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T i s z a - E s z l á r 1 8 8 2
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(p.135)
In the year 1882 there occurred in the little secluded Hungarian village of
Tisza-Eszlár a ritual crime which so closely corresponded to the one committed in
Damascus in 1840, that it was as if a witness to that crime had been present who
was able to observe the horrifying event of that ritual-slaughter of a human being
from beginning to end and gave an account of it again to the protocol. At the time,
Tisza-Eszlár was described as the great turning point in the Jewish Question of Hungary and
of Europe in general -- that it did not become so is attributable to a not insignificant
degree to the methods of the AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle), which had
relatively simple work in the already vastly Judaized Hungary.
In the second half of the past [19th] century, Hungary was glutted with a flood of the
worst type of Jewish sub-humanity, the fanatically Orthodox Chassidim
(2), who were immigrating from the "European mass-warehouse
of Jewry(1)," Galicia. Political upheaval made an
inconspicuous penetration possible for this riff-raff; how these circumstances affected
that village on the Theiß, is still to be dealt with.
On 8 April 1875, the Representative Victor Istóczy put an Interpellation to
the Ministry [i.e., an objection on question of policy, etc.] in the Hungarian House of
Representatives, the gist of which was that in all of Europe no State existed in which the
Jewish element possessed a greater influence and a greater power than in Hungary.
Istóczy asked the following question: "Has the government the intention of putting a dam
in the path of the flood of Jews immigrating to Hungary? Would it put obstacles in
the path of a peaceful movement on the part of the native population for self-defense?
Is the government even thinking of taking a position on the Jewish Question
(136) at all, or of persisting in its politics of complete
neutrality and indifference?"
The Hungarian Minister-President Baron Bela Wenkheim thereupon replied: "The
government is no opponent of any sort of movement which pursues a constructive trend; but
it would be compelled to adopt a hostile position toward any movement which aims at
disturbing the peaceful understanding between the churches and [religious] denominations
existing in the nation or the citizens who belong to them and the mutual respect for civil
rights. Since the law of 1867 declares the equality of rights of the
Israelites with all other citizens of the nation, the government recognizes no such
thing as a Jewish Question and is unable to recognize such a thing, and thus takes
no position toward it whatsoever. . ."(3)
President Koloman v. Tisza, his successor who came into his own in this year,
adopted the way of thinking of his predecessor, to the complete satisfaction of World
Jewry.
First of all, the facts should be established that an entire chain of similarly
featured crimes preceded the blood-sacrifice of the year 1882 in that region --
crimes which came off as secretly and unpunished as the general and nearly hopeless
Judafication of Hungary which was beginning already in this period. According to the
report of Ónody, the following blood-murders preceded the ritual-murder of
Tisza-Eszlár:
1. On the eve of the Jewish Feast of Atonement (15 September) of the year 1875,
there were numerous, mostly foreign Jews assembled on the property of their racial comrade
Horowitz at Zboró (in the Sároser Comitat), and the ritual slaughterer was already called
in. They fell upon the unsuspecting sixteen-year-old serving maid Hanna Zamba, threw her
to the ground, undressed her and began, under the murmuring of Hebrew "prayers," the rite
of butchering. (137) At this moment, a carter stopped before
the house of the Jew and demanded admittance in order to conclude a delayed transaction. The
Jews scattered. The girl, nearly frightened to death, escaped by wading through a highly
swollen stream and thus shook off her pursuers. At her cries for help two women rushed to
her side, who later affirmed under oath the statements of the girl. As a result of the fear
of death she had endured, the girl became critically ill and in April 1876 this
victim of an attempted ritual-crime succumbed to her suffering. On her deathbed the girl
took an oath once more to the statement she had given earlier, before her father, the
mother-in-law, the Catholic sacristan and several inhabitants of the place, that on
the eve of the Jewish Festival of Atonement in the year 1875 in the house Number 165C at
Zboró, the ritual-slaughterer of the Jewish religious congregation there wanted to slaughter
her in the presence of several Jews.
The complaint was presented at the judicial bureau. The sitting judge Winkler, who
had full responsibility but who was friendly to the Jews and had already been either bribed
or intimidated, tried at first to appease the complainants with fine words and to keep them
from any further steps to go forward with the proceedings; since this attempt failed, he
moved on to threats that he would have the "slanderers" locked up because they weren't able
to prove their accusations. In this simple manner, the investigation petered out. As the
Hungarian parliamentary representative v. Ónody determined, this famous lord did not think
it at all necessary to give the documents to the district court at Szwidnik, as it should
have been his duty to do.
