelika and Győri Anna, ties the exposure to a quarrel among women in which one refused to pay the midwife for arsenic.
The gendarmerie post at Tiszakürt led the inquiry. Gendarmes interviewed villagers, and by August the authorities were also asking questions in Karcag, Újkécske and Tiszasas. Once the inquiry was public, villagers who had kept silent for years began accusing one another, Vice reported. The Kunszentmártoni Híradó wrote that hundreds of anonymous letters reached the authorities.
The gendarmes were short of staff and of places to hold suspects, Bajánházy writes, so they kept in custody only those who confessed at the first questioning and released those who denied everything. Many of the accused later said they had confessed under pressure from the gendarmes.
Hungarian law of the time, the 1896 Code of Criminal Procedure, required an autopsy and a chemical test by the national court chemist whenever poisoning was suspected. Graves in Nagyrév and Tiszakürt were opened, and the remains were sent to Budapest for testing. Gendarmes kept villagers back from the cemeteries. Some of those under suspicion had tried to make graves harder to find by removing their markers, Bajánházy writes.
The newspapers of July and August 1929 printed the laboratory findings for some of the dead, among them Szabó Mihály, Madarász József and Szabó Istvánné, in whose remains arsenic had been found. A study of the case by Varga Árpád, as summarized by Bajánházy, counts 54 exhumations, with arsenic found in all 54 bodies and expert opinion holding that arsenic alone caused death in 41 of them. The press of the time reported 45 exhumations.
The midwife was named early. Ládonyi found that she was arrested in the summer of 1929 and that the women held with her first implicated her and then took it back. According to the testimony Ládonyi examined, the midwife struck a bargain with them: if she were set free, she would see to it that the others were released too. She was let go and the authorities kept watch on her.
In the days that followed, according to the testimony, she went round the women she knew asking for money. She asked one of them for 50 pengő, saying that others would help. She asked another woman for a loan of 100 pengő to pay her lawyer, and when the woman could not give it, took half a liter of pálinka from her without paying. Vice reported that once she was known as the main suspect, former friends and clients would not open their doors to her.
On July 19, 1929, gendarmes came to her house to take her in again. They found her dead. The Nagyrév death register records that she took her own life that morning. The death was reported to the registrar by her son.
The county press told the story in different ways. A report in early August in the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok megyei Lapok said the midwife had seen the gendarmes coming and taken her own life before any court could judge her. Móricz, too, wrote that the midwife who sold the poison had taken her own life.
Her death left the prosecution without the woman the press had made its main figure. Because she could no longer defend herself, Bálint and Győri argue, she was easily made the scapegoat. Bajánházy, writing as a legal scholar, calls her the main figure and likely originator of the poisonings but cautions that the evidence against her was not clear-cut, precisely because she was never heard.
She was not the only suspect to die before trial. Bajánházy counts four or five suicides during the proceedings, citing two different studies. One of the women was later found to have been innocent; another had protested her innocence and feared the trial.
The case against the midwife was made in the newspapers and in the statements of co-defendants, not in a courtroom. The Pesti Napló quoted the village clerk saying that she had weighed on the village "like a cursed incubus", the phrase Ládonyi took for the title of her study. The Kis Ujság wrote of a witches' kitchen. The press, Ládonyi writes, made her the "head of the criminal ring" who supplied the poison and talked the women into using it.
Móricz, who went to Nagyrév and reported on the case for the Pesti Napló before publishing a long essay, "Tiszazugi méregkeverők", in the literary review Nyugat in February 1930, portrayed her as the spiritual and moral authority who led the women into crime, the representative of the devil, a woman who ate meat three times a day in a village where peasants tasted it only at the pig slaughter. Ládonyi points out that his account partly mirrors the sensational press.
At the trials the accused women said she had given arsenic to patients to get their property; one said she had her eye on a woman's house. Kardos Mihályné, who confessed to the gendarmes, later blamed the midwife for her crimes. The appeal court found that defense largely baseless. Women under questioning said they had paid for the poison. The Szolnok és Vidéke reported on June 29, 1929, that a death cost 160 pengő. Ládonyi found prices in the files of 50 korona or 60 to 80 pengő a dose, sometimes paid with wheat, firewood or flour, far more than a midwife earned from deliveries.
Ládonyi also examined the motives the press gave the midwife: an alleged affair, a plan to marry her son to a wealthy widow, designs on a house. None of them, she concluded, is reliably proven. She found that the midwife's sister recommended the method to other women and later tried to shield her. Of the 58 people recorded as patients of the midwife's daughter in the early 1930s, none was involved in the poisonings.
