This book examines different facets of a Belgian-Hungarian project, which saw around twenty thousand Hungarian children come to Belgium for “holidays” between 1923 and 1927. There is a focus on the thousand or so who stayed on and became migrants in the more traditional sense. This was one of many examples of child migration in the interwar period, often in the guise of child “rescue” projects, which can be placed along a spectrum from benign to abusive. The author's research framework looks at how social identities, particularly childhood or “being a child,” are affected by migration. The author argues that processes of migration strongly influence individual and collective social identities.
The book is divided into three parts. The first looks at “States, Institutions, and the Welfare of Children,” examining the macro-level migratory regime and the meso-level institutions involved in the socio-historical context. The Belgian Catholic Church took the lead role in the program as it felt it could increase its role in Belgian society through visible participation in popular child-centered international humanitarianism. It also wanted to improve Belgium's international image, tarnished by its occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. The involvement of the Hungarian state, social organizations, and churches was also motivated by national concerns, as they hoped to use these international child schemes to win sympathy and support for the revision of the “unjust” 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when Hungary was forced to cede 71% of its pre-war territory and 64% of its pre-war population.
The second part of the book, “The Family Network—the Best Interests of the Child,” examines how the families involved were affected and how they maintained and negotiated transnational practices and facilitated the children's integration. The author skillfully shows how important the Hungarian children—“Walking Red Tulips” working to create “the International of Love”—were to Hungarian nationalists (Jewish Hungarian children were not allowed onto the project). They were also important, however, to the families who made the decision to send them away and to those who took them in to stay. For many of the Belgian families, joining the child relief project was a highly visible way of demonstrating a Catholic identity, not only in the sense of offering charity but also in possessing many children in a multi-generational family structure. Hungarian families were motivated by poverty and this created some power imbalance with feelings of shame and gratitude. The author argues, however, that the organizers of the child relief project successfully created a transnational humanitarian community linking Belgian and Hungarian families, which was strengthened by family correspondence and the circulation of photographs. For many, this link continued through further generations.
The third part, “Children-Migrants-Identities: Between Motherland and Home,” is about remembering and imagining childhood, based on interviews with surviving participants, now in their late nineties. The author has tried to uncover what the impact and meaning of this childhood migration experience may have had. Some who returned to Hungary went to great efforts to maintain correspondence and keep the experience close to them as a positive and real part of their identity. Others, who stayed on in Belgium, despite having fulfilling lives, expressed their memories in terms of vulnerability as children, emphasizing the role of chance, luck, or fate in their lives.
The book is based on a variety of primary sources, including archives, contemporary publications, ego-documents, photographs, and life-course interviews. The author is honest about the multiple limitations to studying young children in constant motion in the past. She challenges recent arguments that children are flexible, resourceful social actors rather than passive recipients of policies and programs designed by adults. The interviews with participants in fact revealed a belief in their own lack of childhood agency, though this was sometimes contradicted by their stories.
Humanitarianism always involves power imbalances (there is a good discussion of “gratitude” woven into the book), and some surviving participants remembered lonely and powerless childhoods conducted in an atmosphere of stifling Catholic respectability while others told tales of outright abuse and exploitation. Hajtó’s research underlines the importance of the weaving of children, childhood, politics, and national identity beginning in the twentieth century, when children first became vital subjects for international politics and were deployed instrumentally by states for “peace-building.” This book can be highly recommended for those interested in the history of childhood, migration, memory, and in interwar European social and political life.
