Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the "Gypsy Question" in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956 9789633863428

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PROTECTED CHILDREN, REGULATED MOTHERS

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PROTECTED CHILDREN, REGULATED MOTHERS Gender and the “Gypsy Question” in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956

ESZTER VARSA

Central European University Press Budapest–New York

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Copyright © by Eszter Varsa 2021 Published in 2021 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-386-341-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-963-386-342-8 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Varsa, Eszter, 1975- author. Title: Protected children, regulated mothers : gender and the „Gypsy question“ in state care in postwar Hungary, 1949-1956 / Eszter Varsa. Description: Budapest ; New York : Central European University Press, 2021. Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020046754 (print) | LCCN 2020046755 (ebook) ISBN 9789633863411 (hardback) | ISBN 9789633863428 (adobe pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Children--Institutional care--Hungary--History--20th century. | Child welfare--Hungary--History--20th century. Romanies--Hungary--History--20th century. | Hungary--History--1945-1989. Classification: LCC HV1160.5 .V37 2021 (print) | LCC HV1160.5 (ebook) | DDC 362.73/20943909045--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046754 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046755

Printed in Hungary

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents.......................................................................................................................... v List of Figures..............................................................................................................................vii List of Tables.................................................................................................................................ix Abbreviations.................................................................................................................................x Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................xi Introduction...................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Child protection in early state socialist Hungary..............................................................19 A brief introduction to the historical context: Hungary, 1949–1956.........................19 Historical and legal background of child protection in Hungary in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century............................................30 Child protection as a “solution to the Gypsy question” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungary...........................................................................................71 Chapter 2 “The minor would hinder the mother in finding employment”: Child protection regulating women’s labor force participation.............................79 A lack of child care services and “delinquent” children................................................84 “The minor would hinder the mother in finding employment”: Child protection as a tool to force unemployed mothers to enter paid work................89 “As they are Gypsies, they are not employed”: The negative evaluation of Romani motherhood..................................................................................................94 Parents requesting their children’s institutionalization for the purposes of child care.......................................................................................................................99 Chapter 3 “She occupied herself with men”: Child protection regulating the sexual morality of lone mothers and single young women .......................... 107 Concern about women’s sexual morality in early state socialist Hungary.............. 113 The regulation of lone mothers’ sexuality..................................................................... 115

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

The representation of lone mothers in the case files of children in state care ......... 116 The regulation of Romani women’s sexuality............................................................... 126 Regulating the sexuality of single young women......................................................... 130 Chapter 4 “Make them experience the good taste of productive work”: Residential care as an institution of education ........................................................ 139 Reformatory and reform pedagogy: The origins of education for work in residential care education...................................................................................... 142 The continuity of education for work in the curricula and educational practice of residential homes under state socialism.............................................. 147 Education for work in the socialist context: Reform pedagogical and reformatory traditions ................................................................................................ 152 “Make them experience the good taste of productive work”: What education for work meant to child protection professionals during and after socialism........ 155 Turning work into a habit................................................................................................. 158 Education for work as education for life: Creating gendered habits........................ 164 Education for work as a means towards the assimilation of Roma.......................... 169 Chapter 5 “He was three years old but could not speak and had no emotional attachment to anybody”: State care as discourse on Stalinist political terror in socialist Hungary..... 177 Emmi Pikler and the history of “Lóczy” ....................................................................... 183 The cases of László Rajk Jr. and Mátyás Donáth.......................................................... 190 Two mothers’ (re)construction of their children’s institutionalization....................... 195 Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 203 Appendix.................................................................................................................................... 209 Biographical information...................................................................................................... 215 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................. 221 Index............................................................................................................................................ 241

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Distribution of eggs among the inhabitants of the Mária Valéria Settlement, 1946..............................................................................................................20 Figure 2. Children in front of Café New York in Budapest, 1946................................21 Figure 3. Construction works at the Hungarian Radio, 1949.......................................24 Figure 4. Roma settlement at Kecskemét, 1930..............................................................26 Figure 5. Boys playing “snúr,” Hungary, 1948...................................................................35 Figure 6. A police woman takes a wandering boy to the police guard room, Budapest, around 1945...................................................................................................46 Figure 7. Children having a morning snack at a care institution, 1951......................51 Figure 8. The castle of the Zichy family at Soponya-Nagyláng, 1902.........................53 Figure 9. The County Infant Home at 16 Kossuth Street in Csopak, 1957................54 Figure 10. The former building of the József Home for Boys, or Josefium, around 1890......................................................................................................................58 Figure 11. Bathroom at a home for children whose parents were employees of the Hungarian Railways, Kőszeg, 1956...................................................................63 Figure 12. Dining room at a home for children whose parents were employees of the Hungarian Railways, Kőszeg, 1956 ..................................................................63 Figure 13. The former castle of the Károlyi family at Fót in the 1950s.......................65 Figure 14. The Zsuzsanna Kossuth Children’s Home at Bicske...................................66 Figure 15. Tiszadob, the castle of the Andrássy family, 1939.......................................67 Figure 16. Mother and Infant Home No. 18 at Álmos vezér Square in Budapest, 1954.............................................................................................................69

Figure 17. Buildings in the Mária Valéria Settlement in district 9 in Budapest, 1957.................................................................................................. 128 Figure 18. The Ilkovics Buffet in Budapest in the 1950s..................................... 133

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viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 19. Sleeping arrangements at a home for children whose parents were employees of the Hungarian Railways, Kőszeg, 1956........................... 163 Figure 20. Embroidery made by girls living at the Zsuzsanna Kossuth Children’s Home for Girls at Bicske................................................................... 165 Figure 21. Children at the Mária Valéria Settlement in Budapest, 1957......... 171 Figure 22. Children in the garden of the Lóczy Street Infant Home in Budapest in 1948............................................................................................... 187 Figure 23. László Rajk, jr. with his mother at the reburial ceremony of his father László Rajk, and three other political victims of the Rákosi regime—György Pálffy, Tibor Szőnyi and András Szalai —on October 6, 1956, at the Fiumei Street Cemetery in Budapest............ 193 Figure 24. Éva Bozóky with her family................................................................... 198

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LIST OF TABLES

1. Children in state care, 1949–1956...................................................................... 209 2. Children (older than three years) in state care in Budapest, November 1951 ..................................................................................................... 209 3. The yearly inflow of children to the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County, 1949–1956..................................................................... 210 4. Residential homes of the Municipal Council of Budapest, 1952.................. 210 5. Active wage earners, 1949–1956......................................................................... 212 6. Children entering state care in Budapest and Szabolcs-Szatmár County by category of complaints, 1949–1956.............................................................. 212 7. Children entering state care for moral reasons in Szolnok County by category of complaints, 1949–1956.............................................................. 213

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ABBREVIATIONS

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1956 Institute OHA

1956 Institute – Oral History Archive (1956-os Intézet – Oral History Archívum)

ÁVH

Hungarian State Security Services (Államvédelmi Hatóság)

BFL

Budapest City Archives (Budapest Főváros Levéltára)

FGYK-Tegyesz

Budapest Special Service for Child Protection (Fővárosi Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat)

FGYK-Tegyesz irattár

Archives of the Budapest Special Service for Child Protection (Fővárosi Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára)

JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz

Archives of the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County Special Service for Child Protection (Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára)

KSH

Hungarian Central Statistical Office (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal)

MDP

Hungarian Workers’ Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja)

MNL JNSZML

Archives of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County (Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Levéltára)

MNL OL

National Archives of Hungary (Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára)

MNL SZSZBML

Archives of Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County (Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Levéltára)

SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz

Archives of the Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County Special Service for Child Protection (Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Gyermekvédelmi Igazgatóság és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára)

TRHGY

Official Collection of Acts and Decrees (Törvények és Rendeletek Hivatalos Gyűjteménye)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has benefited from the advice and support of many people over the years it has grown from a dissertation project into a monograph. My greatest appreciation goes to Éva Fodor, my former supervisor at the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, for her trust in me as a scholar, her advice while working towards this book, and her friendship. I am particularly indebted from the Department to Francisca de Haan, Erzsébet Barát, and Susan Zimmermann for discussions and their support over the years. I am very thankful to Dagmar Schulze, Sabine Hering, and Berteke Waaldijk for their encouragement at the earliest stage of my research. I benefited enormously from my semester as a Ph.D. student at the History Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the guidance of Sonya Michel over so many years. The scholars at the the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) at Regensburg have been a source of much inspiration. I owe a great deal to conversations with Sabine Rutar, Natali Stegmann, Melanie Arndt, Friederike Kind-Kovács, Stefano Petrungaro, Svetlana Suveica, and Luminiţa Gătejel, whom I also thank for her comments on an early draft of chapter 5. I am particularly grateful for discussions with Jan Grill, Celia Donert, Katarina Čapková, and Helena Sadilková at the Prague Forum for Romani Histories, as well as for the encouragement of colleagues from Hungary, Dorottya Szikra, Borbála Juhász, Angéla Kóczé, Tibor Valuch, Dorottya Rédai, and Beáta Hock. I would like to thank in particular all of those who have assisted me in my research in Hungary, especially the staff of the National Archives of Hungary, the Budapest City Archives, and the Archives of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Counties. I owe special thanks to Mária Szendrei, György J. Kollmann, and Balázs Temesi at the Budapest Special Service for Child Protection, Róbert Hartai at the Archives of the Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County Special Service for Child Protection, and the staff of the Archives of the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County Special Service for Child Protection.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to those who participated in this research by sharing with me memories about their childhood in state care, even when these memories were hard to deal with. I am equally indebted to the teachers and educators who recalled details about their working lives in child protection institutions, residential homes, and as child protection officers. I am especially grateful to the office staff of the Department of Gender Studies at CEU as well as József Litkei at CEU Press, the two anonymous readers, and the excellent language editor for their help and useful comments. Last but not least, I wish to thank my family and friends for being there for me. --Parts of this book draw on arguments I have published elsewhere: A slightly modified version of chapter 2 was published as “‘The Minor Would Hinder the Mother in Finding Employment’: Child Protection and Women’s Paid Work in Early State Socialist Hungary,” East European Politics and Societies 31, no. 4 (2017): 818–39, and in Hungarian as “Gyermekvédelem a kora szocialista Magyarországon a társadalmi nemi és etnikai különbségek tükrében,” Replika 85–86, nos. 1–2 (2014): 57–70.

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INTRODUCTION

In January 1956 the Guardianship Authorities of Túrkeve, a town in Szolnok County, central Hungary, ruled that the two-year-old daughter of Sándor Lugos and Beáta Varga be permanently placed in state care.1 Their decision about the child, who by then had already been in temporary care for a year, was based on the following description of her family background: The father, Sándor Lugos, has legally recognized the child, but has not provided for her maintenance and care at all. . . . The minor thus cannot be placed with the father. The mother, Beáta Varga, does not have a permanent and proper place of living, neither furniture nor bed clothes. She lives temporarily here or there. Her attitude to work is not good either. She does not work regularly or with persistence and often changes her place of work. . . . Her income is insecure; it is not even enough for her own subsistence. Her lifestyle is morally strongly questionable too; she has had another out-of-wedlock child, who also had to be placed in state care, otherwise the child would have died as a result of her mother’s bad treatment and lack of care.2

The story of this small child was not an isolated case in Hungary in the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s. The situation of children and their parents in this time period was deeply affected both by the damages caused by World War II and the political, economic, and social changes set in motion by the new state socialist regime. Although with the onset of catch-up industrialization employment opportunities had improved by the early 1950s, poverty still affected a large percentage of the population.

In order to protect the privacy of the persons in the child protection records these and all following personal names of clients mentioned in this book have been altered. 2   Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Gyermekvédelmi Igazgatóság és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára (Archives of the Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County Special Service for Child Protection, hereafter SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz), 3320/1955. 1 

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INTRODUCTION

Caseworkers’ descriptions of this mother show that children’s case files not only offer a rich source of insight into the living conditions and problems specific to the most vulnerable in society, but also reveal how the authorities perceived these problems. The files show on what basis decisions about children’s behavior and good or bad parenting were made, and what issues were considered and formulated as problems. The evaluation of children’s and their parents’ behavior was characteristic of child protection historically. Child protection, as a field of social policy-making and as practices of care, developed in relation to the formation of modern states in the western world from the eighteenth century on. Being a form of response to perceived social ills in modern states, it has been bound up with issues of social inclusion and exclusion.3 The social history of child protection thus tells us about who was considered deserving and undeserving of support, for what reasons and what kind of (state) involvement was considered appropriate on their behalf in different economic and political contexts across time and place. This book reflects on processes of social inclusion and exclusion in early state socialist Hungary by examining the cases of children placed in state care and the working of the institution of child protection in the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s. The book addresses the tensions that underlined the processes of change at the end of World War II and at the onset of state socialism, including the changing expectations towards the social role of men and women and the institution of the family, the problematic relationship between paid work and unpaid care work, as well as policy approaches towards the largest ethnic minority group in Hungary at the time, Gypsies/Roma.4   James Schmidt, “Children and the State,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (London: Routledge, 2013), 174. 4   Historians differ in their use of the terms “Gypsy” and “Roma.” Some still use “Gypsy,” which was the terminology used until the 1970s–1980s. Others prefer using “Roma,” which is also a marker of identity claimed by European Roma. It also denotes a shift in connotation from talking about “the other” (Gypsy) to referring to a subject position (Roma). Some, who stick to the use of “Gypsy” despite its derogatory connotations point to the fact that there are groups that use it as a marker for the position of the “self.” The term “Roma” has also been criticized from a gender perspective for generalizing the male form (Rom) to talk about all members of a group. It is important to note that the primary sources I used applied a variety of terminology too. While the majority used “Gypsy” or its variations, such as “Gypsy population” (cigánylakosság) “Gypsy child” (cigánygyermek) or “Gypsy settlement” (cigánytelep) others in an effort to distance themselves from its negative connotations, avoided the term. The alternatives, some of which nevertheless remained derogatory were, 3

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INTRODUCTION

There were two fields of scholarly discussion that motivated an inquiry into the institution of child protection in early state socialist Hungary. One concerned the situation of Roma in Eastern Europe following the end of state socialism in the 1980s. Scholarship has established Roma as one of the losers of the transition to market capitalism.5 This literature has generally evaluated the state socialist period in relation to Roma negatively, aside from the acknowledgement of an increase in Romani employment rates. It has pointed to the forcefully assimilationist policies directed at the Roma as well as their growing poverty visible from the mid-1980s onwards.6 In the field of child protection, professionals have discussed the problematic overrepresentation of Romani children in state care. Among others they have pointed out the negative consequences of institutionalization on Romani ethnic identity.7 Unlike in the interwar period, when the proportion of Romani children in state care was negligible, Romani children were overrepresented in residential institutions by the late socialist period in Hungary. Reports composed by local authorities on the situation of the “Gypsy population” in the 1980s have also addressed this issue as problematic.8 In the histories of numerous countries of East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe the onset of state socialism was the first

