By Bob Dent
The Budapest Times (Page 14, 24-29 October, 2006)

As soon as I got my hands on this book and started scanning through its pages there was something immediately appealing. Was it its rather unusual, landscape format, its beautifully produced pictures, the excellent quality of its paper or simply the intriguing nature of its title? It was all that, and more.

In the wake of the 1956 Uprising, about 200,000 people left Hungary,
around 40,000 of them ending up in Canada. This is the story of 15 of them - and the story of the close relatives they left behind.

Memoirs, not history
This dual-language, English and Hungarian volume rightly does not claim to be an exact history book. Like any other collection of memories, there are too much confusion over precise dates and too many nonspecific references for it to be that.

What it is, however, is a series of emotional experiences, recorded and related in an honest manner, reflecting both the pain and the joy which people felt at leaving their homeland, their family and friends, and discovering for themselves a new life in Canada. The reflections of brothers, sisters, cousins and other family members who remained in Hungary adds an unusual and interesting element, not often found in popularised accounts of 1956 emigrés.

The book avoids sensationalism and an over-romanticised presentation of its subjects, who were a mixed bunch, differing in background and in motivation for leaving. The account of their experiences is sensitive to both the pre- and the post-1956 situation in Hungary. It is also sensitive to the people themselves as individuals, to their occasional guilt at leaving, and to the people they left behind, sometimes happy their loved ones had escaped, sometimes sad and perhaps even occasionally resentful.

Positively, this work avoids painting a monochrome picture. That is not going to please a lot of people who like to see things in black and white. We read, for example, of experiences during the uprising of anti-Semitism, of “mob mentality”, as well as, intriguingly, of one Soviet officer helping someone to escape.

Myriad reasons
Political refugees or economic migrants? That is a question posed in today’s terms, and, like today, there is often no clear-cut answer. One interviewee, the author’s father Joseph Princz, approaches the issue from another, rather striking angle.

“In many ways 1956 could be considered a travel revolution,” he says. “Young people wanted to travel and they could not. They waited for the moment when there would be an opportunity.”

It is candid and thoughtprovoking insights like this which confirmed for me the appealing nature of this book.

Buy the book:
Bridging the Divide: Canadian and Hungarian stories of the 1956 Revolution
By Andrew Princz, with photographs by Katalin Sándor
(ontheglobe.com, 2006, 140pp, price HUF 3,900)
Available in Libri or Lira és Lant bookstores