2. Two years later, in 1877, in the village of Szalacs in the
immediate vicinity of the Pér region, where in 1791 a ritual-crime likewise occurred
(4), there was a double ritual-murder of two children. In the
registry of deaths of the Szalacs Roman Catholic church, one reads under the date of 13
June 1877, on page 70 of Volume II: "Emerich, son of the late Peter Szabó and his
spouse Rosalie Keleman, nine years old, was murdered and on 15 June 1877 laid to
eternal rest by the priest Franz Kubowitz. (138) Therese,
child of the same parents, six years old, was murdered and and buried by the same
pastor. . ."
Behind these matter-of-fact words no one expects a ritual-crime, yet that is the
case: The foster-parents had to work at their fields on 13 June and left both children with
their Jewish brother-in-law Josef Klee until their return. The latter presented the
children with a few Kreuzer with the instructions to buy something sweet for themselves at
the small store of the shopkeeper Jew Ehrenfeld. Toward evening the siblings set out
for the Jew's, and from thence onward, despite desperate searches, they remained
missing.
When the sexton of the place walked to church the next morning, he noticed at the house of
the Jew Alexander Ehrenfeld conspicuous traces of blood in the sand, which extended along
the wall of the yard to a wagon shed perhaps 50 steps distant. Furthermore, the coachman
of Ehrenfeld stated that on the evening before (13 June) he had seen the two children playing
together as they sat in the archway of the door of his master; at the same time he related
that on the same evening and all through the night approximately forty strange Jews
were making quite a spectacle of themselves and unceasingly went in and out. After three days
a penetrating odor was spreading from the coach-house. The bodies of both missing children
were discovered jammed into a large equipment case, no longer in use, for a
fire-engine. The Jews managed, through some sort of subversion, that the autopsy
was performed not by the physician of the region, von Székely-Hid, but by a Jewish
doctor. The children's bodies had gaping stab wounds on the neck and all blood had been
withdrawn from the bodies. When the foster-mother, Anna Szabó, was led to the
bodies, she was seized by convulsions and later died insane. The brother-in-law Josef
Klee said to his wife on the night after the bestial crime: "I pity the poor children;
the girl did die right away, but the boy had a long death-struggle." These words were heard
by the stable hand sitting on a bench under the opened window of the Klee residence. Josef
Klee was arrested but soon set free again without the judicial authorities making further
inquiries. (139)The Protocol composed by the Jewish
doctor was kept secret; yet the judge said quite openly to anyone who wished to hear it,
that the necks of both children had been cut through leaving gaping wounds and all blood
had been withdrawn from the bodies.
3. Not fewer than three similar cases occurred with the same role of the Jewish
doctor in 1879 at Tállya in the Zempliner Comitat, in 1880 at Komorn,
and in 1881 at Kaschau, where the daughter of the master binder Josef Kocsis
suddenly disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was found after two weeks
ritually butchered in a well and without any volume of blood. Géza v. Ónody
determined that: "Striking and at the same time characteristic is the fact that all the
children who were lost had belonged to the lower classes of the people, were the
children of poor people from whom the Jews could presume that their disappearance would
excite no particular attention. In no single case did the children of well-off
families disappear, from whom it was to be expected that they -- in case a child of theirs
became missing -- would institute the most zealous official investigations."
Thus in the years 1878, 1879, 1880, and 1881, in the western
Hungarian city Steinamanger, four girls disappeared, one after the other in regular
fashion before the Jewish feast days or before the Passover festival, namely,
two girls, in service with the Jews to do cleaning, whose parents lived in the country,
the daughter of a poor shoemaker and the small eight-year-old daughter of a coachman working
as servant to Jews, all of whom no trace was ever found. In all four cases the judicial
investigation was immediately initiated, well-founded suspicion directed against the
Jews, but the investigations were just as quickly dropped again as "groundless"!
4. In the year 1879 the following case was reported from Piros in the
Bátsch-Bodrogher Comitat: The Jewish owner of a large estate, Herman Großmann
attempted (as could be proved) for months to lure the fifteen-year-old and strikingly
pretty and robust daughter of the farmhand Peter Sipos into his employ with every
kind of suspicious promises, but the parents flatly refused. Since
(140) Großmann, with Jewish obtrusiveness brought up his request over and over
again, and the parents of the girl feared the vengeance of the Jew, they finally consented
under the condition that their daughter Lidi at first should join the Jewish household as a
maid only for one month. That was on 11 October 1879. Four days later, the parents
learned by chance that their daughter had disappeared. When cornered, the Jew Großmann
suddenly declared that the body of the girl was "possibly" to be looked for in a
branch of the Franzen-Canal, the Türr-Canal; on 21 October, thus a week after the
disappearance, the girl was actually pulled from the designated section of the canal by
means of a long iron rake. The body was clothed only in a short slip. The findings of the
autopsy yielded the information that the body could not possibly have lain in the water for
six days and death by drowning was excluded. Those present came to the conclusion that
Lidi Sipos had died an unnatural death. Thereupon the conducting of the investigation was
proposed for district judge Peák at Neusalz, which the latter flatly declined! Further,
the issuing of a copy of the physician's autopsy results to the parents was denied
.
