Call the Midwife: Bálint Margit of Comandău

Like an arc spanning time, in an extraordinary undertaking of remembrance and preservation of memory, we have the privilege — thanks to one of our close collaborators — of reconstructing the portrait of a midwife from a time when this remarkable figure, especially in village life, still served as a powerful bond between communities and authority.

Hospital births coexisted with home births, and the qualified midwife — employed by the state to provide care — helped wherever she was needed. In the forested margins of southeastern Transylvania, this meant entering houses no doctor would reach, and carrying with her the slow, patient authority of trained hands.

An Arc Spanning Time

The story begins in Comandău, a village in Covasna County that came into being together with the forestry operations established here in 1889. The site of today's commune once marked the old border between Romania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where a frontier post — Grenzkommando in German — once stood.

There was nothing there but forest: some 9,000 hectares belonging to Baron Gyula Zathureczky, who sold the logging rights to David Horn, a businessman from Pest. The Zathureczky manor remains the place where our story is written — a story bound to the name of the midwife Bálint Margit.

Figure 1

The Zathureczky manor in Comandău (Covasna County) — once the seat of Baron Gyula Zathureczky's forestry estate, and the silent backdrop against which Margit's life unfolded

Source: Photograph by the contributor, family collection.

Comandău — A Village Born of the Forest

The first workers, together with their families — around forty in number — arrived in 1889, but their number soon swelled to a thousand. A workers' colony of a thousand souls: men, their wives, and their children, most of whom came into the world right there, in the hands of midwife Margit, after 1940.

Figure 2

The famous Sikló — the steep inclined railway that lowered timber from the Comandău plateau toward Covasna

Source: Period photograph, late 19th / early 20th century.

Figure 3

The Comandău forestry train and its men — the colony of a thousand workers gave Margit her clientele: their wives, and their children, born in her hands

Source: Period photograph, late 19th / early 20th century.

Margit, the Town Midwife

Margit, who would become the village midwife and later the town midwife at the Covasna hospital, was born on 9 March 1912, the daughter of Bálint György and Bagoly Rebeka. Her mother was a native of Comandău — born, that is, on Baron Gyula's estate.

Figure 4

Bálint Margit as a young woman — undated black-and-white photograph, framed

Source: Family collection.

As was the custom of the time, Margit was married young — at just eighteen, in August 1930 — to a man seven years her senior, chosen by her parents: a shoemaker from the village of Telechia, in the Târgu Secuiesc district. So she became Tamás Lajosné, the wife of Tamás Lajos, to whom she bore three children: in 1931, in 1933, and in 1935.

But for Margit, being only Tamás Lajosné was not enough. She wanted to follow her own calling, and in 1940 — at twenty-eight, with three children at home — she enrolled in midwifery training and earned her qualification in 1941 at the Ferenc József University in Cluj. We do not know whether she had practiced midwifery before that date, but after 1941, once qualified, every baby in Comandău came into the world in her hands.

Figure 5

Margit (seated, far left) with the medical staff before the steps of the hospital — two physicians in long white coats and two women in midwife's uniform; the photograph survives as a printed copy resting on a wooden surface, already an artefact of memory

Source: Family collection.

A Granddaughter Remembers

As her granddaughter — to whom we owe this account — recalls, the people of the village held her in deep esteem, and whenever they met her they would say, with admiration bordering on reverence, "engem maga fogott" (in Hungarian: "you brought me into the world").

Around 1960, when her granddaughter was in kindergarten, Margit was already working as a midwife at the town hospital in Covasna, founded by Dr. Benedek Géza — the hospital that today bears its founder's name. Later she moved to Târgu Mureș:

Figure 6

The memory keeper. Cornelia — Margit's granddaughter — holds the very leather bag with which her grandmother went out to deliveries. Photographed at the Centre for Population Studies, Cluj-Napoca

Source: Photograph by the editorial team.

Margit died at the age of eighty-seven, in 1998, after spending ten years bedridden in great suffering.

Surely even today, a passerby in Comandău — walking in the footsteps of the famous Sikló — might, in a moment of deep remembrance, ask about Margit bába, and someone would still be found to answer: "She brought me into the world!"

Catalogue: A Life in Documents

The personal archive that survives Margit consists of a few worn objects — the certificates issued by three successive states, and the leather bag with which she went out to deliver children in the forest villages of Covasna County.

Figure 7 · Cat. 01 — 1941

Embossed black cloth binding of Margit's midwife diploma. The Hungarian word OKLEVÉL ("certificate / diploma") is pressed into the front board

Source: Bálint Margit family archive.

Figure 8 · Cat. 02 — 5 August 1941

Midwife diploma issued by the Obstetric-Gynaecological Clinic of the Ferenc József University in Kolozsvár (Cluj). Signed by the dean of the Faculty of Medicine and bearing Margit's own signature

Source: Bálint Margit family archive.

Figure 9 · Cat. 03 — 3 February 1958

Certified Romanian translation of the diploma. Notariatul Principal de Stat al Regiunii Aut. Maghiare Tg. Mureș — "Republica Populară Romînă". The state had changed; her qualification had not

Source: Bálint Margit family archive.

Figure 10 · Cat. 04 — 9 March 1912

Hungarian-language birth certificate (Születési anyakönyvi kivonat) from the parish of Komandó (Comandău), Háromszék county. Records the birth of Bálint Margit, daughter of factory worker Bálint György and Bagoly Rebeka

Source: Bálint Margit family archive · Komandó parish register, 1942 extract of 1912 entry.

Figure 11 · Cat. 05 — August 1930

Marriage certificate between Tamaș Ludovic (b. 1905, Telechia) and Bálint Margareta (b. 1912, Comandău). Re-issued 1957, Sfatul Popular Comandău, Raionul Târgu Săcuiesc

Source: Bálint Margit family archive.

Figure 12 · Cat. 06 — 16 August 1957

Service certificate (Adeverință) issued by the Personnel Section of the Tg. Săcuiesc District Council, stating that Bálint Margareta has been employed since 1 July 1952 in the post of moașă (midwife) attached to the Health Section, with a gross monthly salary of 530 lei

Source: Bálint Margit family archive · Sfatul Popular al Raionului Tg. Săcuiesc, no. 81/1957.

Figure 13 · Cat. 07 — mid-20th c.

The leather bag — brown leather doctor-bag with a stiff metal frame, worn and patinated by use. The companion of every birth Margit attended in the houses of Comandău and the surrounding villages

Source: Bálint Margit family archive.

Figure 14 · Cat. 08 — mid-20th c.

Instruments — contents of the bag. A reusable glass-and-chrome syringe, a length of rubber tubing, and two trays of stainless-steel needles (26G ¾" and 23G 1"). The minimal kit of a state-employed midwife mid-century

Source: Bálint Margit family archive.