Destroying Home
Eric began photographing in the Numbered Streets neighborhood of Miskolc on our trip there in March 2018. We didn’t realize at the time how the landscape would change from visit to visit.
After eviction: The house at the corner of 6th and Foundry streets in March 2018. The residents in the apartment on the left have been evicted, the door and windows removed, and all the wires inside ripped out. Backyards in the Numbered Streets usually include a secondary building (here on the right, with its roof already gone) to provide more bedrooms. These were legal structures.
An extended family lived for years in the house at the northeast corner of 6th and Foundry in the Numbered Streets. They had already been evicted by March 2018, and their home was in the early stages of destruction.
On a later trip I interviewed one of the adult sisters in the family, who talked about the night they lost their home.
”The police came in the evening and they cut the electricity and lights. Because my great-grandmother was so old, we could not stay in that house anymore. It was wintertime. It was dark.”
Then a relative who lived one street over showed up. “He and his wife came over and said we should get our things together. They had pity for us. They said we could come stay in the room they had emptied for us. I could not process it up to this day.”
“My soul was destroyed by that,” she said.
“It was a very good house. I lit a candle in the church for that house.”
March 2018: Streetside view from 6th street. Though one apartment has been emptied and gutted, the apartment in the rear — note the windows and TV satellite dish — may have have still been occupied.
July 2018
July 2018
Causalities of Demolition 1929-2019
The sisters’ extended family included their great-grandmother, who had survived World War II. She died in 2019, after they were all evicted a second time from a home in the Numbered Streets. A Hungarian NGO worker once said to me, no one has accounted for the numerous deaths of the elderly who were removed. This assault on their lives, he meant, is what killed them.
The sisters’ great-grandmother in 2018
The great-grandmother and I had sat in the sun one day in 2018, and she talked to me about the war. “We were just hiding. Some people put coal on their faces so they were not taken away. I had 11 siblings, and I took care of them. It was very bad. They were coming [down the streets] and they were dropping bombs. We heard the noise so we had to run. I took care of the kids, they could see the fire in the sky and we did not have even a piece of potato.”
Her great-granddaughter said, “She would sit here outside in the yard [on 6th street]. She loved watching people passing by. We’d have to bring her out of the house in the morning. There were trees and she loved sitting under the trees.”
October 2018
July 2019: All gone. New topsoil waits to be spread on the empty lot, and on the empty lot behind, where another home was razed.
July 2019: Sisters on the site of their former home on 6th Street.