 

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for example, “settlement inhabitant” (telepi lakos), “wandering person” (kóbor, kóbor személy), or especially from the 1960s onwards, “backward social layers” (elmaradott lakosságcsoport/népréteg). The latter resulted out of the 1961 decree on the “situation of the Gypsy population” in Hungary that declared Roma to be a social stratum not an ethnicity. I consider both “Gypsy” and “Roma” (socially) constructed. When I discuss primary sources, I keep with the terminology applied there, but I use quotation marks to indicate that. While acknowledging that “Roma” and “Gypsy” are far from being synonyms, when not referring to primary documents, I use “Roma” (adj. “Romani”) in order to avoid objectifying and “othering” the (groups of) persons I am referring to. Júlia Szalai, “Social Outcasts in 21st Century Hungary,” Review of Sociology 8, no. 2 (2002): 35–53; Rebecca Jean Emigh and Iván Szelényi, eds., Poverty, Ethnicity, and Gender in Eastern Europe during the Market Transition (Westport: Praeger, 2001). Júlia Szalai, “Conflicting Struggles for Recognition: Clashing Interests of Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Hungary,” in Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power, ed. Barbara Hobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 188–215; Michael Stewart, “Communist Roma Policy 1945–89 as Seen through the Hungarian case,” in Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Will Guy (Hatfield, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001). Aranka Illésné Áncsán, “Roma gyerekek, fiatalok intézetben,” in Fejéről a talpára: Ismeretek a cigányságról a cigányságért, ed. Gabriella Deszpot and Ágnes Diósi (Budapest: Fővárosi TEGYESZ-Önkonet, 2004), 128–37. Among others, Beszámoló a Hajdú-Bihar megyében élő cigány lakosság helyzetéről (Debrecen: Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Tanács, 1981), 7.

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time that active and state-wide policy-making concerning the Romani population as representatives of a “backward social layer” was introduced. This book therefore addresses policies and practices in child protection with specific attention to references concerning Roma. A second ground for inquiry into state care in early state socialist Hungary was policy-makers’ and child protection professionals’ negative evaluation of the residential-home-based system of care, especially during the “dark years” of Stalinism and around the end of state socialism at the end of the 1980s.9 Professionals in Hungary and internationally largely put the blame on communism and the practical failures of the political system between the 1950s and the 1980s for the harms that were affected in children in these institutions. The video recordings of abandoned children suffering from hos-pitalization symptoms in dilapidated rural homes in Romania that filled the world media following the fall of the Ceaușescu regime in 1989 have done much for the widespread popularization of this idea.10 Deinstitutionalization became strongly linked with discourses and processes of democratization in post-state socialism. The transformation of the national child protection systems was supported by international organizations such as UNICEF and the European Social Network, as well as the World Bank. In their reports about Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, representatives of these agencies associated collective education and large children’s homes with the abridgement of the rights of the child. In a similar move they also reduced child protection measures introduced in the Stalinist period as serving the purposes of the “greater surveillance of the family and easier child removal from the home.”11   David Tobis, Moving from Residential Institutions to Community-Based Social Services in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Washington D.C.: The World Bank, 2000); UNICEF Regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CEE/CIS), “At Home or in a Home? Formal Care and Adoption of Children in Eastern Europe and Central Asia” (UNICEF Report, September 2010); Innocenti Research Center, “Children in Institutions: The Beginning of the End? The Cases of Italy, Spain, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay” (UNICEF Report, 1999). 10 Jane Perlez, “Bucharest Journal; Little Care and Less Love: Romania’s Sad Orphans,” The New York Times, October 27, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/27/world/bucharest-journal-littlecare-and-less-love-romania-s-sad-orphans.html. 11 Tobis, Moving from Residential Institutions, 6. 9

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INTRODUCTION

In Hungary too, by the end of the 1980s and following the end of state socialism, numerous social welfare professionals including those within the field of child protection were united in their opinion that children’s homes had to be dismantled in favor of small, family-like units of care and preferably be substituted by foster care or reformed so that more attention could be paid to children’s social integration.12 These goals were finally formulated in the new Child Protection Act of 1997 that “promoted the upbringing of children within the family.”13 As a result, by the early 2000s, the proportion of endangered children living in children’s homes as opposed to foster care had started to decrease. According to post-1989 professional scholarship, this change was a long-due element of the modernization of the child protection system in Hungary. Leaving the outdated and harmful model of Soviet-type institutionbased care behind was seen necessary to catch up with more up-to-date, western European trends. Accordingly, large children’s homes and children’s towns popularized under state socialism were organized in a “top-down” method and were just another example of the country’s Moscow-oriented transformation.14 In the only comprehensive history of child protection in nineteenth and twentieth-century Hungary so far, Ferenc Gergely is especially negative about the Stalinist period. He claims that following the onset of state socialism in Hungary, much of the interwar achievements in child protection were destroyed.15 The present book focuses on child protection policies and practices between the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s in Hungary in order to examine the proposition underlying this criticism, namely that the state socialist transformation especially during Stalinism influenced child protection negatively and transformed it into a tool of totalitarian power. It was not in the late/post-state socialist era and in the East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European context that criticism against children’s homes and residential care was voiced for the first time. A centuries-long 12

Anna Volentics, Gyermekvédelem és reszocializáció (Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 1996); and Mária Herczog, Gyermekvédelmi kézikönyv (Budapest: KJK-KERSZÖV Jogi és Üzleti Kiadó, 2001). 13   “1997. évi XXXI. törvény a gyermekek védelméről és a gyámügyi igazgatásról” [Act 31 of 1997 on child protection and guardianship administration] Netjogtár, Hatályos Jogszabályok Gyűjteménye, http://net.jogtar.hu/jr/gen/hjegy_doc.cgi?docid=99700031.TV. 14   Klára Czike, “Gyermekvárosok,” Educatio 6, no. 1 (1997): 4. 15  Ferenc Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története (Budapest: Püski, 1993), 81.

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INTRODUCTION

polemic between supporters of institutions of residential care and those in favor of family-type services, such as foster care and adoption, has characterized the history of child protection internationally. In the last third of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century in Europe and the United States, for example, institutions for the care of abandoned and poor children came under attack as a result of the idealization of family life and the glorification of the countryside.16 Reformers at the time, concerned with the social ills of advancing industrialization, used very similar arguments to those popular in post-state socialist Europe, attacking orphanages for destroying children’s individuality and not preparing them adequately for the struggles of life.17 Influenced by examples of German and French family education, the American reformer Charles Loring Brace, for example, had been sending poor children from New York City to live with farmer families in the American Midwest from 1854 on. The famous orphan trains of the New York Children’s Aid Society relocated approximately 200,000 abandoned children between the mid-1850s and the end of the 1920s from cities on the East coast to families in the countryside, where most served more or less as indentured servants.18 Large institutions in the early twentieth-century United States, just as in the 1990s and early 2000s in Hungary, were either closed down or broken into smaller units where children lived with a “house mother.” In consequence of the preference in social work for foster care, orphanages diminished or were specialized into treatment centers and temporary shelters. Finally, following the anti-institution movement of the 1960s, they were entirely replaced by foster care.19 Furthermore, not only did deistitutionalization characterize the end   Ivan Jablonka, “Social Welfare in the Western World and the Rights of Children,” in The Routledge History of Childhood, 387–88. 17 Birgitte Søland, “‘Never a Better Home’: Growing up in American Orphanages, 1920–1970,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 1 (2015): 34–54; Nurith Zmora, “Orphanages,” in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society, vol. 2., ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 638–40. 18 For histories of the orphan trains, see among others, Michael Patrick and Evelyn Trickel, Orphan Trains to Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997); Stephen O’Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Clay Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City: The Western Emigration Program of the Children’s Aid Society,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (1999): 121–41. 19 Zmora, “Orphanages,” 640. 16

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INTRODUCTION

of state socialism in Europe, but similar reactions followed the end of other regimes, such as the Franco dictatorship in Spain in the 1970s.20 At the same time, industrialization-related poverty resulted not only in the dismantling but also in the creation of orphanages and institutions for abandoned children across Europe and North America. Reformers such as the late nineteenth-century American “child savers” considered institutions important for fighting child labor and introduced compulsory education, protecting children from exploitation in individual foster family units, while others believed in the positive effects of collective education.21 As opposed to the argument, central to traditional philanthropy, that child removal relieved lazy parents of their responsibilities, nineteenth-century advocates of children’s refuges claimed that it was a means to deprive unworthy parents of their livelihood.22 Institutions were also preferred after (civil) wars, as in early twentieth-century Russia, when foster family placement could not solve the problem of large groups of children without parents or parents were unable to care for them.23 Furthermore, institutions could serve the purpose of preserving the language and culture of immigrant and ethnic minority groups. They were also popular among single and/or poor parents as places where they could secure accommodation, food, and education for their children.24 Working parents in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, for example, used orphanages as a form of child care, which they preferred to day nurseries, because of the overnight care provided. Orphanages also relieved exhausted mothers of having to care for their children at the end of a long workday.25 These transnational parallels for and against institutionalization ask for a more complex answer to the question of how child protection transformed and functioned in state socialist/Stalinist Hungary than suggested by the Sovietization 20

Jablonka, “Social Welfare.” Zmora, “Orphanages,” 637. 22   Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 23   Catriona Kelly, Children’s Worlds: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 24   Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays,’” 125. 25   Jessie B. Ramey, Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 21

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argument. While not denying the harm large, underequipped institutions caused in the development of young children, nor the violence committed against children by members of institution personnel in the past, this book aims to explore child protection and state care beyond the one-dimensional, black-and-white images of victimized children and brutal institutions projected against the unproblematic dichotomy of a Soviet-style dictatorial state and an oppressed and passive society. The maltreatment and neglect of children in institutions has not only been characteristic of discussions concerning children’s homes in countries east of the former Iron Curtain. A social and political climate “that allows challenges to certain hegemonic structures” sparked an international wave of inquiries and apologies concerning the institutional care of children in Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, among others.26 In the framework of “repairing historical injustices,” research concentrated on discovering “truth and facts” with regard to the treatment of children who ended up in these institutions.27 This book does not aim at such an investigation. It is, however, important to acknowledge that historians writing about orphanages and children’s homes are part of a still-ongoing construction of the histories of these institutions. Even if they have already been shuttered for several decades, their histories are not a closed chapter of the past. Former teachers and pupils, who take very different positions when recalling the time they spent in residential care, all contribute to this story. Instead of arguing for or against institutional care, this book rather offers a glimpse into the different shapes the histories of state care in early 1950s Hungary took. The need for such an analysis is further motivated by the fact that existing child protection histories predominantly deal with the north-western hemisphere, including the histories of Western European, North American and Australian child protection systems.28 The child protection history of Eastern   Kjersti Ericsson, “Victim Captial and the Language of Money: The Norwegian Process of Inquiries and Apologies,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 1 (2015): 124. 27 Lieselot de Wilde and Bruno Vanobbergen, “Remembering the Ghent Orphan Houses: A NeverEnding Contested Space,” in ibid, 95. 28   Margaret D. Jacobs, “Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880–1914,” The Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2005): 453–76; Linda Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family: Britain, 1850–1940 (Edmonton, Alberta: The University of Alberta Press, 1995). 26

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INTRODUCTION

Europe, on the other hand, is dominated by descriptive studies of specific institutions or overviews of the major turns in national child protection structures.29 Most of these are provided from within the child protection profession in order to give background information on policy-making or pedagogy and child psychology-related topics.30 Furthermore, beyond (Soviet) Russia there is a lack of theoretically-grounded analysis of Eastern European child welfare and child protection history, especially concerning Stalinism.31 Surprisingly little is known about childhood in East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, and even less in the period of Stalinism.32 Descriptions of children’s lives in state socialist Europe have focused so far primarily on the importance of children for the party and efforts towards children’s political indoctrination through youth organizations such as the pioneers.33 This overtly politicized picture has recently been amended by research discussing children’s lives in the post-World War II period. The novelty of this scholarship is that it included the early years of the state socialist regimes in East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe in its scope of analysis and the ways the war shaped the experiences of children into the mid-1950s.34 Topics included the disruption caused by the war in children’s education, family structure, and damages to their health and psychological condition.

  Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története; György Hogya, A gyermek és ifjúságvédelem múltja és jelene Veszprém megyében (Veszprém: Veszprém Megyei Gyermek- és Ifjúságvédő Intézet, 1986). 30   Herczog, Gyermekvédelmi kézikönyv; József Veczkó, A gyermekvédelem pszichológiai és pedagógiai alapjai (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1990); András Domszky, Gyermek- és ifjúságvédelem (Budapest: BKAE Államigazgatási Kar, 1990). 31   See Catriona Kelly’s extensive publications on Russian childhood history: Children’s Worlds; Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta, 2005). 32 For an introductory overview on childhood in East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Slobodan Naumović and Miroslav Jovanović, eds., Childhood in South East Europe: Historical Perspectives on Growing Up in the 19th and 20th Century (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004). 33   Ildiko Erdei, “‘The Happy Child’ as an Icon of Stalinist Transformation: Yugoslavia’s Pioneer Organization,” in Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe, ed. John R. Lampe and Mark Mazower (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004), 154–79. 34   Machteld Venken and Maren Röger, “Growing Up in the Shadow of the Second World War: European Perspectives,” European Review of History 22, no. 2 (2015): 199–220 and articles in this special issue of the journal. 29

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The rise of the communist party (Hungarian Communist Party, later Hungarian Workers’ Party) into power and the formation of the single-party system at the end of the 1940s in Hungary mark the beginning, while the end of Stalinism and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 mark the temporal end of the investigation in this book. In the field of child protection in Hungary, as in most Eastern European countries, preference in national policy-making for an increase in the number of residential homes rather than the maintenance of the prewar system of foster care characterized the onset of state socialism. Following the revolution, Hungarian child protection underwent changes again. These included efforts to reform the child protection system through the introduction of a new governing body at the ministerial level, specialization of the types of residential care homes, and the improvement of material and inkind support provided to individual homes. The notion that World War II did not end in 1945 or in 1948 guided the approach to Stalinism in Hungary taken in this book. The cases of the children examined demonstrate that the effects of the war were very much present in the early 1950s in the number of sick and undernourished children, and of those who had lost a parent in the war or shortly afterwards as a result of poor health conditions. One of the central arguments of the following chapters is that the array of problems teachers and educators faced in the 1950s were not predominantly connected to the Stalinist politics of the Rákosi regime in Hungary. Instead, there was a wide variety of social problems that children, their parents, and representatives of the institution of child protection struggled with. This book examines the responses to these problems developed by child protection actors in national policy-making and institutional practices between 1949 and 1956. The history of child protection in Hungary between 1949 and 1956 shows that the history of state socialism, including Stalinism, cannot be understood without paying attention to earlier policies and practices. While the case files of children analyzed in the framework of this research come from the period between 1949 and 1956, child protection in early state socialist Hungary is examined as part of the wider history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century (Eastern) Europe. Policy decisions and practices related, for example, to the “solution to the Gypsy question” or ideas of pedagogical reform during

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the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century are important for an understanding of changes introduced in the field of child protection at the onset of state socialism. This book furthermore builds on an increasing body of scholarship on the social history of the Cold War in Eastern Europe. Contrary to previous research that focused on high politics and high profile actors and presented state socialism primarily as a historical break in the development of this region, scholarship in the past two decades has turned to everyday life contexts. It has taken into consideration continuities in actors, institutions, and processes across time, as well as networks of exchange across place.35 A variety of topics have been explored to understand the Cold War period as related to larger European and global processes, such as modernization and industrialization and their effects on the states and societies in this region. Accordingly, states cease to be homogeneous and almighty entities. They are rather characterized by the different and often conflicting interests of actors, who represent different positions and levels of institutional hierarchies. The state in this approach is a part of society rather than its enemy and is formed by a variety of social and not just political processes.36 Feminist historical scholarship devoted to the state socialist countries in Europe has combined these revisionist perspectives and everyday life history with attention to gender as a category of social difference. 37 Concerning the history of welfare politics and gender in state socialist Hungary, Lynne Haney has emphasized that clients of the new socialist welfare institutions were not powerless victims of the state but had room for maneuvering and strategizing, “sometimes accepting, and other times rejecting, state understandings of their needs.”38 A similar perspective on power exercised by welfare institutions has driven the analysis of historian This scholarship comprises works on a wide variety of themes, from the history of consumption to new labor history. 36   For a summary of the major characteristics of this approach to the social history of the Cold War, see Mark Edele, “Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 2 (2007): 349–73. 37 See among many others, Shana Penn and Jill Massino, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 38   Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 18. 35 

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Linda Mahood in the field of child protection. She has used Foucault’s theory of discipline and regulation as a framework to interpret the exercise of power in an asylum for children in Scotland in the early twentieth century.39 Mahood has claimed that through processes of disciplining, students of residential homes internalized distinct class and gender positions. At the same time, she has emphasized the need to consider residential homes not only as terrains of repression but also contestation, “where opposition, rebellion, and resistance was produced.”40 Relying on the above scholarship, I argue that the institution of child protection fulfilled specific regulatory functions in early state socialist Hungary. I claim that placement in state care was intended not only to influence the behavior of children but also the behavior of their parents, especially their mothers. I present three different areas of life where the regulatory function of child protection was manifest and caseworkers and teachers tried to effect change in the lives of parents and children. The first, explored in chapter 2, concerns parental employment. The opening up of employment to women and the parallel expectation that all active-age women join the labor force in the late 1940s and the early 1950s was not matched with an adequate child care infrastructure. The lack of child care services created a tension between women’s responsibilities in the field of paid work and care work. Child protection institutions stepped in and partly overtook child care functions enabling mothers, especially lone mothers, to take up paid work. This situation also enabled guardianship and child protection caseworkers to regulate the behavior of mothers. As a result of prejudice about Roma as “work-shy” (munkakerülő), caseworkers’ evaluation of unemployment among mothers could affect Romani and non-Romani mothers differently.41 This chapter also Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family.   Ibid., 13. 41  The term “work-shy” has racial/eugenic connotations. It was historically coupled with marginalized forms of work and ways of life, such as prostitution, begging, and itineracy. With the growing influence of eugenic thought in the late nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century in Europe and across the Atlantic the elimination of work-shyness among other forms of social illnesses was seen as a necessary means towards the strengthening of nation-states. It was increasingly seen as an inborn characteristic of certain groups of people that typically included “Gypsies.” In Bavaria, for example, a law on “Combatting Gypsies, Vagabonds, and the Work-Shy” introduced in 1926 identified Gypsiness as being “against all forms of work by nature.” See “Gesetz 39  40

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INTRODUCTION

presents the cases of children who ended up in state care not upon demand by authorities but because their parents and relatives turned to child protection representatives with a request for their children’s institutionalization. A second terrain where the institution of child protection fulfilled a regulatory function was female sexuality. In chapter 3 I show that child protection and guardianship caseworkers made an effort to regulate the sexual behavior of both mothers, especially lone mothers, and young, teenage girls. They used children’s placement in state care to curb their mothers’ sexual activity and keep it within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage. A similar pattern was manifest in the case of teenage girls. Child protection thereby contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of the centrality of the (nuclear) family in early state socialist Hungary. Romani women’s sexual regulation through child protection furthermore aimed to ensure that they raised their children to become productive citizens and assimilated into Hungarian society. Third, in chapter 4 I show that particular regulatory processes also characterized the everyday life of children living in residential homes. Work activities in and around homes were central to children’s daily routine and fostered a form of self-disciplinary practice by creating gendered “habits of work” among children. These practices both reinforced and changed existing patterns of the gendered division of work. At the same time, they also aimed to contribute to the assimilation of Roma by the erasure of their perceived work-shyness. While chapters 2 to 4 relate child protection in early state socialist/Stalinist Hungary to earlier historical periods, chapter 5 connects Stalinism with the 1970s and the 1980s. It discusses a particular home for infants founded in 1946 where the children of leading political figures who had been arrested and/ or executed for political reasons in the late 1940s and the early 1950s were placed. The chapter examines the representation of this residential home in the recollections of two mothers and one of the former children in care that were recorded in the late state socialist period, when open criticism of the Stalinist period in Hungary was allowed. In these recollections child protection and this particular children’s home represented the failures of the regime. zur Bekämpfung von Zigeunern, Landfahrern und Arbeitsscheuen vom 16. Juli 1926,” Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt für den Freistaat Bayern 17 (1926): 359–61. During National Socialism the category work-shy (Arbeitsscheu) was a ground for deportation into concentration camps.

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Research for this book was based on a variety of written as well as oral sources from multiple locales. These include state policies issued by the Ministry of Welfare, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Education in Hungary, which were the different national-level agencies responsible for the field of child protection and residential care during the time period in question. Written sources also include ministerial publications, such as the rules and regulations for residential institutions and other documents concerning the work of these ministries in the field of child protection. Documents related to institutions, like the minutes of council meetings on child protection related matters at the respective county and municipal councils, as well as the posthumous documents of the former director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County in the first half of the 1950s, amend the above sources. The most significant part of the institutional-level analysis in this book is based on a total of 630 children’s case files documenting the placement of 797 children (see Tables 6 and 7 in the Appendix) from the archives of the former Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County (Budapest), the Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County (Szolnok), and the Child Protection Institution of Szabolcs-Szatmár County in Hungary (Nyíregyháza).42 These counties represent three different types of locations. Budapest, the capital city of Hungary, had the largest inflow of children in the period (see Table 3 in the Appendix). Szolnok County had a predominantly agricultural population. As opposed to the other two locations Szabolcs-Szatmár County had an already documented history of addressing the so-called “Gypsy question,” and children’s case files mentioned “Gypsy” children. The case files of children from Budapest and Nyíregyháza were randomly selected from the files of children who were received by these three institutions between 1949 and 1956 and placed in state care for so-called material and moral reasons, concepts I describe in detail in   The case files are located at the archives of the Budapest Special Service for Child Protection (Fővárosi Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára); the JászNagykun-Szolnok County Special Service for Child Protection (Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára) in the city of Szolnok; and the Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County Special Service for Child Protection (Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Gyermekvédelmi Igazgatóság és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára) in the city of Nyíregyháza.

42

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the next chapter (see Table 6 in the Appendix). In order to learn more about the latter category, the files from Szolnok represent a non-random selection of placements in state care for moral reasons (see Table 7 in the Appendix). The case files provide uneven information about children and their families. All files consist of a standardized form with personal data about the children, their parents, grandparents, and siblings, as well as a short reference to the reason for their placement. These data sheets, however, were not always filled out completely. Furthermore, while some children have several other documents in their folder, others have nothing. These documents may include statements from the police, a psychologist, a physician, or a school director; a detailed description of the family’s material circumstances; recommendation for placement from local welfare authorities; and one or more decision(s) about placement from child protection authorities. Historian Kaisa Vehkalahti has noted, in analyzing such professional documents in connection with girls’ reform school education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finland, that individual cases were shaped into cases that fitted particular administrative purposes.43 They were “produced for certain objectives and from certain points of departure.”44 In a similar fashion the wording of cases was an important element in the files of children placed in state care in Hungary. Caseworkers used professional jargon through which they shaped cases into “a form that was recognizable” for professionals as cases of child endangerment.45 Thus these files should be read against the possible professional predispositions caseworkers and institution representatives may have had regarding their clients. The folders also contain a variety of letters. These include communications from child protection institution directors who wrote to parents about the behavior of their children in state care, or reports about children that child protection supervisors, who oversaw the care of children in foster families, wrote to institution directors. Some of these letters are requests that parents or other relatives wrote to child protection authorities inquiring about the whereabouts Kaisa Vehkalahti, Constructing Reformatory Identity: Girls’ Reform School Education in Finland, 1893–1923 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 44   Ibid., xix. 45 Ibid., xx. 43 

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INTRODUCTION

of their children or describing the circumstances that had led to the removal of their children from their own perspective. There is, for example, one letter written by a child to an institution director in which she complained about bad treatment by her foster family. Letters are, however, rare among the files selected for this research. This might be the result of different factors, such as parents’ lack of knowledge about or access to such means of communication with authorities, because they could not read and write. It is furthermore not known whether caseworkers filed all such documents or selected to preserve only some of them. While children were categorized and listed according to gender, other information about them had to be dug out of their case files. I identified children as Gypsy/Roma when child protection caseworkers defined them or at least one of their parents as “Gypsy” and whose case files contained at least one, or preferably more of the following pieces of information: direct reference to being “Gypsy,” family name typical among Romani communities of the region, occupations typical among, and held almost exclusively by Roma, such as folk musician or mud brick maker, or housing in a segregated Romani settlement.46 In the case files in Budapest and Szolnok there were hardly any mention of “Gypsy” children. In Nyíregyháza, I collected seventy-seven case files in a total of one hundred children where reference was made to them being “Gypsy.” I also relied on the reports of municipal and county councils concerning the “Gypsy question.” Last but not least, thirty-one semi-structured interviews, seventeen of which were conducted with men and women formerly in state care and fourteen with retired teachers, educators, and other employees of various child protection authorities, informed this book. Part of the interviews with teachers and educators belong to the professional and life history interview series of the Budapest Special Service for Child Protection.47 The series was initiated from For typical Romani family names, I relied on a list of the inhabitants of various Romani settlements in the county prepared by social workers in northeast Hungary in 1949. See Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Levéltára (Archives of Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County, hereafter MNL SZSZBML), XXIV. 562. 593/1949. 47  Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok (Portrait gallery of child protection), Fővárosi Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat (hereafter FGYK-Tegyesz). Hungarian-language information concerning the life history interviews that were conducted prior to 2010 can be found in Sándorné Szendrei, “Gyermekvédelmi arcképcsarnok,” Család, Gyermek, Ifjúság 5 (2010): 5–14, http://www.csagyi. hu/images/stories/kiadvanyok/folyoirat/CsaGyI_2010_5.pdf. Special thanks to Mrs. Mária Szendrei for 46 

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INTRODUCTION

within the profession with the goal of passing on knowledge about key figures in the history of child protection from the end of World War II onwards. The majority of these interviews involved former employees of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County. Part of the activities of the initiators of the interview series consisted of meetings with retired child protection workers in Budapest, where former colleagues exchanged anecdotes and events of their respective institutions. I attended two of these meetings, where I got to know teachers and educators who had been active in the early 1950s, and conducted interviews with several members of this group between 2006 and 2009. Research in childhood history has pointed to the importance of addressing the experiences and accounts of children instead of focusing exclusively on the lives of adults when writing history. 48 How to capture the voices of children however, has remained a dilemma. Scholars have mostly used oral history interviews acknowledging that experiences of the past can be made available only through interpretation and representation made at the point of the recording of the interview. Furthermore, adults who speak about their childhood have a broader understanding of their situation as grown-ups than they had as children. The possibility that re-evaluations of the past may influence memories needed to be considered in the case of interviews both with former teachers and with former residents of children’s homes. Interviews are in this respect very much like written historical documents that need to be analyzed as representations of the past. In chapter 4, I discuss the relevance of post-socialist framings of the state socialist and in particular the Stalinist past to interviewees’ recollections of placement in state care and the situation of children in residential homes in the 1950s. Of particular importance here were also post-1989 discourses on the integration of Roma in Hungarian society. In chapter 5, in turn, I focus on how a shift in the evaluation of Stalinism after the Thaw affected storytellers’ memories in the 1970s and the 1980s of their accounts of the first half of the 1950s. In this book both male and female former residential home inhabitants have recalled their experiences of state care, one of whom identified herself as being of Romani origin. Some of the interviews come from the Oral History 48

introducing these interviews to me and putting me in touch with her former colleagues for interviews.   Venken and Röger, “Growing Up in the Shadow of the Second World War,” 204.

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Archives of the 1956 Institute in Hungary.49 These interviews focus on the 1956 revolution, and only certain sections of those that were conducted with former residents of state care institutions were relevant for this research. Between 2006 and 2010, I personally spoke to thirteen former residents, whom I met by asking around at the three child protection institutions where I conducted research. The snowball technique did not work effectively to contact persons, because former residents of state care I talked to did not keep in touch with others. This was related to the shame and stigma attached to a childhood in out-of-home care as well as to coping with the memories of a troubled childhood. Several of my interviewees told me they had never talked about their experiences outside their narrowest family circles before. An exception was the group of former residents of the Children’s Town of Hajdúhadház, discussed in chapter 4. They have kept informed about each other and also organized meetings through the “Friendship Circle of the Children’s Town of Hajdúhadház” (A Hajdúhadházi Gyermekváros Baráti Köre) for many decades.50 Unfortunately, none of these took place during my research. After this brief introduction and methodological reflection, chapter 1 provides historical and legal background to child protection between 1949 and 1956, placing these years in the political, economic, and social context of early state socialist Hungary, as well as the twentieth-century history of child protection. This chapter pays particular attention to the connection that developed between child protection and the “solution to the Gypsy question” in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe and Hungary.