The coachman of the Jew stated before witnesses that his master had ordered him, on the day
in question (15 October), to Neusalz on a flimsy pretext. When he was about to harness the
horse in the stall the night after his return, he heard suspicious noises and rumbling in
the cellar underneath the stable building. When he communicated his perceptions to Großman
that same night, the latter was startled and instructed him to go to his sleeping place
immediately. A few days later the coachman was discharged from service. The country
doctors who had performed the post mortem examination, stated the following
concerning the death of the girl: Above the navel was a taler-sized circular wound,
under the nose a wound which went very deep was discernable; the victim had probably been
hung up on a hook which had been driven into the flesh at the latter place [i.e., the nose]
and the blood had been siphoned off from the strange wound at the navel
(141) No sort of slaughtering cut could be discovered -- that
this was again a ritual-crime nevertheless, was confirmed by the case of a Budapest girl,
from whom blood had been tapped off, still before the Tisza-Eszlár case had become known;
the only difference was that this victim got away with her life. The girl, employed as a
servant by a Jew in the Budapest Jewish Quarter, Theresienstadt, reported that directly
before the Purim festival (14 February) she had been drugged unconscious
(5), so that she first reawakened after an entire day. After she came to, she felt so
"smashed" that she could barely stand up, and felt strange pains in her limbs. When she
inspected her body, she found on her right upper arm, on her left thigh, and above her
navel similar round, blood-red spots, in the middle of each of which was a small
opening. She assumed that the Jews had sucked out a large quantity of blood during her
death-like sleep and she left their service because of this.
The hair of the corpse of Lidi was disheveled and tangled and so mixed with straw from
bedding, that the two female attendants [preparing the body for burial] had difficulty
arranging her hair in order. All of this led to the conclusion of a desperate struggle of
the girl, attacked in her bed by a band of Jewish murderers. The district judge Peák
prevented a judicial investigation.
The report issued by the authorities, concerning the disappearance and the discovery of the
body of Lidi Sipos reads: "The undersigned authorities hereby officially attest: that the
fifteen-year-old daughter, Lidi, of the local resident Peter Sipos, after she had entered
on 11 October 1879 the service of Jew Hermann Großmann, a resident here, disappeared
on 15 October of the same year and that the body of the girl was found, after a long search,
on 21 October on the ground of the so-called Türr-Canal. -- Piros, 31 May 1882.
Johann Fehér m.p. Judge, Julius Zsigmond m.p. Notary, Georg Mayer m.p. Sworn Witness."
5. Directly before the Jewish Easter of the year 1882,
(142) the Jew Leopold Grünwald, who lived in the Kovácsi Comitat in Barser,
sent the seventeen-year-old Barbara Kleeman, a Zipser Saxon girl who was in service
to him, late in the evening to the neighboring village of Peszér, on the pretext that she
might fetch back home a bag of money he had left there in the inn. In the taproom of this
remotely situated house, there were only two guests present: the brother of Grünwald and
the local ritual slaughterer. The girl, who sensed a trap, made to turn around to leave,
but her master, who had followed right behind her, blocked her exit. The three Jews threw
the girl to the floor, undressed her and bound her. Yet before they could stick a gag in
her mouth, the girl gave out a piercing shout for help. Her elder sister, who was in
service at this inn, pushed the door in and tried to set the unfortunate girl free. During
the scuffle, the victim dragged herself out into the street, where she was found by the
inhabitants running up; the rescuers immediately fell upon the Jews, who were beaten
within an inch of their lives.
The district court at Aranyos-Maróth acquitted the gang, since the accused Jews had all
stated under oath that they had only wanted to subject the girl Barbara to a
body-search, since she had pilfered the money bag from her master!
Four days after this failed attempted murder, the ritual-murder sacrifice in Tisza-Eszlár
occurred.
In Tisza-Eszlár was the wealthy Hungarian Reichstag representative, Géza von Ónody; it is
to him we owe the precise notes which he was able to make right on the spot. But the work of
Ónody is especially valuable for still another reason: in his capacity as representative it
was possible for him to be able to inspect the documents of the preliminary examination.
He did, indeed, make generous use of it, so that he was able to utilize the protocols in
their complete text, even with indication of the reference numbers. His writing, which
brought to light irrefutable material, should have called the attention of the entire
civilized world to the monstrous Jewish danger. It appeared in the Hungarian language in
December 1882 under the title: (143)Tisza-Eszlár in
the Past and Present -- and in the shortest time was bought up by Jews and disappeared.
