Northern Transylvania

• 1. Introduction

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  Northern Transylvania was born and erased on paper in a single afternoon. On the 30th of August 1940, Germany and Italy handed down the Second Vienna Award, redrawing the map of southeastern Europe and transferring a 43,104-square-kilometer slice of Romania to Hungary. No battle had been fought for this ground. The two countries had argued and failed to settle the question themselves; the Axis powers simply imposed the answer.

  The region the award carved out was not ethnically tidy. Historian Keith Hitchins noted that somewhere between 1,150,000 and 1,300,000 Romanians remained north of the new frontier, making up between 48 and over 50 percent of the transferred population. Around 500,000 Hungarians, by contrast, stayed south of it inside Romania. The agreement produced exactly the entanglement it claimed to resolve.

  For the next four years, Northern Transylvania sat at the intersection of occupation, expulsion, massacre, and genocide. It would take a coup, a Soviet advance, and an international peace conference before the question of sovereignty was finally closed. What happened in those four years, and what the territory's complicated past made possible, is the story this documentary follows.

• 2. Centuries of Contested Ground

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  Long before any modern state claimed Transylvania, the region was already being passed between powers. The Kingdom of Dacia held it from around 82 BC until 106 AD, when Roman legions conquered the territory. Rome withdrew in 271 AD, and for the next several centuries the land was crossed by Carpi, Visigoths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, and Slavs in succession. By the 9th century, parts of the region had come under the First Bulgarian Empire.

  The Magyars swept into the Carpathian Basin at the close of that same century, and for nearly six hundred years Transylvania functioned as a voivodeship inside the Kingdom of Hungary. The Ottoman defeat of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 fractured that arrangement. Two rival kings claimed the Hungarian throne, and out of that contest the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom emerged, the direct predecessor of the Principality of Transylvania.

  The Principality was formally established by the Treaty of Speyer in 1570. It occupied a peculiar constitutional position: a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, yet still understood in Hungarian public law as part of the Kingdom of Hungary, with its ruler holding the symbolic title of Prince and serving as a marker of Hungarian statehood's survival. In 1690, the region shifted again into the Habsburg monarchy as part of the Lands of the Hungarian Crown. After 1848, and then from 1867 to 1918, it was folded back into Hungary outright.

  The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I reopened every old wound. On the 1st of December 1918, the Romanian National Assembly voted to unite with Romania; on the 22nd of December, the Hungarian General Assembly reaffirmed loyalty to Hungary. Armed conflict followed. By 1919, the Hungarian-Romanian War had placed most of eastern Hungary, including Transylvania, under Romanian control. The Treaty of Trianon on the 4th of June 1920 formalized that outcome, assigning Transylvania to Romania and stripping Hungary of 71 percent of its historical territory.

• 3. The Award and Its Arithmetic

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  Hungary's path back to Transylvania ran through the volatile politics of the late 1930s. Having recovered part of southern Czechoslovakia via the First Vienna Award in 1938 and regained Carpathian Ruthenia in 1939, the Hungarian government set its sights on Transylvania as its primary remaining goal. When Romania was forced in June 1940 to accept Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hungary moved quickly, mobilizing forces near the Romanian border.

  The two sides met in Turnu Severin on the 16th of August to negotiate directly. The talks collapsed: Hungary demanded 60,000 square kilometers and Romania offered only a population exchange. To prevent a war in their strategic rear, Germany and Italy imposed arbitration. The resulting award, signed on the 30th of August 1940, gave Hungary 43,104 square kilometers in a claw-shaped corridor through northwestern Romania. The shape was deliberate: it was designed to loop around the Szekely Land in eastern Transylvania, where Hungarians were an overwhelming majority far from the Hungarian border, pulling that pocket into the new arrangement by connecting it through mixed-population territory.

  The demographic reality the award created was measured twice. The 1930 Romanian census had recorded a total regional population of 2,393,300, with Romanians at about 49 percent and Hungarians at about 38 percent by nationality. The 1941 Hungarian census, conducted after the transfer, registered 2,578,100 people and showed Hungarians at roughly 54 percent and Romanians at about 40 percent by nationality. The gap between the two sets of figures reflected migration, the assimilation of Jews into Hungarian counts, and the departure of tens of thousands of Romanians. By January 1941, Hungary had received 100,000 Hungarian refugees from South Transylvania, and 109,532 Romanian refugees had left Northern Transylvania for the south.

• 4. Occupation, Expulsion, and Massacre

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  On the 5th of September 1940, five days after the award was signed, the first Hungarian military unit crossed the border at Sighetul Marmației. Two armies entered the territory: the first, with 208,000 soldiers, moved through northeastern Transylvania, while the second, with 102,000 soldiers, operated in the Oradea-Cluj area. The advance unfolded in nine stages across distances of 40 to 80 kilometers each. By the 13th of September, the last localities, Sfântu Gheorghe and Târgu Secuiesc, had been taken. Much of the Hungarian population greeted the army with enthusiasm, a reception documented in films made that year showing military parades and Regent Horthy riding through the main cities on a gray horse.

