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Talking with Angels
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Eva Dános Biography Eva Dános was born on 4 June 1919 in Budapest into a Hungarian middle-class Jewish family. In 1943, she obtained a doctorate in Economics and began teaching at the Secretarial School of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion.
After several weeks in Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, the three friends were assigned to work in a factory in Burgau, a satellite camp of Dachau, Bavaria. She then moved to France where she published the French version of her story Prison Roulante from 15 May to 14 August 1948 in Le Pontissalien, a weekly newspaper from the Haut Doubs region.
Françoise Maupin Messages received by Eva Dános Eva Dános, who attended several talks in Katalin in October and November 1944 (witnesses), remembered her scepticism in the early days. She was raised in the Catholic faith - her father was Jewish – and she was puzzled by this “world of unimaginable wonders”. She shared her doubts with a young Jesuit. He replied that the Church did not deny the existence of angels but advised her to be cautious. Eva also confided one day to Hanna: “Perhaps if the same would happen to a critical mind like mine, then I could believe in the possibility of receiving such words.” Little did she know that, shortly afterwards on 16 October 1944, words would come to her as she was meditating in the chapel. She felt it was important to immediately write them down. Until the eve of her arrest on 1 December1944, she received twenty-four messages, excerpts of which were published (DC, p. 153-160). Later, on her return to Budapest, she received a few more messages from September 1945 to February 1946. But neither Hanna nor she got any at Ravensbrück: “No. It wasn’t a place for messages. We were struggling at the most debased level of existence. Survival took up all of our strength.” The psychoanalyst MáriaTörök, one of the few survivors of the Pest Ghetto (who died in 1998), revealed that a number of similar phenomena had occurred in the Hungarian Jewish community at that time. This was corroborated by Agnes Péter who attended Dialogue N°85 in Katalin and witnessed the transmission of messages by Adrienne Frankovszky (Adri) and Erzsébet Rusznyak (Ruszi) in Gitta Mallasz’ workshop after the war in 1945-1946. Eva Dános confided to Robert Hinshaw
the circumstances of these messages: “It was at once terrifying,
humbling and up-lifting that such poems came out of me. I’m sure
it wasn’t me at all. It was an inspiration. It was the only time
when I laid down the systematic approach and gave over in writing to
the spontaneous.” Robert Hinshaw said: “Eva, not attributing these
messages to her conscious will, but also not able to define the
source of their provenance, felt how greatly they helped and
sustained her. While not denying that they might come ‘from
angels,’ she preferred to call them inspirations in an extreme period
of despair.” Eva added: “You know, these were exceptional times and we were
leading an out-of-the-ordinary existence. We had been stripped of
so much. We didn’t know what would happen to us from one hour to the
next. We were deprived of every security one normally has. I think
the danger – the palpable danger and uncertainty – gave rise to a
finely-honed heightened sensibility for things we normally
wouldn’t perceive.”
Source : (PW) Eva Langley-Dános, Prison on Wheels, Daimon, 2000
Translated by Treharne Translations |