The Women Are Not Fine

Midwife Zsuzsanna Fazekas first arrived at the village of Nagyre’v, Hungary in 1911 to assist the impoverished women with abortions. She offered them a solution: arsenic, made of kitchen larder flypaper boiled with vinegar. But when they told her of the violence they were suffering at the hands of their husbands, she concluded, ‘Why put up with them?’. Nearly twenty years later, it had spiralled into an epidemic and the greatest mass poisoning event of the 20th century. But it wasn’t murder of their unborn children. It was the murder of their husbands. Here, we follow these women to the noose.