“I Miss Everything About Hungary”
To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments. — John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
A partial view of the abandoned Diósgyőr steelworks, once the economic engine of Miskolc and even the country. Beyond, the houses and apartment buildings on the western edge of the the city and the Bükk Mountains.
A mother talks about leaving Hungary forever
I lived forty years in Hungary.
I gave birth to four children over there.
My parents passed away over there.
We are seven of us, brothers and sisters.
I miss them very much all my sisters and brothers who are in Hungary.
I cannot go to the cemetery to see my parents,
and I miss that a lot too,
and I miss everything about Hungary.
But over here I can keep my children safe,
and over here I see a future for us.
So over here my children can become somebody, and they are not going to be treated differently because of the race difference.
Nobody’s going to hurt them. We can have a calm normal life.
So I know my children are going to be safe over here as long as I live.
7th Street in the Numbered Streets
We were sitting in her Toronto kitchen eating the chocolate palacsinta (Hungarian crepes) she had just made when she said this. She and her family fled the Numbered Streets as the evictions and demolitions began. They moved to another neighborhood in Miskolc, to evade city inspectors and the risk their children would be taken away by authorities. Then they sold their furniture and other items to buy plane tickets to Canada, where they recently received their permanent residency status.
Looking east on Vasgyári út, Iron Foundry Street, the central street in the neighborhood. July 23, 2019, just after 5:30PM.
Photographs and video by Eric Etheridge.