49

1956-os Intézet–Oral History Archívum (hereafter 1956 Institute OHA). Although following a government decree in 2019, the Oral History Archives was incorporated into the VERITAS Research Institute and Archives, throughout this book I opted to keep the original reference to this source material. 50   László Tóth, ed., Emlékkötet Ádám Zsigmondról és a Hajdúhadházi Gyermekvárosról (Debrecen: Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Tan. VB. Művelődési Oszt. Pedagógus Továbbképzési Intézete, 1981).

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Chapter 1

CHILD PROTECTION IN EARLY STATE SOCIALIST HUNGARY

A brief introduction to the historical context: Hungary, 1949–1956 In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Hungary was a country deeply shaped by the effects of World War II and the political, economic, and social changes set in motion by the new communist regime. According to comparative estimates, the material and human loss the countries of East and Southeast Europe suffered were “of an altogether different order from the experience of war in the West.”1 Following Poland and the Soviet Union, Hungary lost the largest proportion (9 percent) of its prewar population of close to ten million; about 900,000 people, among them approximately 500,000 Jews, perished. The proportions of Germany’s losses were roughly similar. In comparison, the loss of human life in France was estimated at 1.4 percent (with close to 600,000 deaths), and in Britain and Italy about 0.9–1 percent (with about 500,000 deaths).2 Hungary’s basic industries and infrastructure were largely demolished; the country lost forty percent of its national wealth. This was topped with high rates of inflation and unemployment. The Hungarian population, among them many widows and orphaned children, faced extreme hardships in the second half of the 1940s.3 Between 1949 and 1956, the real income of the population declined   Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), 17. Deborah S. Cornelius, Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 384; Ignác Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest: Corvina, Osiris, 1999), 216. 3   Tibor Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete a XX. század második felében (Budapest: Osiris, 2001), 30. 1 2

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significantly, and the percentage of poor people was very high. In the first half of the 1950s, between sixty-five and seventy-five percent of the 9.5 million Hungarians—that is, around 5.7–6.7 million people—could be considered poor.4

Figure 1. Distribution of eggs among the inhabitants of the Mária Valéria Settlement, 1946 (Fortepan/Donated by Sándor Bauer). The Mária Valéria Settlement was home to the poorest residents of Budapest, among them Roma. A soldier keeps order while others, most likely social workers, identify those entitled to receive support.

The historical time this book examines includes the period of Stalinism in Hungary that followed the rise into power of the Hungarian Workers’ Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja, MDP) in the late 1940s. By 1949 the MDP had gained full political power in Hungary and a single-party communist regime was established, backed by the presence of occupying Soviet troops. The MDP was born in 1948 out of the forced merger of the Social Democratic Party (Szociáldemokrata Párt, SZDP), a historic and well-established representative of working-class rights in Hungary since the end of the nineteenth century, and the Hungarian Communist Party (Magyar Kommunista Párt, MKP), a party   Zsuzsa Ferge, Fejezetek a magyar szegénypolitika történetéből, 2nd ed. (Budapest: Kávé Kiadó, 1998), 39, 46.

4

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CHILD PROTECTION IN EARLY STATE SOCIALIST HUNGARY

Figure 2. Children in front of Café New York in Budapest, 1946 (Fortepan/Donated by Sándor Bauer). The image builds on a long tradition of the visual representation of children as a way to express the extent of suffering caused by war, hunger, and poverty. The guests sitting in this wellknown and frequented café of the capital city provide a strong contrast to the poverty-stricken children of postwar Budapest. Note parts of the word “democracy” on a poster behind them.

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without much social base before the end of World War II. The communists, and later the MDP, supported by Stalin’s Soviet Union, strove to take sole control of the country’s political and economic life.5 The leading party organs oversaw the work of the Parliament, and exercised decision-making power that could override steps taken by the government and state administrative bodies. From the summer of 1948 onwards, both political and administrative power was concentrated in the hands of the MDP, with Mátyás Rákosi as its secretary general. The Rákosi regime in Hungary was a Soviet-style Stalinist dictatorship. The state security apparatus was enlarged and society polarized by agitation against “the enemies of the people.”6 A series of show trials also took place in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the largest of which was the trial and execution of the former Minister of Interior and Foreign Affairs László Rajk and several other party members in the fall of 1949. Enemies of the regime included not only individual politicians but also organizations and social groups that were identified as political cultures antagonistic to the goals of the communist party. These could be, for example, representatives of the churches, those associated politically with the previous, interwar regime in Hungary, as well as those outside the ranks of the working classes, such as so-called “kulak” peasants, intellectuals, and members of the former upper classes. As in the other countries of the Eastern bloc, Stalin’s death in 1953 brought about the first signs of the political Thaw in Hungary. Consequently, the position of Rákosi, who had been prime minister since August 1952, weakened. He had to hand over this post to another member of the Central Committee, Imre Nagy. Between 1953 and 1955, Nagy headed several alterations in Hungarian political and economic policy. Most significant was the redirection of investments from the industrial to the agricultural sector, the lowering of consumer product prices and increase in salaries, and the easing of political purges. The end of Soviet backing for reformism in early 1955 led to the dismissal of Nagy and the brief return of Rákosi into power. The outbreak of the Revolution in 1956 was largely a consequence of the political and economic backlash that followed.   Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák, and Tibor Frank, eds., A History of Hungary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); Miklós Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century. 6  Mark Pittaway, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 11. 5

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Nagy, who was named prime minister again during the revolution, headed political reforms. Following Soviet military intervention in early November and the subsequent end of the revolution, Nagy and several other politicians, with their families, were taken to Romania as political prisoners. In 1957 János Kádár rose to power with the help of the Soviet Union, and in an effort to consolidate his position crushed antigovernment strikes. This led to the imprisonment and execution of the participants of revolutionary events, including the execution of Nagy in June 1958. Extensive industrialization, also called “catch-up industrialization,” with an emphasis on building up Hungary’s heavy industry and expanding its labor force, characterized the early, Stalinist phase of state socialist economy.7 Economic investments were overwhelmingly poured into the industry and the production of raw materials. The large-scale labor force needs of the expanding industrial sector resulted in a significant lowering of the unemployment rate by the early 1950s. While the unemployment rate had risen to ten percent at the end of the 1940s, in the first half of the 1950s there was a lack of labor force in certain economic sectors.8 Meanwhile, catch-up industrialization rendered agriculture “a resource” for the industrial sector and the agricultural population “second class citizens.”9 The period between the end of World War II and the early 1960s saw both the beginning of agricultural privatization and the collectivization of agricultural land. A land reform introduced in 1945 redistributed thirty-five percent of the country’s agricultural land among the former landless or small landholder agricultural proletariat. While the Hungarian Communist Party led this redistribution of agricultural land from gentry landholders and the Catholic Church to peasants, between 1949 and 1953 the focus of the MDP’s agricultural policy was already on land collectivization. As a result of collectivization, in 1953, thirty-four percent of the country’s land was already in state ownership, and the proportion of land still in private hands dropped by two-thirds.10 Hungary’s transition to an industrial society had a great impact on the agricultural population, manifest, for example,   Pittaway, The Workers’ State.   Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, 275; Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete, 219. 9 Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete, 188. 10  Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, 278. 7 8

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in the significant labor migration from the countryside to urban and newlyfounded factory centers.11

Figure 3. Construction works at the Hungarian Radio, 1949 (Fortepan/Donated by Rádió és Televízió Újság). After the end of the war, people found temporary jobs in the capital city at construction sites like this one. The two women in headscarves are wearing clothing typical of peasants from the countryside.

Communist ideology as well as an increasing need for industrial labor motivated women’s large-scale entrance into the labor force in Eastern Europe in the early 1950s.12 Women made up slightly over thirty percent of the total work force in Hungary in Eastern Europe in 1950. In twenty years this rate reached almost fifty percent.13 Most skilled work positions, however, were available only to men, and the female labor force in Hungary, as in other socialist countries, was concentrated in light industries, such as textiles, shoemaking, and food processing. According to a survey from 1959, only twelve Ibid.; Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete, 188, 215, and 219.   Mária Palasik and Balázs Sipos, eds., Házastárs? Munkatárs? Vetélytárs? A női szerepek változása a 20. századi Magyarországon (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2005). 13  Éva Fodor, Working Difference: Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945–1995 (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2003). 11  12

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percent of employed women worked in skilled and twenty-five percent in semi-skilled positions. This tendency of women’s presence in semi- and unskilled work was also characteristic of the agricultural sector.14 Women’s wages in this early period were on average sixty percent of men’s, and wage work was gender-segregated.15 The largest ethnic minority groups in interwar Hungary were Jews and Germans, both forming around five percent of the Hungarian population, while Roma, according to a non-representative survey in 1941, made up 1.4 percent.16 Following the Holocaust, the postwar immigration of returning Jews, the expulsion of the German population in the late 1940s, and population exchanges with Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, Roma became one of the largest ethnic minority groups in state socialist Hungary.17 The late 1940s and early 1950s marked a transitional period in the lives of Roma in Eastern Europe.18 With the onset of catch-up industrialization and the formation of agricultural cooperatives, opportunities for seasonal agricultural work diminished. Although after the end of World War II more than one third of Roma were day-laborers working in the agriculture and living in rural areas in Hungary, they were left out of the land reform of 1945.19 This practice was similar to other state socialist countries with the exception of Yugoslavia.20 Meanwhile, a number of traditional Romani occupations, such as wood carving, Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, A nők helyzete a munkahelyen és a családban (Budapest: Társadalmi Statisztikai Főosztály, 1962), 10–12; Ildikó Asztalos-Morell, Emancipation’s Dead-End Roads: Studies in the Formation and Development of the Hungarian Model for Agriculture and Gender, 1956–1989 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 1999), 31; Susan Zimmermann, “Gender Regime and Gender Struggle in Hungarian State Socialism,” Aspasia 4, no. 1 (2010): 3. 15   Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Statisztikai évkönyv, 1949–1955 (Budapest: KSH, 1957), 60; Haney, Inventing the Needy, 33–34; Zimmermann, “Gender Regime,” 3. 16   Gábor Kertesi and Gábor Kézdi, A cigány népesség Magyarországon: Dokumentáció és adattár (Budapest: Socio-Typo, 1998), 267, 283, 295; David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 17   Cornelius, Hungary in World War II, 404; Crowe, A History of the Gypsies, 91–92. 18   On Roma in early state socialist Hungary, see Balázs Majtényi and György Majtényi, A Contemporary History of Exclusion: The Roma Issue in Hungary from 1945 to 2015 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016); Stewart, “Communist Roma Policy”; Péter Apor, “Cigányok tere: Kísérlet a kommunista romapolitika közép-kelet-európai összehasonlító elemzésére, 1945–1961,” Aetas 24, no. 2 (2009): 69–86. 19   Stewart, “Communist Roma Policy,” 74; Apor, “Cigányok tere,” 69. 20   Zoltan Barany, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 137. 14 

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basket weaving, and brickmaking became highly marginalized and mostly disappeared in these years. Others, such as horse trading, in consequence of the elimination of private trade in Hungary in 1947, were criminalized.21 22

Figure 4. Roma settlement at Kecskemét, 1930 (Fortepan/Donated by Attila Jurányi). Such settlements were typically segregated on the outskirts of villages and towns.22

In state socialist Hungary factories offered job opportunities mainly for Romani men, but mostly in the lower-paid, unskilled sectors of heavy industry, such as mining or ironmaking. According to the first representative Roma survey from 1971, eleven percent of Romani household heads were employed in skilled, ten percent in semi-skilled, and forty-four percent in unskilled jobs. Another István Kemény, Beszámoló a magyarországi cigányok helyzetével foglalkozó, 1971-ben végzett kutatásról (Budapest: MTA Szociológiai Kutató Intézet, 1976), 33; Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997). 22   This image of a segregated settlement at the outskirts of a Hungarian town relies on topoi that became standard in the ethnographic representation and construction of Roma since the end of the nineteenth century. Showing Roma and Romani children in groups alludes to the fear of their perceived high numbers. The passivity of the adult men sitting around implies their work-shyness. The dusty ground, the barefooted children and the houses built with adobe represent “Gypsies” as people of the nature and in contrast to, and separated from, the world of civilization outside of the boundaries of the settlement. The deliberate inclusion of the boy in the front left-hand corner of the picture, wearing a Turkish-like hat, contributes to the orientalization of “the Gypsy.” (I would like to thank Dr. Frank Reuter at the Research Center on Antygypsyism at Heidelberg University for these insights.) 21 

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fifteen percent still worked in the agricultural sector, and three percent were day-laborers.23 The employment rate of Romani women remained much lower than that of Romani men and non-Romani women. While by that time over sixty percent of active Hungarian women were employed, Roma women’s employment rate was at thirty percent.24 Pushed out of their former areas of occupation and denied new economic opportunities, Roma were thus in a precarious situation in the first half of the 1950s.25 A local council report from a southern Hungarian region from 1955 is illustrative of the postwar social-economic situation of Roma. The authorities noted about a Romani settlement that consisted of twenty-eight families, including thirty-six adult men and forty adult women, that a mere eight persons were formally employed. They had jobs at the local state farm of the wood industry while another three persons worked as musicians.26 This meant that only fourteen percent of the seventy-six active-age adults had a source of income. The settle-ment had two two-room houses while the rest lived in oneroom huts. Families had on average six children. The authorities admitted that people were often reported to be sick because they fed themselves with dead animals and their wells had unclean water. While the early 1960s marked the beginnings of the authorities’ explicit and nationwide focus on Roma in Hungary, there was already considerable interest in the “Gypsy question” in the 1950s.27 Recommendations for the improvement of the “situation of the Gypsy population,” for example, were on the agenda of the Political Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party in 1955 and 1956. Analyzing these documents as well as background reports prepared on this occasion, historian István Feitl has shown that the socialist authorities distanced themselves from the racial definition of the Roma as well as the violent administrative control measures of the interwar period.   Kemény, Beszámoló, 33, 57.   Ibid. 25 Stewart, “Communist Roma Policy,” 74–75; Barany, The East European Gypsies, 137–40. 26   Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Baranya Megyei Levéltára, Pécsváradi Járási Tanács VB Ig. oszt. 9-1/1955. II. 3, cited by Attila Márfi, ed., Cigánysors: A cigányság történeti múltja és jelene, vol. 1 (Pécs: Emberháza Alapítvány, Erdős Kamill Cigánymúzeum, Cigány Kulturális és Közművelődési Egyesület, 2005), 159. 27 István Feitl, “A cigányság ügye a napirendről lekerült: Előterjesztés az MDP Politikai Bizottsága számára 1956 áprilisából,” Múltunk 53, no. 1 (2008): 257–72. 23 24

