The promise of a faraway land

By Roland Borsos
Magyar Hirlap, 2 November, 2006 (Page 18, 2 November, 2006)

Raised in an isolated setting, an all but orphaned teenager Cecília took up arms and began transporting ammunition to the freedom fighters of Corvin alley. She would later flee to Argentina with her revolutionary fiancé - alone - and finally found refuge in Canada. Not only was the talented violinist Róbert Verebes separated from both his parents and his little brother when he emigrated, but he was also denied a promising career with the Bartók Quartet; and during the revolution the young agrarian Konrád Kocsis, who at the time was doing his military service, was forced to leave fearing for his life should be caught and tried for being a deserter. These are only some of the fifteen life-stories that are all tied together by two things: 1956 and Canada.

In the months following the defeat of the 1956 revolution and fight for freedom more than two hundred thousand Hungarians left the country, most of whom ended up in the United States or Canada. The countries of this 'new world' were imbued with a fantastical notion of a place that embodied the notion of paradise to these young refugees who had lived in an oppressed world where even basic necessities were not to be found. In their dreams the American continent represented happiness, security and the attainability of wealth.

The choices they made may also have had more practical reasons: that in the Austrian refugee camps - which would be their first stop after their risky border-crossing - left the voyage to the United States or Canada surprisingly a faster route than staying on the European continent. At the time, choosing certain European countries as their final destination might have meant waiting years to obtain their citizenship, further delaying the possibility of getting back on their feet. Meanwhile, the American continent welcomed them as heroes of a freedom fight. These young Hungarians were supported as they rebuilt their lives - either of their own desire to break with their past or despite a longing to eventually return. Either way, they would go on to rebuild their lives several thousand kilometers away from their homeland.

It is stories of these refugees who settled in Canada - be they soldiers or students, revolutionaries or simple workers that the bilingual publication Bridging the Divide / Ötven év távlatából tells, a book authored by Canadian-born Andrew Princz and illustrated with the photographs of Katalin Sándor.

"The tragic history of Hungary in the last century has left the country scarred to this day … The injustices weighed in on people's personal lives and families. As the torch passes to the current generation, these wounds are still healing," writes Andrew Princz in the introduction. And the author's motivations are understandable: within the pages of the book we find the story of his father, Joseph Princz, the one-time journalist in Szeged who himself emigrated to Canada.

The subject of this investigation, the stories of the 1956 emigrants and their family members whom they left behind, is far from customary. The idea of this project was not simply to produce a documentary account of stories, but rather it was to bring together these fragmented individual impressions in a mosaic that should give the reader an idea of who these nameless heroes or those who were left to endure, those who are called the 1956 Hungarians. "These are ordinary people, who lived through an extraordinary moment in history. Some gained, others lost. Some were heroic while others were pragmatic, while some just looked out for themselves," writes the author.

It is a strange, but seemingly not a haphazard choice that the both English and Hungarian language title of the album together reveals the explanation of the inspiration for this book. The author, himself the product of those separated families that he writes about, from a distance of a half century, attempts to bridge the divide between their homeland and the place that they now call home. Distance and time is the impenetrable watershed that separates the two.

That we truly have a need for stories of individual fates was demonstrated by the disturbances that took place during the commemorations of the revolution. More and more people have discovered that the past is far from being black and white. An in the discovery of our past, in order to accept a version of history, we sometimes require the certainty of a compass to show the way. One similar, perhaps, to the one that appears on the cover of this book. It belongs Géza Hermann, whose father was a master-watchmaker, and measured the magnetization of these devices. It was this minuscule compass that lead him and his family across the border in January of 1957.

Andrew Princz, Katalin Sándor:
Bridging the Divide
Ötven év távlatából
ontheglobe, 2006, 140 pages
3,900 HUF

* Translated from Hungarian article published in the Hungarian daily newspaper, Magyar Hirlap.