The same fate befell the German translation, which was taken in hand by his personal friend
and liaison officer to German comrades-in-arms, the knight Georg von Marcziányi and
already in 1883 appeared in Budapest. In fact, only a few copies remain of even
this translation, which possess the cultural-historical value of rarities. Incidentally,
Georg von Marcziányi himself published in the summer of 1883, during the judicial
preliminary examination, a treatise about this blood-murder: Esther Solymosi. This
publication had the task of uncovering the Jewish machinations and intrigues, in order to
bring about orderly judicial proceedings; this broadside has also been translated into
German (M. Schulze, Berlin, 1882). The Jews were not able to do anything against the
publications of both the Hungarians -- thus the Jewish press worked all the more intensively
to weaken their effect.
Exactly 50 years later, in 1932, the then judge of the investigation, Dr. Josef
Bary, who later became President of the Hungarian Supreme Court, published in Budapest
his recollections of this trial in a volume of 612 pages. Unfortunately his Tisza-Eszlár
Criminal Trial could not be included in the composition of this chapter, since the notes
of Bary are only available in Hungarian ("a tiszaeszlári bünper" -- Budapest, 1933).
A German translation would be very desirable, since without a doubt there would be very
informative material there!
The Jewish smoke-screen artist, Paul Nathan(6) -- we have
(144) have already introduced him in the foreword and will still
have to deal with him in detail -- disposed of this "case" too -- to be on the safe side,
though, some ten years afterward. He counted on the memory of non-Jewish humanity, insofar as
it pertained to its own most innate interests, being a bad one, for the accounts of Ónody
and Marcziányi were pushed aside -- and the articles of a veritable forest of Jewish
newspapers overgrew and smothered every national impulse opposed to the Jews.
In 1892 there appeared in Berlin Der Prozeß von Tisza-Eszlár [The Trial of
Tisza-Eszlár] of this Paul Nathan. This concoction, numbering 400-pages, is a
sophisticated Talmudic master-performance; one cannot suppress a smile now and then, at
how this young Talmudist, who moreover had been distinguished with the highest dignity by
a German university (Heidelberg), begins to additionally adulterate the impact of the
documentary and factual material and at the end has gone so far with this that the honest
reader, who has no notion of these disgraceful intentions and, after all, is not even
able to have any such notion, can take note of one more example of how the poor and
innocent "fellow-citizens of the Mosaic persuasion," of whose restless urge toward activity
he could convince himself daily, had to suffer under the suspicions of "anti-Semitic
hotspurs." Thus does Paul Nathan bluster, also -- one sees him, speaking almost with his
hands: "But an entire book would have to be written, in order to demonstrate in all its
details the repulsive corruption, the limitless dishonesty, the blind hatred, the
tower-high frivolity, which have been employed without hesitation by the anti-Semites, in
order not to have to give up their accusations of ritual-murder."
But we will keep to the judicially and historically certified facts of the case, even if we
run the danger, in so doing, of being by no means convinced of Jewish innocence, because
our (145) "mental disposition prevents this" (Nathan in his
"Preface," p. vi!).
Tisza-Eszlár, a modest little village of the Szabolcser Comitat situated on the upper
Theiß, had hardly a dozen Jews to show before the year 1848, but a few decades later
there were already 200, most of them elements fleeing from military service and smuggled
across the Russian border with the aid of the Jewish secret organizations (Kahal) --
elements which now "work with tireless industry and never-slackening perseverance at the
labor of exploitation and for the material as well as moral ruination of their
non-Jewish fellow-citizens" (Géza v. Ónody).
As already mentioned, the region of Hungary lying between the Danube and the Theiß and
including the nation's capital (7), had been flooded with the
most disgusting sort of kaftan-draped Galician Jews. J.G. Bogrow, himself a Jew,
describes in his Memoiren eines Juden [Memoirs of a Jew]
(8), which appeared in 1880 in St. Petersburg, his own view of this type as follows
(p. 313): "In the gloomy, filthy antechamber. . .stood a ragged Jew of low stature with a
puffy, wrinkled face, with a red beard mixed with gray, and long, glued-together red
peyes (earlocks). The folds of his over-sized kaftan, with holes and tears of every
size and shape, were bordered with a broad crust of dried excrement from the streets,
which formed an entirely unique fringe and tassel on the torn edges [of his garment]. At
first glance one would take this man for a beggar of the basest type" -- but he was a
person distinguished with positions of confidence!