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Instead they found employment opportunities the most important in “solving the Gypsy question,” and emphasized the importance of providing better housing and improving education through school attendance and daycare. They also recommended supporting Romani cultural activities and language learning, and suggested the establishment of a national forum or committee for coordinating these activities. This turn towards social and environmental factors as opposed to previous racialized approaches in defining the “Gypsy question” was also characteristic of other newly formed socialist states of Eastern Europe. In her excellent book on the history of citizenship rights of Roma in postwar Czechoslovakia, Celia Donert has pointed to a similar distancing from racial politics towards Roma in the 1950s.28 Czechoslovak authorities saw Roma as “ideal citizens of Stalinism” loyal to the state. Not until the late 1950s and early 1960s did a rollback of such assimilationist approaches and a strengthening of biological discourses about Roma occur. The party declaration concerning the “situation of the Gypsy population” in Hungary in 1961 also signaled such a turn.29 While it identified Roma as a social layer as opposed to an ethnic minority, it constructed their assimilation into majority society based on their perceived “attitude to work.” The resolution established three categories: assimilated Roma, who had already abandoned the “Gypsy lifestyle”; the semi-assimilated, who lived in segregated settlements and had only temporary work; and last, the “social parasites” of “partially settled, wandering Gypsies,” who had not been assimilated.30 Despite the fact that the state distanced itself from former racial politics toward Roma in the early 1950s, discourses from the interwar period that attributed a wandering, crime-prone lifestyle and work-shyness to certain groups of Roma lived on.31 Indeed, the Ministry of Interior issued separate black identity   Celia Donert, The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 29  “A cigánylakosság helyzetének megjavításával kapcsolatos egyes feladatokról, Az MSZMP KB Politikai Bizottságának határozata, 1961. június 20.” [Tasks concerning the improvement of the situation of the Gypsy population, Decree by the Politburo of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party’s Central Committee, June 20, 1961], in A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt határozatai és dokumentumai, 1956–1962, ed. Ágnes Ságvári and Henrik Vass (Budapest: Kossuth, 1979), 602–5. 30   This categorization resembled a Central Committee resolution on work among the “Gypsy population” in Czechoslovakia issued in 1958. See Donert, The Rights of the Roma, 124–26. 31 For details, see Eszter Varsa, “‘The (Final) Solution of the Gypsy Question’: Continuities in 28

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cards in order to control the “twenty to twenty-five thousand wandering Gypsies” who “could not prove to have a proper job” or a registered place of living in 1955.32 Introduced two years after Hungarian citizens had received identity cards, this discriminatory regulation was in effect until 1961 despite repeated objections. Other measures, such as the forced bathing of Roma, were not outlawed or put to an end after the Hungarian communist party came to power at the end of the 1940s. A decree from 1924 by the Ministry of Interior, for example, which enabled the enforcement of hygienic measures among “Gypsies” identified as “sources of infectious diseases,” gave rise to humiliating practices carried out by health authorities for the “prevention of wandering lifestyle” for decades from the 1940s on.33 While such discourses and practices reflected exclusionary politics on behalf of state socialist authorities towards Roma, it is important to note the continuities that can be traced back to the first half of the twentieth century in Hungary as well as the parallels with other countries in Europe.34 Within the course of a few years in the early 1950s, significant changes took place not only in the political, but also the welfare system of Hungary. In the new welfare model introduced by the state socialist government, welfare provisions were attached to paid employment. This system favored statesector employees.35 Since members of the agricultural population, including most Roma, were outside of these areas of employment at the time, they had no social insurance. Employment-related welfare provisions included, among others, access to enterprise-based kindergartens and nurseries as well as in-kind benefits, such as milk or meat. The new welfare model reflected the centrality of productive work in the country’s catch-up industrialization project. Salaries were set low to pressure active-age adults to enter the labor force, leading

Discourses about Roma in Hungary, 1940s–1950s,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 1 (2017): 114–30.   Gyula Purcsi Barna, “Fekete személyi igazolvány és munkatábor: Kísérlet a ‘cigánykérdés megoldására’ az ötvenes évek Magyarországán,” in A cigánykérdés “gyökeres és végleges megoldása”: Tanulmányok a XX. századi “cigánykérdés” történetéből (Debrecen: Csokonai Kiadó, 2004), 248–84. 33  Gábor Bernáth, ed., Forced Bathings in Romani Settlements (1940–1985) (Budapest: Roma Sajtóközpont, 2002); Purcsi, “Fekete személyi igazolvány,” 259–60. 34   Christian Promitzer, “Typhus, Turks, and Roma: Hygiene and Ethnic Difference in Bulgaria, 1912– 1944,” in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, ed. Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011), 87–126. I discuss the child protection-relevant aspects of these long-term continuities later in this chapter. 35  Haney, Inventing the Needy, 39–44. 32

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to a two-earner family income model. While the state made serious efforts to socialize previously unpaid work, such as child care, housework, and care for the elderly, provisions never met existing need, and women bore the tensions created by catch-up industrialization between work and family life.36 Due to the lack of the redistribution of unpaid work between men and women, in practice the two-earner model functioned as a two-earner-one-free-houseworker-onefamily-income model.37 Furthermore, a general lack of child care facilities and the limited number of places available for children in these institutions made employed mothers’ situation especially difficult.

Historical and legal background of child protection in Hungary in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century The development of child protection in state socialist Hungary and in the other countries of Eastern Europe was influenced by the uneven development of child protection in the first half of the twentieth century. The establishment of a statewide child protection system based on residential institutions, which the authorities tried to introduce from the late 1940s onwards, depended greatly on the structures of child protection that existed in these countries beforehand. The new state socialist regime in Hungary inherited a well-developed state-financed child protection system that had been founded in the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This centralized, foster-care-based system consisted of a network of child protection institutions (called state children’s asylums until 1948), foster family colonies, and several children’s homes, especially in the capital city, that were run by private welfare organizations. The creation of a state child protection system in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire was unique at the time even by international standards.38 It formed part of social reform initiatives that targeted the alleviation of poverty 36

Zimmermann, “Gender Regime.”   Ibid., 6. 38   Susan Zimmermann, Divide, Provide and Rule: An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Policy, and Social Reform in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011), 55–56. 37

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among those identified by authorities as worthy of support. These were people with physical or mental health disabilities, and the ill or hospitalized, who were unable to work. Financed from a state health care fund nationalized in 1898, it initially covered the costs of care of children under the age of seven, whom authorities declared “abandoned.” In Poland, by contrast, the system of care for abandoned children was much less developed. There, the state child protection system started to be expanded only in the 1920s, but only in the former Habsburg-owned territories of the country. At the onset of state socialism there were hardly any homes for children, which was one of the main reasons, alongside a lack of financial resources, that placement in residential institutions did not develop.39 Instead, contrary to the Hungarian case, families were encouraged to get more involved, and foster care was revived in Poland already from the late 1950s and early 1960s onwards.40 In the Hungarian territories of the Habsburg Empire, state children’s asylums were set up by the child protection laws of 1901.41 They served several purposes. First, they received and temporarily accommodated abandoned/ endangered children recommended for state care. They also fulfilled medical functions, since children underwent a compulsory medical examination before placement to foster families. The director of state children’s asylums therefore always had to be a physician. Second, state children’s asylums directed children’s assignment to foster families or in special cases other institutions of care, such as sanatoriums. As the child protection system was based on foster care, the majority of children were placed with families in the countryside. Although   Izabela Szczepaniak-Wiecha, Agnieszka Małek, and Krystyna Slany, “The system of care for abandoned children in Poland 1900–1960: The development of family-forms of care,” in Need and Care—Glimpses into the Beginnings of Eastern Europe’s Professional Welfare, ed. Kurt Schilde and Dagmar Schulte (Opladen and Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2005), 180. 40   Ibid., 192–93; Joanna Wiesler, “Die Kinderfürsorge und der Alltag polnischer Familien in den 1980er-Krisenjahren: Die Arbeit der Gesellschaft der Kinderfreunde,” in Wirtschaftskrisen als Wendepunkte: Ursachen, Folgen und historische Einordnungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Dariusz Adamczyk and Stephan Lehnstaedt (Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2015), 400. 41   “1901. évi VIII. törvénycikk az állami gyermekmenhelyekről” [Act 8 of 1901 about state-provided children’s homes], http://www.1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3¶m=6822; “1901. évi XXI. törvénycikk a közsegélyre szoruló 7 éven felüli gyermekek gondozásáról” [Act 21 of 1901 about the care of children above seven years old in need of public relief], http://www.1000ev.hu/index. php?a=3¶m=6835; “1/1903. BM.sz. rendelet: Szabályzat az elhagyott gyermekek védelméről” [Decree 1/1903 of the Ministry of Interior: Ordinance about the protection of abandoned children], Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára 38 (1903): 585–34. 39

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state children’s asylums were distributed across the country, not all county centers had their own institutions. The state children’s asylum in Budapest, for example, received children not only from Pest County and the capital city but also from Szolnok County, where in the first half of the twentieth century there was no state children’s asylum. Foster families were organized into so-called colonies, meaning a group of foster families in villages or small towns. Colonies could be set up only in places that were easily reachable by train and that were attended by a resident doctor. The state children’s asylum kept in touch with and supervised foster families, and stayed informed about the well-being of children through a so-called colony supervisor, who was an employee of the state asylum. Finally, state children’s asylums, like Hungarian kindergartens and primary schools, followed a policy of nationalization. Children were placed with Hungarian-speaking foster families. Therefore there were no children’s asylums in other regional centers of the empire, such as Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony), where inhabitants were not only of the Hungarian nationality. 42 In the Hungarian territories of the empire there were seventeen (for a short while eighteen) state children’s asylums. After 1920 eight institutions remained in Hungary, which were increased by two in the interwar period.43 In 1949 there were a total of ten child protection institutions located across the country, in the cities of Budapest, Debrecen, Gyula, Kecskemét, Miskolc, Pécs, Szeged, Szombathely, Veszprém and Nagykanizsa. Private organizations that received extensive state funding were the main carriers of child protection work in Hungary until the end of the 1940s.44 The largest such organizations in the field of child protection were the Stefánia Association and the National League for Child Protection. The Stefánia Association focused on infant care, including the care of pregnant women and mothers and the training of infant care nurses. It had a nationwide network of care centers extending to provincial towns and even some villages, and was active in the prevention of infant mortality. They operated milk kitchens, birth centers, 42

Zimmermann, Divide, Provide and Rule, 50. Mátyás Dickmann, “A Fővárosi Gyermek- és Ifjúságvédő Intézet (GYIVI) története,” Család, Gyermek, Ifjúság 3 (2001): 4. 44   Sabine Hering and Berteke Waaldijk, eds., Guardians of the Poor—Custodians of the Public: Welfare History in Eastern Europe, 1900–1960 (Opladen and Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2006), 102. 43 

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nursing homes, and homes for mothers, and advised mothers and families on financial, medical, and legal matters.45 The National League for Child Protection ran, among others, nurseries, children’s homes and correctional institutions, and recommended children for placement in state care.46

Child protection regulations and the category of the “abandoned child” Abandonment has been a central category in child protection internationally since the end of the eighteenth century, and its content has historically been very fluid. As a social construct, the meaning of this term depended on what in different times and places was considered a “proper” childhood.47 From the beginnings of state-financed child protection in Hungary, abandonment had two important components: material need and so-called “moral depravity” or “moral delinquency” (erkölcsi romlottság, züllöttség).48 Initially, in 1901 and 1903, the Ministry of Interior, which governed state-provided child protection, defined abandonment in material terms. Extending the age limit of state care to children under fifteen, it claimed that abandoned children were those who “had no property and no relatives liable for their maintenance and upbringing,” and whose “maintenance and upbringing was not appropriately secured by relatives, benefactors and charity institutions or organizations.”49 Parallel to this material definition of abandonment, there existed a growing concern about children’s moral depravity and delinquency starting in the late nineteenth century. The guardianship act of 1877, which ordered the establishment of orphan guardianship authorities (árvaszék), limited the parental authority of fathers in case they “completely neglected the upbringing and education of their children

  Ibid., 103.   Ibid., 100. 47   Catherine Panter-Brick, “Nobody’s children? A reconsideration of child abandonment,” in Abandoned Children, ed. Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcom T. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4. 48   “Moral depravity” or “moral delinquency” were terms to define the so-called “moral abandonment” of children as opposed to their abandonment or endangerment resulting from material need. 49   Act 8 of 1901 about state-provided children’s homes; Act 21 of 1901 about the care of children above seven years old; Decree 1/1903 of the Ministry of Interior. 45 46

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or endangered their morality or physical well-being.” 50 Fathers’ parental authority was also limited if they endangered the inheritance of their children by maltreatment. Drawing on the guardianship act of 1877, decree 1/1903 of the Ministry of Interior stated that abandoned children whose “legal guardians refus[ed] to place them in the care of children’s homes” and who “neglect[ed] their upbringing and education, and endanger[ed] their morality or physical wellbeing” were to be assigned an official guardian.51 This decree also allowed authorities to order the institutionalization of “not abandoned” children, if they saw it to be “in children’s interest.” This meant that children who were not considered to be in material need could also be placed in state care. In “vitally urgent cases” temporary institutional placements were also permitted.52 Finally, in 1907, with the Ministry of Interior’s ordinance on the protection of children “exposed to moral depravity” and “delinquent children,” the category of “moral abandonment” in Hungarian legislation was established.53 This rapid expansion of the category of abandonment in the early twentieth century brought not only juvenile deviancy but also children’s lives outside the legal framework of the family, together with single motherhood and prostitution, to the attention of authorities. Material and moral abandonment remained the two main preconditions of children’s placement in state care across the interwar period as well as following the onset of state socialism in Hungary. Decree 2.000/1925 of the Ministry of Welfare and Labor, which in the interwar period specified “material abandonment” as a separate category from “moral abandonment,” remained in force until the early 1950s.54 Two important shifts took place in the definition “1877. évi XX. törvénycikk a gyámsági és gondnoksági ügyek rendezéséről” [Act 20 of 1877 about guardianship], http://1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3¶m=5784. 51   Decree 1/1903 of the Ministry of Interior, Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára 38 (1903): 535. 52   Ibid. 53  “60.000/1907 BM. sz. körrendelete az eddigi környezetükben erkölcsi romlásnak kitett, avagy züllésnek indult gyermekek oltalmáról az állami gyermekvédelem körében” [Decree 60.000/1907], Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára 44 (1907): 1293–1306. For a detailed discussion of child protection in the two capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, see Susan Zimmermann, Prächtige Armut: Fürsorge, Kinderschutz, und Sozialreform in Budapest; Das “sozialpolitische Laboratorium” der Doppelmonarchie im Vergleich zu Wien 1873–1914 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1997). 54   “2.000/1925 N.M.M. eln. sz. rendelet a m. kir. állami gyermekmenhelybe való felvétel módja, a felvett gyermekek gondozási költségeinek viselése s a költség behajtásának módja tekintetében fennálló 50 

