Hajja Salesjana

the lives of six young people who were arrested with him, his execution, his burial in a common and unmarked grave, and how his body was found seventy years later with the help of Martin, a former student along with three professionals who are experts in history and DNA evidence. This discovery made it possible for me to go to Budapest, Hungary, on June 4, 2022, to the Clarisseum to celebrate the Blessed’s return home to the same place from which he had been taken to the gallows. Additionally, after seventy years, the land and the house from which they were once expelled and into which they were forbidden to enter ever again has now been returned to the Salesians of Don Bosco. The Clarisseum reopened The photograph in which you see us entering from an outside door shows us making a step that no one could have made in the last seventy years, until today. I am telling this because I sincerely believe that despite the difficulties that we are seeing, even at this present moment in European and world history, God continues to have the last word, the definitive one, about life and death. So, it has been with the young Salesian, Br. Stephan Sándor. «I owe him my life » Stephan prevented six young people from being executed with him. In one of the photographs, you see me with a man sitting in a wheelchair. His wife could not come because she was very ill. He was one of the six young people who, at the age of 22, were arrested along with Stephan for being considered traitors to the regime. After a very harsh interrogation with torture, the young Salesian managed to talk to the six young people at one point and asked them to blame him for whatever they were being accused of by the communists. Although the young people resisted, he told them that because of both the friendship that united them and their faith in Jesus, they had to do so to save their lives. And that is what happened—that is what this former student, a former youth animator at the Clarisseum, told me. Indeed, Stephan was sentenced to death, and the young men were sentenced to eight years in prison. Fortunately, our friend told me, three years later, the communist regime fell in Hungary, and his sentence was repealed. The DNA of a postage stamp For seventy years, Br. Stephan’s body lay in unknown whereabouts. He had been executed and buried in a common grave with five others, in a forest on the outskirts of Budapest, without any indication or name that could give clues as regards who or what was there. The burial took place at night without leaving any trace— precisely what those who had executed him intended. For seventy years, the conviction 21 Ottubru - Diċembru 2022 hajja