Penloom History · The stories they left out
Hungary, 1911–1929
An eighteen-year poisoning economy in interwar Hungary — and the famous victim count that the evidence does not support.
In the Tiszazug, a poor bend of the Tisza river, a midwife named Zsuzsanna Fazekas arrived around 1911 and began boiling arsenic out of flypaper and selling it. For roughly eighteen years, women in Nagyrév and the villages around it used it on husbands, fathers-in-law, parents, and in some cases children.
It worked because Fazekas was the only medical authority for miles: the deaths went down as cholera, and nobody audited her. It ended in 1929 with an anonymous letter to a regional newspaper. Investigators exhumed the cemetery; dozens of bodies carried arsenic. Thirty-four women and one man were arrested. Fazekas poisoned herself first.
Debunked — you will read that there were three hundred victims. That figure comes from the sensational press of 1929, not from evidence. Béla Bodó, who worked through the court files, puts the credible count at around forty-five to fifty. That is still an eighteen-year poisoning economy inside interwar Europe. It does not need inflating.
Part of this story is labelled DEBUNKED above, in the paragraph it belongs to. We label rather than cut: a claim the record does not carry is still part of how the story was told, and you are entitled to know which part is which.
Penloom History — dark history you can trust. Every claim traced to a named archive, monograph, report or paper, and everything the record does not carry labelled where it sits. How we check a history fact before we repeat it →