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Figure 5. Boys playing “snúr,” Hungary, 1948 (Fortepan/Donated by Magyar Rendőr). The name of this game comes from the German word “Schnur,” meaning “string.” It was played with and for money. A string was placed or a line drawn on the ground onto which players threw coins. The winner was the person whose coins were nearest to the string or the line. The fact that the photograph was taken for a police magazine suggests that young boys playing this game were suspected of “delinquency.”

of abandonment, however, as a result of World War II and the restructuring of the welfare system in state socialist Hungary. First, the protection of children’s health gained in importance. Parental behavior that led to the “endangerment of children’s physical and mental health,” as well as “permanent cruelty to children” and the “neglect of the medical treatment of children suffering from treatable chronic diseases,” became part of the category of moral abandonment in the late 1940s.55 rendelkezések módosításáról, úgyszintén a gyermekek gondozási idejének kivételes meghosszabbításáról” [Decree 2.000/1925 of the Ministry of Welfare and Labor about the placement of children in state children’s asylums, the modification of the costs and the method of their collection for the care of children accepted and the exceptional extension of the period of care], Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára 59 (1925): 669–70. 55  “12.050/1948 korm.sz. rendelet az állami gyermekvédelemre vonatkozó egyes rendelkezések módosítása és kiegészítése tárgyában” [Decree 12.050/1948 of the Government of the Hungarian Republic about the modification and amendment of certain decrees concerning child protection]

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Second, work and parental work inability appeared as components of the category of abandonment. The social construction of “proper childhood” was strongly influenced by expectations about the responsibilities and duties of socialist subjects as productive workers. Accordingly, the guardianship regulations issued by the Ministry of Education in 1954 stressed that placement in state care for material reasons could occur only if minors’ parents were “unknown, not alive, or unable to work,” and neither parents nor other relatives “were able to provide for their maintenance and upbringing.”56 They emphasized that guardianship office caseworkers, who were to bring about the final decision regarding children’s and their parents’ material need, were to make sure that “children of parents able to work” were not placed in state care for material reasons. In early 1955, the minister of education responsible for child protection already stressed that “contrary to previous practice,” besides “orphans or children with unknown parents who did not have relatives liable for their upbringing,” only children of parents “unable to work could be placed in state care for material reasons.”57 In other words, parents capable of working were to provide for their children without state support. Parents of children in state care who were able to work had to contribute to the expenses of care. These were settled at twenty percent of the salary of relatives liable for the upbringing of the child. In case of two or more children in state care, expenses could be settled under twenty percent. If child support fees and expenses of state care were to be paid at the same time, the two were not to exceed fifty percent of the salaries of relatives liable for the upbringing Magyar Közlöny Rendeletek Tára, no. 272 (1948): 2527–28; and “121.000/1949 N.M. sz. rendelet a testi vagy szellemi fejlődésükben illetőleg egészségükben veszélyeztetett gyermekeknek az állami gyermekvédő intézeteknek gondozásába vétele és egyes más gyermekvédelmi intézkedések tárgyában” [Decree121.000/1949 N.M. on the placement of children endangered in their physical or mental development or health in child protection institutions and other child protection measures] Törvények és rendeletek hivatalos gyűjteménye [Official collection of acts and decrees] (hereafter TRHGY) 1949 (Budapest: Állami Lapkiadó, 1950). 56  “955-84/1954 O.M. sz. utasítás a gyámügyi eljárás szabályozásáról” [Decree 955-84/1954 of the Ministry of Education about the regulation of guardianship procedures] Tanácsok Közlönye 2, no. 78 (1954): 909–24. 57  “14/1955 O.M. sz. utasítás a gyámügyi eljárás szabályozásáról szóló 955-84/1954 O.M. sz. utasítás végrehajtásának egyes kérdéseiről” [Decree 14/1955 of the Ministry of Education about certain issues related to the execution of decree 955-84/1954 of the Ministry of Education about the regulation of guardianship procedures] Tanácsok Közlönye 3, no. 9 (1955): 90–93.

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of the minor. The guardianship authorities responsible for enforcing payment were entitled to directly order companies to withhold the required proportion of the relatives’ salaries and pay them to the local councils. Nevertheless, as research on child protection in the northeastern region of Hungary points out, in practice authorities usually had difficulties collecting these fees.58 Further important legal transformations in the early state socialist period included the rise in the age limit for children’s placement in state care to eighteen, the legal equalization of children born outside wedlock, and the severe restriction of abortions.59 Act 4 of 1952 on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship, the so-called Family Act of 1952, brought about significant changes concerning women’s equality in the areas of marriage, family, and guardianship.60 It erased patriarchal family patterns by instituting marriage as the equal partnership of “two working people,” and it ended discrimination against women regarding property ownership, divorce procedures, and child custody.61 Importantly, it gave equal rights to children born out of wedlock when it “effectively outlawed single parenthood by requiring children to have two officially recognized guardians.”62 This is significant, when one considers that prior to 1946, children and mothers of children born out of wedlock were legally, in terms of access to social services and societal evaluation, second-class citizens.63 A number of other child protection regulations also aimed to make

58

Ibolya Gaál, A közigazgatás feladatkörébe utalt gyermekvédelem Szabolcs és Szatmár vármegyében, 1867–1950 (Nyíregyháza: Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, 2007). 59  “13/1952 (II.9.) M.T. sz. rendelet a gyermekek (kiskorúak) állami gondozásba vételével kapcsolatos egyes kérdésekről” [Decree 13/1952 of the Council of Ministers about questions related to the placement of children (minors) in state care], TRHGY 1952, 135 and “51/1954 M.T. sz. rendelet a kiskorú gyermekek tartásának és nevelésének biztosításáról valamint az állami gondozásbavétel feltételeiről” [Decree 51/1954 of the Council of Ministers about the maintenance and raising of minors and the preconditions of placement in state care], TRHGY 1954. 60  “1952. évi IV. törvény a házasságról, a családról és a gyámságról” [Act 4 of 1952 on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship], TRHGY 1952. 61   On a gendered assessment of the law, see Zimmermann, “Gender Regime”; and Haney, Inventing the Needy, 29–30. 62   Haney, Inventing the Needy, 29. The first step taken in this direction following World War II was the introduction of Act 29 of 1946 on the legal status of children born out of wedlock [1946. évi XXIX. törvény a házasságon kívül született gyermek jogállásáról], http://www.1000ev.hu/index. php?a=3¶m=8247. 63   István Varga, “Kísérlet a törvénytelen gyermekek két világháború közötti helyzetének bemutatására Magyarországon,” in Kötő-Jelek 2006, 2007, ed. Dénes Némedi and Vera Szabadi (Budapest: ELTE

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the rights of abandoned children equal to other children and expressed a vision of a democratic state where all youth were provided for. In 1948, for example, state children’s asylums were renamed as child protection institutions. In 1952 the Council of Ministers increased the age limit for state care to eighteen and banned the term “abandoned children” in favor of the notions “children in state care” and “endangered children.”64 While the Family Act and the Hungarian Constitution of 1949 were important milestones in the legal equalization of women, including single mothers and their children born out of wedlock, they also emphasized the centrality of the nuclear family. This was similar to efforts towards the strengthening of the family in other European countries in the aftermath of World War II.65 The Hungarian Constitution declared that it protected the rights of youth and placed “the structure of institutions for the protection of mothers and children” among policies intended to support “women’s equal rights with men.” 66 The Family Act of 1952 expressly followed up the constitutionally declared protection of youth and declared that, “in line with” the “social order and socialist moral understanding” of the state, its goal was to “regulate and protect the institutions of marriage and family, ensure women’s equality and children’s protection in the marriage and the family, and advance the development and education of youth.”67 Child protection also formed part of pronatalist reproductive politics in Hungary. State socialist governments, like their western European postwar

Társadalomtudományi Kar Szociológia Doktori Iskola, 2007), 203–21, http://www.tarsadalomkutatas.hu/termek.php?termek=TPUBL-A-765. Caseworkers were entitled to conduct paternity tests to locate fathers and require them to pay twenty percent of their salaries as child support. Haney, Inventing the Needy, 29. 64  “13/1952 (II.9.) M.T. sz. rendelet.” An optional increase of state care up to a child’s eighteenth birthday had been available since 1925 but only for children enrolled in secondary education. 65  Chiara Saraceno, “Social and Family Policy,” in Family Life in the Twentieth Century, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, vol. 3 of The History of the European Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Venken and Röger, “Growing Up in the Shadow of the Second World War,” 205. 66  “1949. évi XX. törvény, a Magyar Népköztársaság Alkotmánya” [Act 20 of 1949 The Constitution of the Hungarian People’s Republic], http://www.rev.hu/sulinet45/szerviz/dokument/1949.evi3. htm. 67   “1952. évi IV. törvény a házasságról, a családról és a gyámságról.”

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counterparts, were keen on increasing the population size and birth rate.68 Following the Soviet example, in the early 1950s abortion was strongly regulated in many East and Southeast European countries.69 In Hungary in 1952 and 1953, the Ministry of Health restricted the practice of abortions that had been legalized after the end of World War II due to rape cases committed by the Red Army in 1945.70 The Ministry of Health decree of 1952 limited pregnancy termination to twenty-eight weeks.71 Reasons for an abortion excluded social indications and had to be approved by a medical committee. What has been popularly termed the “abortion law” or “Ratkó act” in Hungary, after Anna Ratkó, minister of health between 1950 and 1953, was actually a ministerial decree from 1953.72 Little known is the fact that this decree was part of a series of mother and infant protection regulations.73 While it, for example, entitled mothers employed in the state sector to their full salaries for twelve weeks during maternity leave, a gift of baby clothes at birth, and a brief daily nursing time once back at work, the decree also called for “an increase in the fight against abortion.”74 These restrictions on abortion were amended by a number of further decrees and guidelines to medical professionals that were applied with extreme harshness and brutality. Aborting women or physicians carrying out abortions could be given a court sentence. While before 1952–53 abortions without a medical indication and not performed in a hospital were forbidden too, pregnancy termination was not actively persecuted. In 1953 there were three times as many persons sentenced for participating in or carrying out abortions than in any of the years prior. Even following the Venken and Röger, “Growing Up in the Shadow of the Second World War,” 205.   Joanna Z. Misthal, “How the Church Became the State: The Catholic Regime and Reproductive Rights in State Socialist Poland,” in Penn and Massino, Gender Politics and Everyday Life, 133– 49. 70   Andrea Pető, “Women’s Rights in Stalinist Hungary: The Abortion Trials of 1952–53,” Hungarian Studies Review 29, nos. 1–2 (2002): 49–76. 71   “81/34/1952 Eü. M. rendelet a terhesség művi megszakításáról” [Decree 81/34/1952 of the Ministry of Health on pregnancy termination], TRHGY 1952. 72  “1004/1953 sz. M.T. határozat az anya- és gyermekvédelem továbbfejlesztéséről” [Decree 1004/1953 of the Council of Ministers on the improvement of the protection of mothers and children], TRHGY 1953, 173–76. 73   Györgyi Garancsi, “‘Úgy irányítjuk, mint a kocsit, az asszonyok életét…’: A születésszabályozás a Rákosi rendszerben” (master’s thesis, ELTE University Budapest, 2001), 48–49. 74  Ibid., 46. 68  69

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easing of this practice in 1954, there were approximately five hundred persons sentenced by the court. During a general amnesty in the summer of 1953 there were 674 women, among the 25,000 persons released from prison, who had been sentenced because of an abortion.75 Finally, following the Thaw and the legalization of abortion in the Soviet Union in 1955, pregnancy termination became legal in numerous other state socialist countries, including Hungary in the summer of 1956.

The restructuring of child protection in the late 1940s and early 1950s and its consequences The onset of state socialism in Hungary brought about not only significant legal but also structural changes in the child protection system. Among the most important were decentralization and reorganization, including the placement of child protection under the authority of the Ministry of Education, the formation of an institutional structure for pediatrics relying on the former state children’s asylums, and the attachment of responsibilities to child protection that formed part of the juvenile justice system. These processes were paralleled by further, largely ideologically motivated changes, such as efforts to reform child protection by replacing the existing foster care system with a residential-home-based system and closing private and many religious child protection organizations. In practice, since these transformations were set in motion at the same time, they often led to uncoordinated work at the ministerial and local levels, not to mention that a lack of financial means and infrastructural and technical conditions hampered their successful implementation. On the whole, the interaction of these different factors made child protection work in this period especially difficult. The child protection system that the socialist authorities inherited in 1949 was a centralized one: between 1901 and 1919 the Ministry of Interior and after that the Ministry of Welfare and Labor as higher authorities had overseen the work of the various institutions of child protection. The ministry also Ibid.

