Eviza Orbics was 30 years old when she heard the gospel preached in Budapest, Hungary, in the year of 1914. Eviza was a Croat, a native of Belgrade (now the capital of Serbia, Belgrade was within was near the Serbian border with the Austrian-Hungarian empire at the time of Eviza’s birth, and was within the nation of Yugoslavia for much of the 20th century) but had moved upriver to the capital of Hungary in her youth. There she had met members of the Church converted 14 years earlier by the legendary missionary Mischa Markow (or converts who themselves had been taught by Elder Markow’s converts). Eviza was baptized in July June ((Probably June. I don’t have her exact baptismal date (yet), but it was referred to in places as “six weeks before the outbreak of war.”)) , 1914.

That was a difficult time to join the Church. Six weeks after Eviza’s baptism, World War I broke out. One of the consequences of that war was the breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, and one of the consequences of that breakup was the forced sorting of people along ethnic lines. Eviza was forced to return to Belgrade. A very few of the branches established in that part of Europe before the war continued to function informally: for instance, Kronstadt in Transylvania, southeast of Budapest, continued to exist in some form after the war because Anton Kaptchack Bergel, a local elder, stayed in touch with as many as 40 members, holding sacrament meetings until he died early in 1923; by that time, the branch had dwindled through death and emigration.

Eviza found no other Church members with whom to meet after she returned to Belgrade. Under those circumstances, as happened in so many other cases of isolated members in Eastern Europe, Eviza could have been lost to the Church. But she was not. She stayed in touch at irregular intervals with mission presidents in Basel, Switzerland, through whom she subscribed to the German-language magazine Der Stern. She didn’t read German well – hers was a sort of “makeshift German,” recalled one Church member who met her, but Der Stern provided the regular contact with the Church that Eviza craved. She mailed her tithing to that office, until changing laws forbid her from sending money out of the country. Thereafter, she deposited her tithing in a secret place in her home, year after year, hoping for an opportunity someday to pay it.

That opportunity came in 1932, after the organization of the Czechoslovak Mission with headquarters in Prague. Its president, Arthur Gaeth, made a trip into Yugoslavia, in part to try to locate the scattered Saints who had gone without contact from the Church for many years. Eviza was one of the few he was able to locate. He wrote about that visit:

I called on her in her little one-room cottage on the outskirts of Belgrade where she was trying to make a living by dressmaking. … She has been a faithful Latter-day Saint, anxious to have as many of her countrymen as possible hear the Gospel, for she had lived in the hope that some day its message might be preached in her own native land.

In Eviza’s case, it had been 14 years since she had last seen another Latter-day Saint. She paid to him her saved-up tithing, 750 Serbian dinar, then equivalent to about $15 U.S. You have to wonder what those 750 dinar might have meant to her in a material sense. It’s easier for me to understand what they meant to her in a spiritual sense: Cut off from regular contact with the Church, unable to participate in outward worship, the choice to pay her tithing was a voluntary sign to herself as much as to God that she was faithful and had a place in the Church.

She made President Gaeth welcome, providing his meals while he was in Belgrade and arranging a small meeting with some of her neighbors so that he could preach to them.

Eviza had married by that time, to a Serb who was a Seventh Day Adventist. It was not an especially happy marriage; the Vujičičs apparently had no children, and there were religious disputes between them. Eventually Eviza was abandoned by her husband, and she lived alone the rest of her life.

It became more and more difficult for Eviza to support herself. By 1936, when she was only 52, Eviza became ill with stomach ulcers. She was reduced to begging in the street for food to survive. In November 1937, she wrote another letter to her old friend President Gaeth, by then released from his long mission and living in Provo, telling him what had become of her. That letter, he told others, “contained no plea for help, but stated the conditions as they were.” She was, she wrote, afraid of the hard winter ahead, and asked President Gaeth to pray for her.

Wallace F. Toronto, who succeeded Arthur Gaeth as president of the Czechoslovak Mission, had been trying to reach Eviza, by mail, even before he heard about her desperate situation in the winter of 1937, but every card he sent to the only address he had was returned as undeliverable. But still, in early December 1937, when he heard of her suffering, he immediately wrote to the address provided by Arthur Gaeth, enclosing money “to tide her over until I could come into correspondence with her,” he said.

But it was too late. In a few days, the letter with its enclosed money came back to Prague, stamped “Addressee Died.” His further correspondence with the city registrar in Belgrade brought the word that she had passed away on December 1, 1937.

“There is no one in Europe at the present time who knows the sister,” President Gaeth had written when he tried to send help to her. “She was always good to me. She was a real Latter-day Saint.”

Eviza Orbics Vujičič. It might be a hard name to keep in memory, but never forget that such a woman lived.