When journalist Hope Reese visited Budapest in 2018, she was looking for a story. As a solo traveller, she found an English language open mic event in the Hungarian capital and hung back to chat to people there afterwards.
“I ended up in a really interesting conversation with a man whose Hungarian grandmother, had poisoned her husband - his grandfather, trying to kill him, but was unsuccessful. She ended up in prison’.
This story, although shocking, was not unusual. “Hungarian women have been poisoning their husbands for centuries,” the man told her.
This conversation put Reese on to the story of the village of Nagyrév, Hungary, where midwife Zsuzsanna Fazekas - Aunty Zsuszi, helped poor women give birth and assisted them with abortions. In addition, she helped them kill their abusive spouses by giving them a colourless odourless poison to slip into their husband’s brandy or porridge.
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When the journalist ran into someone whose grandmother still lived in the area and offered to drive her to the village she knew she had to keep digging.
“It just felt like a sign. OK, this is a story I really need to follow,” the author said.
In this episode of the Women’s Podcast, Reese details the extensive research behind her new book The Women Are Not Fine: The Dark History of a Poisonous Sisterhood, a story of how a quiet village became the epicentre of one of the deadliest poisoning epidemics of the 20th century.
The American author says that although the motives for these murders varied from case to case, “in the majority of the cases that I researched, there was domestic abuse at home”.
In the aftermath of World War I, during which many men had witnessed violence and had also been injured, spousal abuse “was kind of written into the code of what was acceptable to a certain point”.
Reese explains how many of the women convicted of the poisonings ended up imprisoned or hanged, after long trials that the author says were treated as a “spectacle and entertainment”.
You can listen back to this podcast in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