By the end of the inquiry the gendarmerie reports named 83 suspects, 72 women and 11 men, according to Bajánházy: 59 women and 7 men in Nagyrév, 4 women in Cibakháza, and 9 women and 4 men in Tiszakürt. The press reported 43 people detained. Ládonyi counts 65 suspects named in the Nagyrév files and 43 arrests. Poisonings were reported in Tiszakürt, Ókécske, Tiszaföldvár, Kunszentmárton, Mesterszállás and Öcsöd, and similar cases surfaced in Békés, Zala and Csongrád counties.
The numbers of dead vary with who is counting. The gendarmerie reports named 101 victims, 80 men and 21 women, according to Bajánházy, who adds that other sources give 162. Ládonyi counts 78 victims in Nagyrév. Bezsenyi, writing in the journal Valóság in 2015, says investigators identified more than 150 victims before the inquiry was ended under political pressure. The historian Béla Bodó, whom Vice described as the researcher who has studied the case most thoroughly, counted 45 to 50 confirmed murders. The press of 1929 spoke of around 300 dead, a figure that became part of local legend.
The Szolnok prosecutor brought charges in 12 arsenic cases against 28 people, 26 of them women, Bajánházy writes, roughly a third of the original suspects. The cases were tried separately. Hearings at the Szolnok court began on December 13, 1929, according to Bezsenyi, and the proceedings, including appeals and extraordinary remedies, ran into 1931; the court files Ládonyi used run to 1936.
Of the 28 defendants, 16 were convicted, 14 women and 2 men. Ten were acquitted, six at first instance and four on appeal, and the prosecutor dropped the charges against two. Ládonyi reports that the final judgments included six death sentences and eight sentences of life imprisonment. The high number of acquittals, Bajánházy argues, reflected the difficulty of proof: arsenic could be found in a body years later, but memories faded, and defendants changed their stories.
The law of the day, the Csemegi Code of 1878, did not treat poisoning as a separate crime. It was tried as homicide. Premeditated killing was punishable by death; aggravated cases such as the killing of relatives could bring life imprisonment.
The death sentences reached the Kúria, Hungary's supreme court, where a panel led by Finkey Ferenc heard four cases involving five defendants. It upheld three death sentences and commuted two to life imprisonment, according to Bajánházy. The three women whose death sentences were upheld and carried out were:
Kardos Mihályné, convicted of killing her son, Kovács Sándor, in November 1919, and her husband, Kardos Mihály, in April 1922, with arsenic in their food. She had confessed to the gendarmes.
Csordás Bálintné, convicted of supplying arsenic in several killings in 1925, among them those of Szabó István, Madarász József the elder and Szabó Mihály.
Szabó Lászlóné, convicted of taking part in killings that included that of her father, Szabó Mihály.
The two women whose death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment were Lipka Pálné, convicted of killing Kardos Áronné in 1912 and Zsiros György and his wife in 1921, people she was bound to support under maintenance contracts, and V. Takács Lajosné, convicted of killing her husband and her father-in-law. Finkey later wrote in his memoirs, published in 1944, that mercy would have been pointless for these defendants.
Vice reported that 34 women were tried and that seven were sentenced to death, figures that differ from the court-based counts.
Contemporaries reached for easy explanations. The county papers, Bezsenyi found, wrote of a "criminal association", a "poisoners' cooperative", witches and "godless Cumans". Much of the press, Vice reported, saw the case as proof of an innate female wickedness and brushed aside poverty as a cause. Bálint and Győri found that newspapers portrayed the accused as beasts and witches, while the press also cast the women as greedy, Ládonyi adds, without mentioning that the property in question was often a few hold of land, the Hungarian measure, barely enough to keep a family from hunger.
Historians have looked instead at the conditions of the villages. Bajánházy points to poverty and isolation and to strained marriages. Ládonyi lists economic hardship, backwardness and the neglect of the village by its notary and its pastor. She also stresses that peasant communities kept silent about crimes to protect their own, and that those who did inform were often anonymous or acting out of personal revenge. Had the community's own sanctions worked, she argues, the first case could have been stopped.
On the midwife's place in all this, Ládonyi's conclusion is measured. The midwife's status, her role as a confidante and her knowledge of every household gave her influence. But many women were accomplices, the village shared the responsibility, and the community found in the dead midwife, with her record of abortion cases and her reputation for folk magic, a figure on whom the guilt could be placed.
The case had local political consequences. Bezsenyi traces how the Kunszentmártoni Híradó and its editor, Mezey Lajos, used the case in arguments about the development of the neglected district, and how the paper claimed credit for prompting the gendarmerie command in Budapest to act, a claim Bezsenyi doubts. On August 25, 1929, Klebelsberg Kunó proposed in the Pesti Napló that the Tiszazug be attached to Csongrád county. A new bridge for the district was handed over on October 17, 1929, in the presence of the regent. Mezey became a member of the county assembly and, in 1934, a member of parliament.