(146)Tisza-Lök, which is located in the direct vicinity of
Tisza-Eszlár, had developed into a kind of Little Jerusalem, in which the non-Jewish
portion of the populace was menaced -- in the full meaning of the word -- in its physical
as well as mental existence. The Jews of Tisza-Lök had the reputation among their
co-religionists of "holiness" and maintained continuous and very active ties with the Polish-
Galician Chassidim. But the threads of all ritual-crimes in that region stretch
beyond the Carpathians, toward Galicia, and just as the command-posts of the Polna
(1898/99) and Konitz (1900) blood-murders are also certifiably to be sought in that
dark and horrible ghetto of Europe, one can indeed simply speak of an organized Jewish secret
service, which determines the time and location for the ritual slaughter of a human being,
puts together a detachment of Jews, instructs the ritual-slaughterers of various Jewish
communities and arranges for the murder gang to vanish again without a trace. If, due to
unforseen circumstances, this plan does not go off without problems, as, for example, at
Tisza-Eszlár, then the World organization of Jewry, the AIU, whose specialty became the
quashing of trials, steps forward into action all the more successfully. In any event, the
carrying out of the murder and the non-punishment of the murderers seem to be sufficiently
secured.
After the failure at Kovácsi in the Barser Comitat, Tisza-Eszlár had been designated
to furnish the blood-toll.
Esther Solymosi
On 1 April 1882, in the early afternoon, the peasant woman Andreas
Huri was hurrying through the long stretch of the village street and turned in every
direction, as if she were looking for something. She had sent the fourteen-year-old
Esther Solymosi (whose mother, a widow, lived in her immediate neighborhood) to
a shop located at the opposite end of the village, between eleven and twelve o'clock, to
buy paint. The road to the store-keeper Kohlmayer led the girl past an uncultivated, larger
area, the village meadow, on whose western side, near the dam of the
Theiß, rose the synagogue, a spacious building which stood isolated. This Jewish temple
was not located, therefore, (147) within the enclosed
row of village properties, but stood on open country and was thus never closely observable
from the direct neighborhood. This circumstance is important and was one of the determining
factors in the selection of Tisza-Eszlár for the slaughtering-place.
The girl made use of the street for her path home, until the point of the dam turn-off;
from there onward she used a field path, which led hard by the back of the synagogue --
probably so she could reach home faster. She paid for this with her young life.
According to the statement of the Christian shop-keeper Josef Kohlmayer, Esther
very much urged him to hurry while she was making her purchases, "because she had to get
back home quickly, for the house must be given a fresh coat of whitewash before evening."
The girl packed up her paints and immediately set out on the road home. Shortly before the
branch-off, Esther met her seventeen-year-old sister Sofie and happily told her that Frau
Huri, her god-mother, had promised to buy her a new dress and give her five Gulden, so
that she might be able to still buy herself a pair of shoes for the Easter holidays. . .
Then she greeted the local magistrate, Josef Papp, who was standing in front of his mill
and exchanged a few friendly words with him; he was still watching the girl as she made
the turn onto the path.
The synagogue in the village of Tisza-Eszlár
These named here, and a few other witnesses besides, gave their accounts later under
oath.
Esther had disappeared as if gone from the surface of the earth -- and stayed that way. Frau
Huri started to worry, she assumed at first that Esther was still on her way to the store and
then stopped in at her mother's. The old lady Solymosi reported to the court on this point:
"Toward two in the afternoon Frau Huri came and said: 'Has her god-mother had anything
brought from the vault (of the store) by the girl?' The mother was taken aback: 'Is she
gone?' Frau Huri: 'She's gone! I sent her to fetch paint. . ." (protocol statements). With
that, began the tragedy of a mother who was crushed by the horrible end of her daughter.
The Murderers
The mother, sobbing loudly, searched for her daughter. Her sister, Frau
Gabriel Solymosi, helped her; they searched until sunset. . .(148)
In the direct vicinity of the synagogue the wife of the temple servant Scharf
addressed them hypocritically: "What's wrong with you?" and without waiting for an answer
continued: "Has Esther become lost? She isn't lost. Possibly a fever took hold of her and
she's lying about, somewhere." Now Scharf himself put in an appearance and got
involved in the conversation. The mother of Esther made the following declaration about this
on the second day of the hearings: "Scharf, the temple servant, asked me what was
wrong with me; I couldn't speak a word, but my sister, Frau Gabriel Solymosi, told him
that Frau Huri had sent the girl into the village and that no one could find her since then;
to that he replied there was no reason to be so sad, and there was a similar case in Nánás
when he was still a child, and that then, too, the Jews were suspected, even
their ovens were searched. . ." But these Jewish "words of comfort" -- one can still picture
the cunning Jewish faces today -- had the opposite effect: the women became increasingly
alarmed, and a terrible suspicion tormented them. The Jew Nathan also knew quite
well that the Scharf couple had committed a major piece of stupidity with their
thoughtless chattering. That's why, when he comes to this part in his book about
Tisza-Eszlár, he becomes downright sentimental, which has always been an effective means
of fooling one's fellow-man, in this case the non-Jewish reader: "This scene,
which played itself out at twilight so peacefully in front of the house of
the temple servant Scharf, was the was the kernel for the most dreadful conflicts,
conflicts which were supposed to disturb the peace of thousands. Both Solymosi women
went homeward; what was going on in their souls, we know. . ."
