Great, suffering Transylvania, what is thy reward for this?
There they sat, Transylvanian men and women, the descendants of ancient princes, sufferers with shaded eyes. And as I looked at them there appeared behind their handsome faces the dreamlike outlines of a bluish-green landscape. As if seen in the crystal of an antique emerald ring, distant, dreamy trees appeared: two pointed poplars reached towards the sky: down below, among the meadows, a willow-bordered brook flowed softly: wagons rumbled on the winding road: a horseman came slowly, with a sack across the saddle in front of him. Beyond, the meadow rose to a velvety hillock, where an ancient spire, a little village, a tiny Székler village, nestled....
A wanderer told me the tale this summer, when I was in Transylvania. It happened during the war, in 1916. It was when the alarm was raised for the first time, and one day the cry passed through undefended Transylvania, “The Roumanians are coming!” In mad haste it spread through the counties, rushed along the electric wires, rang in the bells: “Save yourselves!” One village carried the next with it, Transylvania was fleeing.
In the village of Gelencze, on the bank of the rippling brook, at the foot of the hillock, there was silence. It was just like any other day; the people were working in the fields. Meanwhile the Roumanians crept cautiously through the undefended Transylvanian passes. One morning early, soon after the break of day, like some awful sudden death, they fell upon the people of Gelencze, there in their fields in the midst of their peaceful work. The people were helpless. Only one old Székler raised his spade, and fell with a shout among the rifles. They knocked him down, but he did not die; so they nailed him to a plank and dragged him into the forest that he might die there, alone. He was heard till nightfall, struggling and cursing the Roumanians.
That is how Gelencze was informed of the invasion of Transylvania. The alarm, the cry of warning, had passed it by, had missed it on the way. The telegraph wires carried the news, but they passed over its head, and not a word, not a sound came to bring warning. The Government, the County, the District, forgot—Hungary forgot the little village.
A wanderer told me all this, there, just outside the village of Gelencze, when it was still ours. And as I listened to the sad story it became bigger and deeper, so deep that the whole of Transylvania had room in it.... The hillock became the mass of Transylvania’s mountains, the brook became all Transylvania’s rivers, and the fate of the village was Transylvania’s fate.
“Do you remember how I promised you that summer, down there, that I would write a book of Transylvania, that I would trumpet the rights of your land, your race? I was to proclaim the wrongs you have suffered and call to account those who directed Hungary’s fate and for ever forgot the Hungarian folk in Transylvania. How they delivered you to the tender mercies of your foes, and armed neither your soul nor your arm for resistance.... A forgotten village! Do you remember? I said that that should be the title of my book. You were nothing but a forgotten village to those who wielded power in Hungary. The sufferings of Transylvania never caused them a moment’s inconvenience.... And the present government surpasses them all. As if it had decided on your destruction it now sends out an old accomplice of the Roumanian Irredenta to speak in the defence of the victim whom he himself has condemned to death. Oscar Jászi deals to-day in Arad with Transylvania’s fate.”
“A TINY SZEKLER VILLAGE.”
Photo. Erdelyi, Budapest.