Bálint and Győri write that the New York Times published more articles on the case than on the rest of Hungary under Horthy, though they give no source for the claim. The case was reported across Europe, Vice noted.
The case entered Hungarian literature almost at once. József Attila published the poem "Tiszazug" in the journal Toll on September 8, 1929. Móricz's essay appeared in Nyugat in February 1930. The playwright Háy Gyula wrote the drama "Tiszazug" in 1934 to 1936; it was printed in 1945 and staged from May of that year, with 57 performances at the Magyar Színház by September. Kosáryné Réz Lola drew on the case in the 1941 novel "Különös ismertetőjegye: nincs", and Saád Katalin wrote the novel "Csupaszon" in Nagyrév after 1979; it was published in 1997, and in it the midwife appears as the leader of the women who killed, "a rabszolgalázadók vezére", the leader of the slave rebels. Sociographies of the district were written by Szeibert János and Szállási Sándor in 1935 and by Illés Sándor in 1961.
Magyar Rádió produced a radio play, "Táncol a halál". The Dutch filmmaker Astrid Bussink made the documentary "The Angelmakers" in 2005, a Dutch, Scottish and Hungarian production that the weekly HVG described in 2006; it puts the number of victims at 162 and includes an interview with an elderly woman of the village.
Her guilt. No court ever heard evidence against Fazekas Gyuláné. The accusations against her came from co-defendants, some of whom had reason to shift blame, and from a press that Ládonyi and others describe as sensational. Ládonyi treats one leading witness's account as exaggerated, given that the witness had reason to fear her own verdict.
How she died. The death register, as reported by Ládonyi, a county newspaper in August 1929 and Móricz all describe a suicide; later accounts differ on the substance.
Her birth year. Ládonyi gives 1862 as most likely, while other sources give 1861; the baptismal register for those years is missing.
The first case. The county press in 1929 dated the first poisoning to 1911 and connected it with the midwife's poison; Ládonyi found that the midwife's name first appears in the files in connection with 1918.
The number of dead. Counts range from Bodó's 45 to 50 confirmed killings, through 78 in Nagyrév (Ládonyi) and 101 named in gendarmerie reports, to 162 and more than 150 in other studies, and around 300 in the press of 1929.
The trials. The court-based studies give 28 defendants, 16 convictions, six death sentences at various stages and three executions; Vice gives 34 tried and seven death sentences.
How the inquiry began. One account puts three anonymous letters to the Szolnok prosecutor in July 1929; the local newspapers wrote about the poisonings from June 9, 1929; and village memory ties it to a quarrel over an unpaid debt to the midwife.
The English name "Júlia". It does not appear in the Hungarian historical studies, which use Fazekas Gyuláné and Oláh Zsuzsanna.
1862 (or 1861): Oláh Zsuzsanna is born, probably in Nagyrév.
November 22, 1884: She marries Fazekas Gyula, a day laborer, and becomes Fazekas Gyuláné.
1893: Records first name her as a midwife in Nagyrév.
1911: The first case later traced by the county press, the death of Takács Lajos.
1918: The midwife's name first appears in the court files.
1920 to 1921: A prosecution of her for abortion ends in acquittal.
1921: She is suspended as midwife.
1923: An anonymous letter about a death leads to an inquiry that ends when doctors find the death natural.
1925: Her daughter is officially appointed midwife; an elderly widow of Nagyrév is found dead and arsenic is later found in her remains.
October 1928: Her husband dies; the death register gives heart failure.
June 9, 1929: The Kunszentmárton és Vidéke writes about the poisonings.
June 16, 1929: The Szolnok és Vidéke reports that an investigation has begun.
Summer 1929: She is arrested, then released.
July 1929: Anonymous letters accusing three Nagyrév women reach the Szolnok prosecutor; graves are opened in Nagyrév and Tiszakürt.
July 19, 1929: She takes her own life as gendarmes come to take her in, according to the death register.
August 25, 1929: Klebelsberg Kunó proposes attaching the Tiszazug to Csongrád county.
September 8, 1929: József Attila publishes the poem "Tiszazug".
December 13, 1929: Hearings begin at the court in Szolnok.
February 1930: Móricz's "Tiszazugi méregkeverők" appears in Nyugat.
1929 to 1931: Twelve arsenic cases against 28 defendants are tried; 16 are convicted. The Kúria upholds three death sentences, which are carried out, and commutes two to life imprisonment.
1934: All the poisoning cases have become final, according to Bezsenyi.
2005: Astrid Bussink's documentary "The Angelmakers".
2007: Ládonyi Emese publishes her study of the midwife in Korall.