Indeed, this Jew, all Jews knew it, only one entity did not know -- the Hungarian state,
which let many precious weeks go by until the judicial investigation, as time unused!
But this intermission was exploited all the more zealously by the Jews, to take defensive
measures -- i.e., to disseminate slanders to the effect that Esther, who (they said) was
a flighty creature(9), just took off on this day. Consciously
or unconsciously, Nathan (149) grasped at this
"valuable" line of thought and wrote further: "Finally, the disappearance of Esther was
not a rare event; it happened frequently, that Hungarian girls secretly went off for
even years. . ."(10)
Later, Jewry became more aggressive; the customary tactic was employed of turning the
accusers into the accused, and efforts were supposed to be made to bring suit against
the widow Solymosi and the spreaders of the news of the murder of Esther, on the grounds
of "offense against honor"! But it remained only a threat; something else happened: to
wit, when strangers unexpectedly came into the village, as for example in one case imperial
officers, to carry out administrative tasks, the Jews immediately took violent fright, put
their heads together, whispered among one another in Hebrew, fearfully looked over the new
arrivals and ran to the community office in order to discover there the reason for the arrival
of the strangers. On their faces fear and panic were clearly evident! (Géza v. Ónody
in his book about Tisza-Eszlár.) Finally, Nathan called the mother of the victim, in public,
"bought" for the purpose of "making ill-feeling against the not insignificant" Jewish portion
of the population: "The woman had been poor, anemic. When a sad fate had overtaken
her daughter and anti-Semitism with happy heart made the mother's cause its own, then the
destiny of its valuable protégée also changed. Charitableness and party interests
brought about collections for the poor widow. . .From somewhere or other, certain
benefits flowed in to the old Solymosi women."
The mother, questioned about this before the court, at first did not understand what was
wanted of her, but then she spurned these infamous slanders with outrage -- Nathan
knows better, however: "These statements (of the mother) do not correspond to the facts.
In truth, the living situation of Frau Solymosi has improved considerably. She no longer
needs to work for her daily support. . .She was well-dressed, far better than a Tisza-Eszlár
peasant woman otherwise usually dresses; in her pot meat is no longer absent and as the
surest symptom of (150) a change in her circumstances, the
envy of the other peasant women of the Theiß village has already begun to be directed
toward her. . .thus one sees how even the reasons of external advantage captivate the
peasant women -- thus does worldly advantage triumph!"
Only a Jew can write like that! A widow, whose fourteen year-old daughter was literally
butchered, experiences "a visible change in her exterior circumstances" -- the death of
of one's own child was therefore turned into a "business," to "external advantages" for
those left behind! That comports fully with the "offer," composed as a business letter,
made to the father of the likewise ritually-slaughtered Ernst Winter of Prechlau-
Konitz(11), who was supposed to be "compensated" for the blood
of his son with 20,000 Marks -- the death of a child as business!
On 3 April, two days after the disappearance of Esther, the mother reported to the community
judge Fárkas at Tisza-Eszlár; she asked that the synagogue be searched. Fárkas declined --
which no longer surprises us -- with the argument that he was not empowered to do anything
like that and referred the mother to the sitting judge Eugen Jármy. The latter again
answered Frau Solymosi, when she repeated her suspicion about the Jews: "Good woman, how
can you think such a thing? That sort of thing can no longer happen in this day and age!"
(12) He finally issued a circular letter in which the following
appears: "On 1 April, between 10 and 11 o'clock, Frau Solymosi's 14 year-old daughter
disappeared, whose further description is given below." That was all at first! The family
of the temple servant Scharf, however, became in the following period the enfant
terrible of the Jewish community. A few days after the disappearance of Esther, the six
year-old son of the temple servant, Samu Scharf, told his playing companions of a special
murder case which he had heard about from his older brother. The eleven year-old
Elisabeth Soós repeated in a protocol this tale as follows (Samu said to the children he was
playing with): "Father called the Christian girl into the temple and had her sit down in an
easy chair; Moritz seized her hand, (151) father seized her
head, the schächter [ritual-slaughterer] cut into her feet and then they carried
her there, where the large tree stands." With that, Samu pointed toward the cemetary!
The mother of little Elisabeth Soós, Frau Andreas Soós, a few days later than her daughter,
heard from Samu himself the following (protocol): "Papa called the Hungarian girl to him, he
tied her up, washed her, and then right away the schächter -- Bácsi -- cut her
neck" and also in this version: "Papa called the Hungarian girl in from the street, mother
washed her feet, and the schächter cut her across the neck. Bácsi also has
slaughtered a hen that way at our place."