75 

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had the final word in decisions concerning children’s placement and release from care that county and municipal guardianship authorities had brought. Following the introduction of the council system in municipal administration in 1950 in Hungary, newly formed guardianship authorities were located in local councils. Local councils of cities, the district local councils of the capital, and the regional district councils in the countryside became so-called primary guardianship authorities. As a significant new function, they gained the primary right to decide on children’s placement and release from state care. In addition to these competencies, they also made decisions about requests for adoption and parental supervision rights and dealt with establishing fatherhood and enforcing child support payments. Next to child protection-related tasks, guardianship authorities also acquired a number of other, more general welfare tasks, such as care for war veterans, war widows, and war orphans, elderly care, settling housing problems, as well as overseeing the upbringing of children in their districts. 76 The higher, county-level councils and the municipal council of Budapest fulfilled the role of secondary guardianship authorities. They not only supervised the work of primary guardianship authorities but also had the right to decide on disputed cases of children’s placement in state care, especially following parental appeals. This decentralization of the child protection system in the early 1950s was part of the restructuring of the Hungarian welfare system, which included the decentralization of child care services.77 Besides placing greater decisionmaking power in the hands of local councils, the process of restructuring and decentralization between 1950 and 1954 also led to the fractioning of the child protection system among different local council departments. Following the dissolution of the Ministry of Welfare in 1950, the supervision of child protection work in guardianship authorities, child protection institutions and children’s homes for children aged three to fifteen was taken over for a short time by the Ministry of Interior. The supervision of the education of children in state care at this time was delegated to the Ministry of Education. Furthermore, Haney, Inventing the Needy, 45. Éva Bicskei, “Our Greatest Treasure, the Child: The Politics of Child Care in Hungary, 1945–1956,” Social Politics 13, no. 2 (2006): 151–87.

76  77 

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the supervision of institutions and homes for infants up to three years old and mother and infant care became the responsibility of the Ministry of Health. Matters were further complicated by the fact that the ministerial-level fractioning of child protection was reflected at the county and local levels as well. Different departments of the county, regional and local councils were responsible for different sections of child protection work. Until the dissolution of the Ministry of Welfare in 1950, the local councils’ public health and welfare departments, and afterwards their administrative departments, housed guardianship authorities. The health departments handled issues related to the care of children under three, and the education departments were responsible for residential homes for children above three. A similar assignment of child protection duties to different overseeing bodies in the early Soviet Union led to the phenomenon that certain areas of child protection work were not covered by any state institutions. There were also disputes over their jurisprudence.78 In Hungary too, the parallel and often overlapping activities of the now-different branches of the child protection system led to their rivalry and a slow-down in decision-making processes. The case load of local guardianship authorities that were populated by only one or two caseworkers and a lawyer was at the same time comparatively high. Their work thus varied in intensity. The supply of caseworkers was not well-coordinated either. In Szolnok County, for example, there was no child protection caseworker in the spring of 1956 for more than two months.79 From 1950 onwards, guardianship authorities could theoretically rely on the assistance of so-called social policy committees. These committees were organized at each administrative level, from towns to counties, and were composed of council members as well as local, non-council member activists. Social policy committees were supposed to participate in carrying out a number of welfare and child protection tasks and serve as a link between local councils and the population. They could, for example, make recommendations to the local council “in the name of the working people,” and “initiate and encourage the solution of problems, and social policy issues.”80 In the field 78

Kelly, Children’s Worlds, 197.   Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története, 161. 80   “‘Szociálpolitikai állandó bizottság,’ Tanulmányi anyag a gyámügyi előadók 1954. január-június 79

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of child protection, they were to support guardianship authorities in local councils, among others, in recommending children for placement in state care, finding adoptive parents, and checking on foster parents and the situation of children in foster families.81 The active contribution of committee members, however, differed greatly. Especially in the early 1950s, they were delegated to work on issues considered to have priority over welfare and child protection, such as assistance with the councils’ other bureaucratic work or participation in the forced collection of agricultural harvest from peasants. Committee work first started to be taken more seriously in 1953 when an independent Social Policy Center was created at the Ministry of Health. For a brief period between October 1953 and September 1954, when the Ministry of Health was responsible for child protection and guardianship tasks, the ministry set up an independent Social Policy Center to coordinate this work as well as to take over responsibility for some other fields of welfare work, such as social benefits and care for the disabled.82 The center’s guardianship and child protection department was to prepare regulations concerning child protection and guide the work of guardianship authorities. In this time period guardianship work was improved by the introduction of child protection caseworkers at guardianship authorities. Their responsibilities combined child welfare and child protection tasks. Another major shift in the structure of child protection took place in 1954, when the ministerial responsibility for child protection tasks, previously overseen by the Ministry of Interior and the Social Policy Center at the Ministry of Health, was finally delegated to the Ministry of Education.83 Accordingly, hónapokban folyt szakmai továbbképzéséhez” [Social policy committee: Material for the training of guardianship authorities in January-June 1954], Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Levéltára (Archives of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County, hereafter MNL JNSZML), XXIII. 15. f., Szolnok Megyei Tanács VB Művelődési Osztályának iratai. 81   “K-5.161-1/1951. I/4. B.M. (BK.13) sz. rendelet a közgyámi feladatok ellátásáról” [Decree K-5.161-1/1951. I/4. of the Ministry of Interior about the role of public guardians] Belügyi Közlöny 1, no. 13 (1951): 232. 82   “1.067/1953 (X.29.) M.T. sz. határozat az Országos Szociálpolitikai Központ felállításáról és az egészségügyi miniszter ügykörének újabb szabályozásáról szóló 172/1951 (IX. 16.) M.T. sz. rendelet kiegészítéséről” [Decree 1.067/1953 of the Council of Ministers about the National Social Policy Center and the amendment of decree 172/1951 of the Council of Ministers about the renewed regulation of the tasks of the Minister of Health], TRHGY 1953, 214. 83 “2.111/1954 (IX.15.) M.T. sz. határozat a gyermek- és ifjúságvédelem egyes szervezési kérdé-

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the education of children between three and eighteen years old in state care, the supervision of both placement in state care and guardianship work carried out by local councils, and the work of child protection institutions and residential homes for the care of “trainable” (képezhető) disabled children were given to the Ministry of Education. Issues related to the state care of children under three, and “non-trainable” (képezhetetlen) disabled children remained with the Ministry of Health. This meant that the protection of children aged three to eighteen was no longer understood as a welfare or a health care issue but as an educational one. The system of children’s homes followed the newly structured system of primary and secondary education in Hungary. Until the 1960s the primary school education of children in state care was segregated from the education of other children. Nevertheless, there were separate homes for primary school-aged children who were in the first four classes and those who attended the primary school classes five to eight. As a result, most of those children who grew up in state care needed to change institutions every three to four years. A further major structural change affecting the child protection system was the institutional expansion of pediatrics in early 1950s Hungary. This process heavily influenced the functioning of child protection institutions because the former state children’s asylums provided the institutional basis for the expanded system of children’s hospitals. After 1949 the state children’s asylums continued to operate as reception centers for children recommended for placement in state care, as they had before World War II, but were called child protection institutions. Beginning in April 1951, the buildings of these institutions and their medical equipment were turned into children’s hospitals. The institutional network of pediatrics in Hungary was thus created by taking over the equipment and buildings of the former asylums/child protection institutions. The new children’s hospitals were at the same time charged with the responsibility of caring for sick institutionalized children as well as all institutionalized children younger than three years old. In other words, the medical function of the child protection system was delegated to the expanded system of pediatrics in Hungary at the beginning of the 1950s. The practical seiről” [Decree 2.111/1954 of the Council of Ministers about certain organizational tasks concerning child protection], TRHGY 1954, 354–55.

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consequence of this change was that child protection institutions had to leave the buildings that were originally built to function as institutions for the reception of children and move to new locations that were not designed for this purpose. The new buildings had to house not only the administrative staff and children’s case files but also the so-called transport section of child protection institutions, where children lived while they waited for a decision about their further placement. The process of moving was strenuous in the postwar years when no appropriate buildings were available and institutions were understaffed and overcrowded with children. Mrs. István Dési-Huber, who was director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County at the time, described this process in desperation as “the biggest mistake” of the child protection legislation: We are compelled to receive the incoming children and do the related administrative work in the Üllői Street building [the former institution building] hoping that at the latest, by the end of this year we can move to a new building. The home, on the other hand, is at the other end of the city, in district 1, Donáti Street. This means that teachers and caregivers take the newly arrived children to the other end of the city each afternoon, but if they happen to fall ill, they have to take them back to the Üllői Street [building] the following morning. The same happens when children need new clothes, or the X-ray could not take place at the time of their arrival. In sum, teachers and the kindergarten care providers [spend their time] accompanying the children between these two opposing ends of the city instead of doing their real job. This results in substantial costs we need to pay for the tram tickets, not to mention the increased risk of run-away children. . . .  Furthermore, the Donáti Street building does not serve the purposes of a children’s home at all, and one cannot see that 40,000 forints had been invested in renovation.84

Finally, the institutional link between child protection, child welfare and the juvenile justice systems further complicated the situation in the early 1950s. This increased the case load and put extra burden on the child protection system. As I present in more detail in the next chapter, the capacity of nurseries, kindergartens, and daycare centers did not match the need arising from women’s Dési-Huber Istvánné hagyatéka [The posthumous documents of Mrs. István Dési-Huber], FGYK-Tegyesz.

84 

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Figure 6. A policewoman takes a wandering boy to the police guard room, Budapest, around 1945 (Unknown photographer, Hungarian National Museum). In postwar Hungary, the police watched out for minors whom they suspected were not being looked after by parents or committed a crime. In the newly restructured child protection system, such children were temporarily transferred to child protection institutions. The picture depicts one of the tasks, namely child protection related work, that was delegated to women among the newly restructured police force in 1945, the year when women were first admitted into the armed police. Note the oversized hat and shirt the woman in the picture is wearing, both of which were part of the male police uniform.

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large-scale entrance into the labor force in the early 1950s. The children of working parents, who were otherwise not considered abandoned/endangered, but had nowhere to stay while their parents were at work, could also be placed in children’s homes.85 Meanwhile, the available homes of the child protection system supported and received an extra load of children not only from the institutional infrastructure of child welfare services but from the juvenile justice system too. The juvenile justice system had had its own separate institutional structure, with juvenile courts and reformatories, since the late nineteenth century in Hungary. In the early 1950s, however, wandering children and minors caught by the police for suspected prostitution or criminal activities were all placed in child protection institutions until the child protection department of the police finished investigation and decided on their cases.86 This meant that child protection workers had to deal with a variety of different children, many of whom had serious war-related and other psychological damage and behavioral problems that the staff of child protection institutions and children’s homes were not sufficiently prepared to deal with.

Conflicting visions on foster care and institutional care after World War II An important structural change in child protection involved efforts to introduce a residential-institution-based system of care. Between the end of World War II and the first years of the 1950s, there were in fact two contradictory reform initiatives towards the improvement of child protection work in Hungary. One group of child protection actors believed in the existing foster-care-based system, while others were convinced that children’s homes, rather than foster care, better served children’s interests. In the immediate postwar period, leading “1.011/1951 M.T. sz. határozat a termelésben résztvevő nők számának emeléséről” [Decree 1.011/1951 of the Council of Ministers about increasing the number of women in production], TRHGY 1951. This decree recommended an increase in the number of children’s homes in order to be able to accommodate the children of parents “especially occupied at work.” 86   “2/1952 (I.29.) B.M. sz. rendelet a helyi tanácsok végrehajtóbizottságainak az 1951. évi 34. tvr. hatálya alá tartozó gyermekek és fiatalkorúak érdekében teljesítendő feladatai ellátásáról” [Decree 2/1952 of the Ministry of Interior about the fulfillment of the tasks of the executive committees of local councils in the interest of children and minors falling within Act 34 of 1951], TRHGY 1952, 303. 85 

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actors in the field at the Ministry of Welfare worked on the extension and further professionalization of the foster care system. Efforts to professionalize foster parenting and start new children’s colonies were made by László Dobszay, the head of the mother and infant protection department at the ministry between 1946 and 1948 and director of the state children’s asylum in Budapest before World War II, and his colleague Miklós Kun, the director of the child protection department between 1945 and 1951.87 They believed this was necessary at the time because of an increase in the number of abandoned children as a result of the war. A specific problem was the increase in abandoned infants, whom foster parents were reluctant to receive. “We inherited from the past system a lot of corrupt colony supervisors. I was of the opinion that we needed to continue with the foster care system but differently as in the past. By having well-trained and competent colony supervisors who were capable of evaluating whether a foster parent was good or not. And I gave courses at the state children’s asylum in Budapest,” recalled Miklós Kun.88 In order to rescue infants stuck at the former state children’s asylums, Kun and Dobszay organized new colonies at the end of the 1940s by first training and employing “women who liked to look after infants and possessed a suitable apartment with a room where six to eight beds for children could be placed.”89 In 1950 there were twenty-four colonies looking after 226 infants in the vicinity of the capital. The colonies operated between 1949 and 1951 in family homes in the suburbs of Budapest with equipment and appropriate nourishment for infants provided by the child protection institute. Parallel to these efforts to reform the foster care system, other actors in the field of child protection worked on establishing new children’s homes and expanding the number of residential institutions. Motivated by the idea of collective education and the example of the Soviet child protection system, the first children’s town (gyermekváros) in Hungary opened with support from the   “249.000/1948 N.M. az állami gyermekvédelem körébe tartozó gyermekek telepen kívüli elhelyezése tárgyában” [Decree 249.000/1948 of the Ministry of Welfare about the placement of children within the scope of child protection outside settlements] Magyar Közlöny Rendeletek Tára, no. 288 (1948): 2684–85. 88   Miklós Kun, interview by Gábor Rejtő, 1988, no. 188, 1956 Institute OHA. 89 Ibid. Also documented by Mrs. István Dési-Huber in the early 1980s relying on László Dobszay’s report about the infant colonies from 1950, in Dési-Huber Istvánné hagyatéka, FGYK-Tegyesz. 87

