In Budapest, Romania’s Refugees Look Homeward With Fear : Ethnic violence: Thousands of Hungarians fled hatred and bloodshed in Transylvania. Hundreds of others continue to arrive daily.

In a crowded storefront office pungent with the scents of cheap tobacco and unwashed clothes, Istvan and Agnes Magda shuffle dejectedly through a worn sheaf of index cards hawking the hardest of work for the lowest of wages.

The ethnic Hungarian couple has fled Romania less than six weeks before their first child is due, leaving behind their families, good jobs, a two-room house and the Transylvanian homeland that was the only life they have ever known.

Fear and fatigue are etched in the faces of the Magdas and other refugees arriving in Hungary by the hundreds each day to escape ethnic hatred and violence in Transylvania.

The flare-up of hostilities this month has killed eight and made Romania’s 2 million Hungarians fearful that they will continue to be targets of nationalist attacks in a centuries-old conflict that shows no signs of abating.

“It’s impossible to live there now,” Magda said as he and his wife sought help in resettling at Budapest’s Transylvanian Refugee Center. “No one knows what is happening in Romania. We will never go back.”

Uncertainty about the future is driving many of the Hungarians out of Transylvania, a vast territory that has passed from Hungary to Romania twice this century, after each of the world wars.

The refugee processing center and a transit camp in Csilleberc, at the western edge of the Hungarian capital, are crowded with young people and families who claim that the brief era of hope that followed Romania’s revolution against Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December has ended.

“The situation is very grave,” said Gabriella Kovacs, a radiologist who fled with her 9-year-old son from the city of Satu Mare two weeks ago. “My husband could not come with us because he had no passport. But we couldn’t wait for him, it was too dangerous for my son.”

Kovacs said that women chatting on street corners and children enrolled in the region’s few Hungarian-language schools, like her son, have been attacked for using their native tongue in public.

Romanian outrage was reportedly incited by ethnic Hungarians taking part in national day celebrations March 15, when some rallied or waved the green, white and red Hungarian flag in the first open show of ethnic identity in decades.

Istvan Magda, who fled from the city of Tirgu Mures--the scene of the bloodiest confrontations--says that tensions between Romanians and the ethnic Hungarian minority have always been palpable but that under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, no one dared express such ethnic hatred openly.

Since Ceausescu’s trial and execution on Christmas Day, suppressed hostilities have burst through the newly opened social barriers, threatening Romania’s first steps toward democracy and burdening Hungary with a mounting refugee problem as it struggles to avoid unemployment and a decline in living standards.

As many as 500 ethnic Hungarians have been arriving from Romania each day, a tenfold increase from the migration rate a month ago, said Ferenc Nemeth, director of the refugee processing center on a busy thoroughfare in downtown Pest.

Like many of the new arrivals he counsels each day, Nemeth doubts that an easing of the inter-ethnic strife in Transylvania will come about without years of reform.

Until Romanians can count on a stable leadership and steady food supplies, the ethnic strife will repeatedly break out into open clashes, Nemeth warned.

“In the meantime, we have to fear the consequences for Hungary as more and more refugees arrive,” he said. “The changes taking place in Hungary are eliminating jobs for those who are already here, and there are 70,000 people already on the waiting list for housing just in Budapest.”

Lorand Buda said his mother begged him to leave his home in Cluj to start a new life in Hungary.

“She told me to go and never come back,” the 22-year-old typographer said as he waited for a bunk assignment at the Csilleberc compound, which was once a children’s summer camp. “All the Hungarians in Romania are afraid that we have no future there.”

After Ceausescu’s downfall, Hungarians and Romanians joined in a few weeks of blissful celebration at what they thought was the end of a lifetime of repression, the leather-clad youth said.

But increasing instances of ethnic fighting have been ignored by police and in some cases spurred on by Ceausescu loyalists looking for an excuse to seize power amid turmoil, Buda contended.

Maria Tanko has been at the Csilleberc camp since two sons helped her travel to Budapest for medical treatment on Dec. 16, the eve of the revolution.

“We were too afraid to go back after we heard what had happened,” the 47-year-old woman said tearfully as she recounted what has been a three-month wait for word from her husband and two other sons. “I’ve written tens of letters but have no reply. That is proof that it’s still too dangerous for us there.”

Outbreaks of violence have subsided in recent days, as Budapest and Bucharest have promised to work toward a solution.

“The governments must be very strict about this problem,” said a newly arrived machinist who would give his name only as Michael. “But the Romanian order is very unstable. We don’t know what is going to happen.”