A Cold War map detailing the Warsaw Pact’s training plans for a nuclear war has been released by the new Polish government, which pledged to confront the nation’s Communist past. “Women back then were not treated that well – but that is not a justification for what they did. I didn’t want to create sympathy for the women.”Yet the moral emerges without any effort on her part. “For centuries the village women had been told that they could not live without men. Then the war came and they found they were fine without men, in fact better than before, because they were no longer abused.”Murdering them when they came home was a desperate solution for desperate times And for quite a while it worked pretty well. After the poisoning started, said Maria Gunya, whose coroner father had seen the whole thing, “the men’s behaviour improved markedly”..

She told them, if you feel oppressed, you can get out of that situation She had the power to convince people They didn’t see what they were doing as murder And if your husband died, you inherited the property. And then you would be in a better position to marry someone else.”Bussink did not intend to make a film with a feminist moral “I’m not even a feminist myself,” she said. ‘The men were in the way,’ they said, or ‘they must have been crippled…’ They tended to minimise the importance of what had happened.”So what in her view lay behind the crimes that once gave Nagyrev the title “the murder district”? “There was no one single motive,” she said. “There were a lot of different circumstances: poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, the First World War.

Yet it is not a fairy story, and the latest person to beat a path to Nagyrev in the hope of learning more is a young Dutch film-maker called Astrid Bussink, whose documentary on the village and the epidemic, entitled The Angelmakers, premieres next Tuesday at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.Bussink and her crew spent four months in the village “We had a hard time getting people to talk,” she says. “They are not supposed to talk about it and they hadn’t talked about it for a long time, so we went about it very carefully. What struck us was that the older women were very easy about the crimes, they did not talk about them as if they were serious. And over the years it wasn’t just insufferable husbands who died: mothers, children, other relatives all fell victim Some of the poisoners even murdered each other. The figures for how many people died in the arsenic years vary wildly, and no historian has yet given a definitive account. But it is claimed that other villages in the area were up to the same thing, and that in all 300 people may have been killed.The epidemic only came to an end in 1929. As with almost everything else in this story, accounts vary as to how it was stopped.

One story has it that two of the village poisoners fell afoul of one another and denounced each other in public. In another version, a medical student from another town stumbled on a corpse washed up on the river bank, and discovered high levels of arsenic in the stomach. Police moved in to investigate, dozens of corpses were exhumed, and many of them, too, had traces of the poison.The most vivid explanation of how the poisoning was brought to an end goes like this. A nurse called Mrs Ladislus Szabo was caught putting arsenic in a man’s wine.

Mrs Szabo, under questioning, blurted out the name of a fellow poisoner, who admitted killing her mother – and named Zsuzsanna Fazekas, the spider at the centre of the web.Mrs Fazekas denied everything, and the police let her go – but secretly tailed her. As they suspected she would, she zigzagged down the village street, warning her customers to keep their mouths shut The police followed in her wake, and picked up 38 women. Empires dissolved and crumbled to dust; and the same thing happened to Nagyrev’s ideas of morality.”The injured soldiers came home to a severe economic depression,” says Istvan Burka, the mayor of the village “It was a hard life. The circumstances were extreme, and feeding another mouth that couldn’t contribute anything was too much of a burden on the family.”But like anything else you do repeatedly, murder in Nagyrev became habitual. And three: Russian prisoners-of-war had been billeted near Nagyrev While the men were away, the wives had had affairs.