In late August 1944, Romania switched sides in World War II, abandoning the Axis powers and joining the Allies. The move left Transylvania's borders in violent flux. Between September 5 and October 10, 1944, Sarmasu -- located in what was then Cluj-Turda County -- fell under the control of Nazi-aligned Hungarian troops. The occupation was driven by Hungary's desire to reclaim all of Transylvania, a territory it had partially regained through the Second Vienna Award of 1940. Hungarian gendarmes, led by Captain Lanczos Laszlo, moved into the town alongside members of the Hungarian National Guard. Local Hungarians who supported the irredentist cause joined them. Together, they began looting the homes of Jewish and Romanian families.

On September 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmes removed several prominent Romanian civilians from their homes -- people who had held administrative roles in the community -- and brought them to an improvised camp in Sarmasu. For days, the detainees were subjected to systematic torture. The People's Tribunal in Cluj later documented the treatment: beatings, staged mock executions at night, forced physical exercises regardless of the prisoners' age, continued until they collapsed from exhaustion. The Jewish residents of Sarmasu were confined alongside them. On the afternoon of September 16, the 126 Jewish prisoners were loaded onto horse-drawn carriages and transported to a place called Suscut, outside the town. That night, Hungarian gendarmes and soldiers killed them all. When a medico-legal commission exhumed the bodies from two mass graves in February 1945, they confirmed that death had come by gunshot -- except for several of the children, who had died of asphyxiation. They had been buried alive.

Investigations into the Sarmasu massacre began in 1945 and concluded the following year. The People's Tribunal in Cluj delivered its sentence on June 28, 1946, establishing individual responsibility for the killings. Seven military personnel were found guilty: Captain Lancz Laszlo and Lieutenant Vecsey, the two commanding officers, along with five non-commissioned officers -- Second Lieutenant Halasz, Second Lieutenant Fekete, Sergeant Major Szabo, Sergeant Horvath Istvan, and Sergeant Polgar. All seven were sentenced to death. Two local collaborators also faced justice. Janos Panczel, a soldier-gendarme from Sarmasu who participated directly in the violence, received twenty years in prison. Istvan Soos, a member of the Hungarian Civil Guard in Sarmasu, was sentenced to five years. The tribunal's findings placed the Sarmasu massacre alongside similar atrocities committed during the same period at Ludus and other Transylvanian towns.

A cemetery in Sarmasu marks where the victims were reburied after their exhumation from the mass graves at Suscut. The site stands as one of several massacre memorials across Transylvania from this brief but devastating period of Hungarian occupation in the autumn of 1944. The Sarmasu massacre was not an isolated act. It occurred alongside the massacre at Ludus and paralleled atrocities at Ip and Treznea, part of a pattern of violence against Jewish and Romanian civilians in territories that Hungarian forces sought to reclaim. Of the 142 Jewish people living in Sarmasu before September 1944, only 16 survived. An entire community -- families who had lived in this town for generations, who had raised children and built homes here -- was nearly annihilated in a single night. The youngest victims had not yet reached their fifteenth birthday.