That was a few days after Esther Solymosi had disappeared. Later, the Scharf couple
came to hear of the chattering of their offspring. they cautioned him. On 2 May (1882)
Samu called out: "Now I'm saying nothing about what my father did with the girl."
(13)
Concerning this 2nd of May, the 23 year-old Elisabeth Tanyi also spoke in the public hearing
(14): "I was driving the geese home toward evening, when the
little Samu, out of the temple, set himself down in front of us. I said to him: 'Get out
of my way, else you'll catch a smack!' Then Samu said: 'Then I definitely won't tell you
what Father did with the Hungarian girl!' I asked him, what it was, then? He said to me:
'Now I won't tell you at all'" --
On 4 May, therefore over one month after the loss of her child, the mother again spoke
before the community judge of Tisza-Eszlár, Gabriel Fárkas. "On the 4th of May, the
Solymosi woman came again to me and said that she had no peace of mind. . ."
(15) She made reference to the statements of Samu Scharf. Fárkas again declined to
do anything. He was [he said] not responsible. Finally, the sitting judge instructed the
local magistrate to question the witnesses once more. Thus, a full 36 days after the
disappearance of Esther, the first authorized investigation was begun!
The protocols were sent to the state prosecutor's office at Nyiregyháza; In mid-May, this
office made application for introduction of (152)the
investigation; the entire documentary material up to this point was sent to the Court of
Examination. The Notary of the Nyiregyháza Court of Justice, Josef Bary, was
entrusted with the conducting of the criminal investigation, after the examining judge
originally appointed for this task, who found himself in financial embarrassment and had
Jews as his chief creditors, had come under disciplinary investigation and had taken
his own life.
On the 19th of May, Bary arrived at the scene of the crime. Preventive detention was imposed
upon the Scharf family. On the same day, the six year-old son Samu blabbed away
before the examining judge (protocol): "Father called Esther inside, and she came into the
place. Father stuck a white piece of linen in her mouth, then they washed her in the trough
and a large Jew cut her in the neck with a long knife, so that her head fell away. He had
made just one single cut on her. . .they they grabbed Esther and carried her through
the hallway to the temple. They had hold of her by her hands, her feet, and her head, and
they were: Abraham Braun and his son, Samuel Lustig and his son, and Moritz. There
were many there. . . !
On 20 May, Bary took up the first interrogation with the sixteen year-old Moritz,
the brother named by Samu. Moritz Scharf declared by way of an introductory statement, that
on the Sunday evening before the Jewish Easter, on 1 April, an election of the new ritual-
slaughterers had taken place at the house of Jacob Süßmann. He did not want to admit
knowing Esther by name; his performance appeared, in this first interrogation protocol, to
be so artificial and contradictory, that he was held in custody. The examining judge had a
number of Jews arrested besides [Moritz Scharf]. Since the space of the modest community
house did not suffice for a separate accommodation for the arrested persons, the security
commissar Andreas Recsky declared himself prepared to temporarily lodge the youngest,
Mortiz Scharf, in his office space at Nagyfalu. Separated from his co-religionists,
Moritz suddenly broke down in the surroundings which were foreign to him, and stated that
he was ready, still on that very evening, to make a full confession; He gave an account
of the ritual-crime and the murderers in every single detail; on the basis
(153) of his testimony, four Jews could be charged with the murder and five others
with complicity. The confession of Moritz Scharf, which was made on the evening of
the 21st of May before Commissar Recsky and the protocol chief of the examining
judge, Koloman Péczely, reads exactly(16):
"On Saturday toward twelve o'clock in the afternoon, Esther Solymosi, who was on her
way home from the old-village section of Eszlár, came into our house at my father's
invitation. My father called her in with the remark that she should take the candlestick
from the table. When she came into our house with my father, Esther Solymosi had
on a shabby white cloth on her head, a red-colored cloth around her neck, and wore a
kind of white coat and a -- if I remember this correctly -- blue-colored skirt. That the
girl was called Esther, I knew that because my father addressed her by that name. The
mistress of the girl was Frau Andreas Huri, for Mother had asked her with whom she
was living, and she said, mentioning her name, that she was living with Frau Andreas
Huri. Esther's face looked like her sister Sophie. At the behest of my father,
Esther placed the candlestick, just as she had taken it from our table, upon the chest of
drawers. When the girl climbed down from the chair [apparently used to reach the top of the
chest of drawers], a Jewish beggar(17) was sent in from the
temple for the girl. The Jewish beggar caught the girl by the hand and lured her in with
him to the temple. There, in the corridor of the temple, the tall, brown Jewish beggar
took hold of the girl and threw her to the ground. The girl began to moan and scream then,
but the already present ritual-slaughterers from Téglás and Tarczal
quickly pressed the girl back down on the floor and the ritual-slaughterer Salomon
Schwarz, who had arrived from Tisza-Lök, cut the girl's neck through and let the blood
flow into a red earthenware plate; when the plate had become filled with blood, he poured
the blood into a pot.