  But ethnic violence began almost immediately. Within the first two weeks, approximately 1,000 Romanians were killed. The massacres at Treznea and Ip became the most documented instances of these early killings. A Romanian statistical report covering the period from the 30th of August 1940 to the 1st of November 1941 recorded 919 murders, 1,126 maimings, 4,126 beatings, and 15,893 arrests. Romanian schools suffered a specific institutional assault: of the 1,666 Romanian-language elementary schools operating on the 30th of August 1940, 792 had been closed by the start of the 1941-1942 school year. By 1940-1941, only one Romanian-language high school remained in the territory, in the town of Nașsăud.

  Expulsions continued alongside the killings. A commander's report from the internment camp at Püspökladány noted that 1,315 Romanians had been interned there in September 1940 alone, exceeding the camp's maximum capacity. Two additional camps were quickly opened, at Szamosfalva and Szászfenes near Kolozsvár. By a statistical count covering 1940 to 1943, a total of 218,919 people had been expelled or displaced.

  Amid the violence there were also acts of protection. József Gáll saved several Romanians during the Treznea Massacre. Survivor Gavril Butcovan testified from Ip that local Hungarians had risked their lives defending Romanian families, and he believed more would have come forward had the killings occurred during daylight. Sarolta Juhász, a maid from Omboztelke, was killed alongside the family of the Romanian priest Bujor while attempting to shield them.

• 5. The Deportation of the Jews

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  German forces occupied Hungary on the 19th of March 1944, and Northern Transylvania came under German military occupation alongside it. What followed for the region's Jewish population was the most systematic destruction of the entire occupation period.

  A high-level meeting on the 26th of April in Szatmárnémeti, which is now Satu Mare, involving Hungarian official László Endre, confirmed the decision to deport the Jews of Northern Transylvania. On the 3rd of May, authorities in Dés, now Dej, began ghettoizing Jews in the Bungăr forest. That ghetto held 3,700 Jews from Dej itself and 4,100 from surrounding localities. The people confined there were mistreated, tortured, and starved. Deportations to the Nazi death camps were conducted in three freight-wagon transports: 3,150 Jews on the 28th of May, 3,360 on the 6th of June, and 1,364 on the 8th of June.

  The Kolozsvár Ghetto, in what is now Cluj-Napoca, was established on the same day, the 3rd of May. It held approximately 18,000 Jews under the command of local police chief László Urbán. Six transports carried its residents to Auschwitz; the first left on the 25th of May and the last on the 9th of June. The Oradea ghetto was the largest in the region, holding 35,000 Jews. Other ghettos operated in Baia Mare, Bistrița, Cehei, Reghin, Satu Mare, and Sfântu Gheorghe.

  The total scale, excluding the Szekely area, was measured precisely after the war: 127,377 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Of those, 19,764 returned. The remaining 107,613 did not. Most of those deported from the Dej ghetto were exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with just over 800 surviving. About 150,000 Jews in Northern Transylvania in total were caught up in this process, their deportation facilitated by local military and civilian cooperation.

• 6. Liberation and the Return to Romania

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  King Michael's Coup of the 23rd of August 1944 pulled Romania out of the Axis and into the Allied camp. Romanian forces joined the Soviet advance, and the combined armies moved to retake Northern Transylvania. The Allied Commission moved swiftly on paper: the Armistice Agreement with Romania, signed on the 12th of September 1944, voided the Second Vienna Award through Article 19, declaring the decision null and stipulating that Transylvania, or the greater part of it, should be returned to Romania, subject to confirmation at the peace settlement.

  On the ground, the final battle for the territory was fought at Carei on the 25th of October 1944. Units of the Romanian 4th Army, commanded by General Gheorghe Avramescu, defeated the last Hungarian and German troops in the area and secured the last piece of the ceded territory. The war in Northern Transylvania was over.

  But the transfer of administration was not immediate. Romanian paramilitary activity prompted the Soviets to expel the Romanian administration from the territory in November 1944. It was not until the 10th of March 1945 that Romanian administration was permitted to return. On the 20th of January 1945, Hungary's Provisional National Government formally accepted the obligation to withdraw all troops and officials, retreat to pre-war borders, and repeal all legislation connected to the annexation.

  The 1947 Paris Peace Treaty closed the matter by reaffirming the borders originally drawn by the Treaty of Trianon twenty-seven years earlier, confirming Northern Transylvania as Romanian territory. As of the following year, the region that had shifted hands under Axis arbitration rejoined the country it had briefly left, carrying with it the disrupted lives, destroyed communities, and altered demographics that four years of occupation had produced. The Romanian census of 1930 and the Hungarian census of 1941 remain the two statistical records that bracket, in bare numbers, what those years had unmade.