The main purpose of this work is to furnish scholars, diplomats, statesmen, journalists, and other interested persons with factual information concerning the land called TRANSYLVANIA, today a province of the Socialist Republic of Rumania. Besides giving a condensed and authentic survey of the geography, history and culture of Transylvania, we felt the necessity to pay special attention to the problems of national minorities, minority rights and other complex human factors to which we can no longer be indifferent, neither as a society of mankind, nor as a community of nations.
It has become mandatory also to re-evaluate certain outdated concepts, and the very principles upon which these concepts were established.
In our days, the accepted definition of "national minority" refers to a group of people who migrated into the established country of another nation, and failed to assimilate. Therefore, based on this principle, if Germany would occupy Denmark or part of Denmark, or France would occupy Germany or part of Germany, neither the Danes nor the Germans would be regarded as "national minorities" within the occupying nation, but as a nation or part of a nation occupied by another nation as a result of an act of force. The same would be valid in case Mexico should overrun California or Cuba should invade Florida. The Americans, inhabiting these states would not be regarded as "national minorities" residing in Mexico or Cuba, but as Americans subdued by force and separated from the rest of their country.
Exactly the same is true in regard to the Hungarians of Transylvania. They were, and ethnographically still are, part of the majority nation inhabiting for eleven hundred years the Carpathian Basin, where they held established statehood for more than one thousand years, building this complete geographical unit in East-Central Europe into a lasting and functioning economical, political and cultural entirety long before the Vlach immigrants, forefathers of the Rumanians, began to seep into the Eastern part of their country. On the ethnographical map of the Carpathian Basin this Hungarian majority still constitutes an almost uninterrupted unity, dotted with small and large foreign settlements. Therefore, as the original inhabitants of the Carpathian Basin, the Transylvanian Hungarians must still be regarded as part of a majority. Their present-day minority status within the war-imposed frontiers of Rumania was not the result of a peaceful evolution but of global armed conflicts which found them, unfortunately, on the losing side.
From this it follows that the cultural genocide, the forced relocation, the forced Rumanization, and the total discrimination to which the native Hungarian population of Transylvania, more than 2.8 million strong, is being subjected today by the Government of the Socialist Republic of Rumania, needs very special attention. For it is the moral obligation of all civilized societies on earth to cure the ills caused by hatred, ignorance or chauvinistic bigotry, and to eliminate unnecessary human sufferings as much as possible.
The task of compiling this work was immense, and as our bibliography shows, the material extensive. As compiler, co-ordinator and editor of this unique book, I feel obligated to give due credit and a word of gratitude to all those who took part in this work, either by gathering the research material or by scrupulously evaluating the authenticity of all the documents used in this extremely complex and sensitive material.
Acknowledgement is due to each and every member of the Danubian Research Center, to the Transylvanian World Federation and its member-organizations all over the world for their invaluable contributions. Special recognition must be given to Mr. Istvan Zolcsak, Dr. Petru Popescu, Professor Georghe Bota and Mr. Jonel Margineanu for their honest and conscientious striving to establish scholastic facts by separating unbiased data from myth, national zeal, and political expediency.
March 1977.
Albert Wass de Czege University of Florida, retired.