I wasn't in the temple at this event, but I looked in on it from outside through the keyhole
of the temple doors. My father wasn't there, but was inside our house. When the girl was
(154) led into the temple, they barred the temple door from
within. Aside from those mentioned above, there were present in the temple: Samuel
Lustig, Abraham Braun, Lazar Weißstein, and Abraham Junger. They
had previously undressed the girl down to her slip and then the schächter [ritual-
slaughterer] inflicted the cut; the girl was barefoot. When she was no longer moving, they
bound her neck together with rags and dressed her again. The ritual-slaughterers took hold
of the girl, the Jewish beggar undressed her; when she was dead, the Jewish beggar likewise
dressed her again. After this happened, I went to my father and to my mother into our room
and told them that the girl had been killed; then my mother forbade me from speaking
to anyone at all of this." -- To Recsky's question: "Did your father know that they'd
killed the girl?" he answered: "He knew it, for I told it to him, that they had slain
the girl!" -- "I have made this statement without any coercion." -- Moritz Scharf m.p."
This protocol, which had been concluded toward ten o'clock in the evening, was delivered
to the examining judge Bary still that night, by means of a messenger on horseback;
shortly after midnight Bary entered the rooms of Recsky in Nagyfalu.
Mortiz Scharf was questioned for a second time. Since the Jewish press wants to take note of
contradictions in the protocols and from them construe the statements of Moritz Scharf
as baseless, the second protocol, taken by the examining judge himself in the same night,
also ought to be published in its complete text again(18).
On the 22nd of May, Moritz Scharf, as witness before the examining judge in
Tisza-Eszlár, stated the following in addition: "About 1 o'clock the foreign beggar (Wollner) came
and said to me that I should close the synagogue. When I was about to do this, I saw the
three foreign ritual-slaughterers Lustig, Braun, and Weißstein walking to the house just
then. Then the body was no longer in the entrance hall, also there was no trace of blood
to be seen. I don't know where they concealed the girl. It wasn't in the synagogue,
(155) because they would only have been able to hide it by the
Torah. But when I looked for it in the cabinet in the afternoon, there was nothing
there to see. They would not have been able to bury it in the courtyard, because there I
would have had to see it, so they could only have carried it into the Theiß. During the
afternoon and the evening I saw no wagon near the synagogue, perhaps there was one nearby
after 10 o'clock at night, when I lay down to sleep. Then there were, still in the
synagogue: Lichtman, Rosenberg, Süßmann, Romer, Einhorn, and my father. When they
went away I don't know. I believe that the corpse was carried out, not through the door,
because geese are herded in the vicinity, but through the window of the entrance hall
(19)."
Finally, in the protocol taken on the 23rd of May 1882 before the Nyiregyházar
Court of Justice for authentication of the confession, after his attention had been drawn
by the President of the Court to the consequences of a false statement by a witness,
Scharf declared that he upheld, in their full compass the confessions made on
the night of 21/22 May in Nagyfalu and on the same day (22 May) before the examining judge
Bary in Tisza-Eszlár, that he confirmed them and stood ready to take an oath on
them. His confessions [he said] he had made without any psychological or moral force, and
the fact that he had not so stated the facts on 20 May before the examining judge, or had
denied them, was out of fear of the members [of the Jewish congregation].
If we examine the grave statements of Scharf, whose plainly monstrous significance Bary
immediately had realized -- for not only this blood-murder, but countless others of that
region finally found their solution -- the following aspects, with which the public court
hearings then had to deal, emerge:
1. On the day of the murder of Esther, the schächter-election took place.
2. The girl was lured into the house of the temple servant next to the synagogue, as
she was returning from her shopping at about twelve o'clock in the afternoon.
3. The child was led out of the house by a Jewish beggar into the synagogue situated
in the direct vicinity.(156)
4. Several ritual-slaughterers who were already present there overpowered the
girl.
5. The schächter from Tisza-Eszlár, Salomon Schwarz, slaughtered
Esther.
6. In the synagogue still several other Jews were present.
7. The parents of the witness Scharf were accessories.
8. After the crime, still numerous other Jews appeared toward five o'clock in
the afternoon.
9. The body of the girl was removed without leaving a trace, and probably sunk in the
Theiß.
10. Three foreign Jews were had come to Tisza-Eszlár already on the day before
the crime and had found a hiding place in the house of the temple servant.
So far we are taken by the observations of the young Scharf. We must now determine
what the court did with this.
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