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communist minister of welfare, Erik Molnár, in 1946.90 As I discuss in chapter 4, for some leaders of children’s homes in Hungary in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Soviet pedagogy and the work of Anton Makarenko were a source of inspiration. This notwithstanding, the final choice between the foster-carebased and the institutional-care-based systems did not purely rest on pedagogical considerations. Official communist propaganda presented foster care as an outdated system that contributed to the exploitation of children. Although this argument was not without grounds, it was turned against peasants and socalled “kulak” families in the context of forced collectivization. The Ministry of Education forbade children’s placement with such families in 1955, arguing that these foster parents misused the labor power of children placed in their care. 91 While numerous children who lived in foster care, including three out of the thirteen interviewees in this research, were indeed inadequately nourished and clothed and were overworked on the farms of their foster families, the exploitation of foster children was simplified to be a phenomenon occurring only among peasant landholders. Contemporary statistics showed a gradual decrease in the proportion of children placed with foster parents and an increase in placements in children’s homes between 1949 and 1956 (see Table 1 in the Appendix). In 1949, out of 25,940 registered children in state care, 17,406 were placed with foster parents while only 6,323 were in children’s homes, including those in the child protection institutions.92 By the end of 1954, there were 23,310 children   Children’s towns were homes for abandoned/endangered children that applied educational practices taken from the field of reform pedagogy. In Hungarian children’s towns established during and immediately after World War II this entailed, for example, concepts such as education for work or children’s self-governance. A common feature of children’s towns established later in state socialist Hungary was their capacity to house more children than other homes, which at times amounted to several hundred. This enabled keeping together siblings who otherwise would have been separated due to the structure of homes that were broken down according to age categories, such as nursing and kindergarten homes, and lower and upper primary school homes. 91   “100/1955 O.M. sz. utasítás a gyermekvédelmi felügyelői hálózat egyes szervezeti kérdéseinek, a gyermekvédelmi felügyelők feladatainak és munkamódszerének szabályozásáról, valamint a nevelőszülők jogainak és kötelességeinek megállapításáról” [Decree 100/1955 of the Ministry of Education about organizational issues related to the network of child protection supervisors, their tasks and work methods and the rights and obligations of foster parents], Tanácsok Közlönye 3, no. 68 (1955): 972–75. 92   Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Szociális intézmények, 1950. évi adatok: A KSH jelentése (Budapest: KSH, 1951), 12. 90

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in state care with 11,670 children with foster parents or biological parents and 11,640 in institutions. This year statistics reported about five new child protection institutions in the cities of Szolnok, Nyíregyháza, Eger, Győr, and Zalaegerszeg.93 The first year when proportions changed was 1955. According to the report of the Central Statistical Office, this was due to a radical decrease in the number of placements to scattered farms that were difficult to oversee.94 Out of 19,330 children in state care at the end of the year, official statistics claimed that less than forty percent, 7,580 children, were in foster care, and a little over sixty percent, 11,750 children, in residential care.95 In reality, however, institutional places were far from sufficient, and they were unevenly developed in the country. In October 1956, for example, the education department of Baranya County in southern Hungary complained to the Ministry of Education that the number of children’s homes in the county did not meet existing need since it covered only forty-six percent of children in state care.96 As a result, and contrary to the widely held claim about the destruction of the foster parent system during state socialism, the foster care structure remained in place throughout the years between the late 1940s and the end of the 1980 and in certain regions of the country, it served as the primary form of children’s state care. As in the Soviet Union, where institutional placement could not cover existing need and the ban introduced on foster care in 1918 was removed in 1926 even in the case of peasant families, the Hungarian Ministry of Education admitted in 1955 that as a temporary solution it accepted foster care.97 The system of foster care in Hungary was not only maintained but also further professionalized throughout the state socialist period.

III. számú statisztikai tájékoztató az általános iskolák, gyermekotthonok 1953–1954. tanévvégi helyzetéről (Budapest: Oktatásügyi Minisztérium Terv és Pénzügyi Főosztály Statisztikai Osztálya, 1954), 45–46. 94   Gyermekvédelem az 1955. évben, 5. 95  Ibid., 2. 96  Cited in Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története, 158. 97 Ibid., 170; Kelly, Children’s Worlds, 211. 93 

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“Overcrowding and bedwetting”: Life in child protection institutions and children’s homes in the early state socialist period The generally difficult conditions characteristic of the Hungarian child protection system of the late 1940s and early 1950s was clearly reflected in the everyday lives of child protection institutions and children’s homes. One of the major problems institutions struggled with was an overcrowding of children coupled with too few personnel. In 1950, for example, there were 24,356 children in child protection institutions but the number of caregivers was only 565.98 This meant in general more than forty-three children per care worker. While existing figures cannot necessarily be taken at face value since these institutions were most likely compelled to exaggerate their situation in their reports to the ministry in the hope of effecting some improvement, they still reveal the extent of the problem. In the Child Protection Institution of Gyula in southern Hungary, where the number of available places was forty, the actual number

Figure 7. Children having a morning snack at a care institution, 1951 (Fortepan/Donated by Gyula Hámori). This picture was most likely taken at a home for kindergarten-age children, and illustrates the kind of uniforms children were made to wear. The hair of many children, especially of the boys, was cut short for the summer. 98

  Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Szociális intézmények, 1950. évi adatok, 1.

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of children fluctuated between twenty-four and seventy with no more than three care workers, according to their report from 1952. A home for infants in the same county reported that there were five to six children in one baby playpen and two children shared one bed. There were even homes where four to five children slept in one bed, and in other places children slept on straw mattresses.99 According to another report, a children’s home filled to over ninety percent of its hundred-place capacity in Budapest had only five trained child protection workers, all of whom wished to leave.100 One of the most vivid memories of former teachers and institution directors interviewed in the framework of this research was also connected to overcrowding. They recalled that rooms were often stuffed with bunk beds placed close against each other so that two or even three children could sleep in one bed.101 County authorities often admitted in their reports to the lack of food and clothing in homes and the weak health supervision of children in state care in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There were homes where children ate meat only once in two weeks and had only watery coffee with a slice of bread for breakfast and dinner.102 Children’s clothing was equally scarce. The uniform they had to wear was provided to child protection institutions by a state company. This centralized distribution of clothing often resulted in a lack of clothing items and sizes needed by the children.103 Child protection institutions in turn had difficulties supplying children placed in foster families with a set of winter and summer clothing. Due to the war, the health condition of children in the early 1950s was generally poor. The infant death rate was higher than the prewar average in Hungary. As a result of a general lack of physicians, pediatricians, nurses, and places in hospitals for children in Hungary at the time, not only children in state care but all children had limited access to health care. The city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary, for example, reported in 1953 that it had only seventeen district nurses for 120.000 inhabitants. In Hajdú-Bihar County there were 8000 persons attended by one nurse.104 Cited in Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története, 96. Ibid., 91. 101  Béla Kövecs, interview by Mrs. Mária Szendrei, November 1, 2006, Budapest, Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok, FGYK-Tegyesz. 102  Cited in Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története, 93. 103 Ibid., 94–95. 104   Ibid., 96–97. 99 

100 

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Despite this overall similarity in the poor health condition of children and the lack of food and clothing supplies in institutions, there was also a significant variety in the situation of residential homes. Differences depended on the availability or lack of support by local county-level authorities, the composition of institution leadership and staff, the actual location of the home and other random factors, such as the previous function and condition of the building selected to serve as a home. Former institution directors recalled, for example, that their relationship to the local party functionaries, members of the local council, and other local authorities and institutions such as the police and kindergarten and primary school directors, greatly influenced the kinds of services they could provide for the children in their care.105 Furthermore, children’s homes in the countryside or near villages had cheaper access to local products than homes in the capital, meaning that the same financial means allowed for cheaper and thus more food. Homes placed in former villas and

Figure 8. The castle of the Zichy family at Soponya-Nagyláng, 1902 (Fortepan/Donated by Zichy). Many children’s homes were opened in the late 1940s in castles and villa houses confiscated from the former upper classes. Gyula Patkós, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 22, 2008, Szolnok.

105 

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Figure 9. The County Infant Home at 16 Kossuth Street in Csopak, 1957 (Fortepan/Donated by Sándor Bauer). This building used to be the summer residence of the Hungarian Catholic Church for nuns belonging to the order of the Loreto Sisters. The house appears peaceful, surrounded by grape vines in the wine region of Csopak. While an advantage for a summer residence, one of the disadvantages of confiscated villas and church buildings was that they were cut off from the rest of the world.

small castles in the countryside often had access to the park that used to surround these buildings where they set up vegetable gardens and kept animals to improve their food supply. Distance from a city, however, could also cause difficulties in transporting food products. Besides overcrowding and poor material conditions, another major difficulty was the psychological condition of children following the war. Bedwetting, a typical sign of psychological disturbance in children, was a widespread phenomenon that care workers faced and struggled with on an everyday basis. With psychology labeled as a useless field of science in socialist society and the dissolution of the institutions of psychology in Hungary in the late 1940s, care workers and teachers had few means to offer help to children in need. Common practices included treating the symptoms of psychological damage rather than being able to address the causes of the problem. Coupled with overcrowding, child protection workers sometimes had no other option than to place bedwetting children together in one room, or in worse cases, as in the Child Protection Institution of Gyula in 1953, bedwetting children

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had to share a common bed or mattress.106 “In some children’s homes they had to set up so-called ‘sailors’ hostels,’” in the period between the end of the war and the mid-1950s, remembers Béla Kövecs, who was a care provider in different residential homes in the capital. “These were bedrooms created for the bedwetting children.” Kövecs recalled that in a group of twenty-five children there could be as many as six to eight such children, and in a group of one hundred and forty children as many as twenty-five to thirty. Teachers had no other means but to try and make sure that children went to the toilet before going to sleep or that they did not drink water in the evening. These efforts, however, offered little success: They were especially the bedwetting children, who drank much before going to bed. We tried to put extra blankets on these children, so that they would not feel cold at night. It was cold in the bedrooms, the children slept on straw mattresses on the concrete floor. It was cold, so they wetted their bed rather than go to the toilet. When they wetted the straw mattresses, that smelled very badly.107

These recollections illustrate that the harsh realities of child protection work in the early 1950s were heavily affected by the outcome of the war.

The network and function of child protection institutions and children’s homes in early state socialist Hungary Since the establishment of the state child protection system in early twentiethcentury Hungary, a variety of actors were able to initiate children’s placement in state care. These actors included representatives of child welfare and child protection organizations and institutions, the police, schoolteachers, nurses, and physicians, as well as private persons from the child’s environment, such as parents and relatives or even neighbors. Written applications and recommendations for placement in state care could also be taken down at the state children’s asylums/child protection institutions. Before 1950, recommendations were evaluated at regional orphan guardianship authorities, after which final Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története, 95. Béla Kövecs, interview by Mrs. Mária Szendrei, January 11, 2006, Budapest, Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok, FGYK-Tegyesz.

106  107 

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decisions were taken at the ministries of interior and later welfare. After decentralization in 1950, decisions were made at local guardianship authorities housed in the building of local councils, and only cases of appeal were taken to county level authorities. During this process children stayed in the building of the state asylum/child protection institution, after which they were either placed with foster parents or, after 1950, increasingly to a children’s home appropriate to their age. In the following I describe the history and the working conditions in three child protection institutions in the early 1950s in more detail. These were the three institutions where the case files of children analyzed in the framework of the present research come from.

The Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County As mentioned above, in the early 1950s, the Hungarian pediatric system expanded using the buildings and medical equipment of the former state children’s asylums, which forced several child protection institutions to give up their original locations. This increased the difficulties child protection workers faced at this time as a result of the war and the economic and social changes effected by the rise into power of the Hungarian communist party at the end of the 1940s. The case of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County illustrates these difficulties well. The institution had operated in the original buildings of the former state children’s asylum of Budapest for over four decades since its opening in 1909. Within the short period between 1951 and 1953, it had to change locations twice. For several years workers at the institution had to commute daily in the city between the building where children were received and registered and the building that was assigned for their accommodation. Other difficulties arose from the constant changes in the overseeing authority of the institution, as well as in the places where incoming children originated from and where they could be placed. Between 1950 and 1952, the child protection institution belonged to and was supervised by the Council of Pest County. On January 1, 1953, it was moved under the supervision of the Municipal Council of Budapest but still attended to the child protection tasks of both the capital and Pest County.108 The two were finally separated in 1964, when Pest County opened its own child protection institution, see László Dobos, ed., Magyarországi bentlakásos gyermek- és ifjúságvédelmi intézmények (Budapest:

108

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The relationship between these two councils, however, was tense. When the capital took over the direction of the institution, it issued a temporary stop on the inflow of children, because there was no capacity to house them. Disregarding this stop, the county continued sending children to Budapest, causing friction between the two authorities.109 “Overcrowding has reached a previously unknown level at the institution . . . the children’s nurses are collapsing one after another from exhaustion,” wrote the director, Mrs. Dési-Huber, in one of her reports to the Ministry of Health in the winter of 1951. The yearly inflow of children in the 1949–1956 period was between three and four thousand (see Table 3 in the Appendix). In November 1951, for example, there were thirteen care workers for ninety-three children in the institution and by 1954 the number of children had reached close to four hundred.110 Mátyás Dickmann, who worked as a lawyer for the institution for several decades, recalled the early 1950s as a period characterized by extreme poverty and rushed decision-making due to the pressure of overcrowding.111 As there were not enough children’s homes and foster families to receive children, they were stuck at the institution for several months. The composition of this group of children was also very diverse. Some were wandering children, while others had been caught by the police. There were also disabled children in the institution, whose further placement was unresolved. Material conditions in the final, new building of the child protection institution were not ideal either. Small in size compared to the number of children to be housed there temporarily, it did not alleviate the problem of overcrowding in the early 1950s. The major difference between the former asylum and the new location was that the latter was not built for the purposes of a children’s institution, but had been a poorhouse and a home for old people in the interwar period.112 “Its large rooms and concrete floor did not provide an atmosphere where children could feel at home.” There was no kitchen in the building until 1956, and food had to be cooked in three large kettles.113 Művelődési Minisztérium Gyermek és Ifjúságvédelmi Önálló Osztálya, 1986), 182.   Dickmann, “A Fővárosi Gyermek- és Ifjúságvédő Intézet,” 6. 110   Mátyás Dickmann, interview by Eszter Varsa, June 3, 2008, Budapest. 111  Ibid. 112   Dickmann, “A Fővárosi Gyermek- és Ifjúságvédő Intézet,” 4. In today’s Alföldi Street, which is in one of the poorest districts of the capital. 113   Ibid. 109

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Like all child protection institutions in the country before the early state socialist period, the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County relied predominantly on foster families for the placement of abandoned/endangered children. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, there were approximately ten children’s colonies in small towns and villages around the capital and in its suburbs, and numerous other colonies in the neighboring counties of Pest and Szolnok. Paradoxically, the opening of a new child protection institution in Szolnok County in 1952 reduced the number of foster families available for the Budapest institution, worsening the problem of overcrowding in its building. Still, Budapest was in a relatively advantageous situation compared to the rest of country, because from the early 1950s onwards the child protection institution could use the formerly private or church-run orphanages and children’s homes in the capital. As a result, the Municipal Council of Budapest had the highest number of children’s homes. Unlike in other counties, such as Szolnok, by the mid-1950s the majority of children

Figure 10. The former building of the József Home for Boys, or Josefium, around 1890 (Fortepan/ Budapest City Archives, HU.BFL.XV.19.d.1.07.079). The József Home for Boys, named after a member of the Habsburg family, was built to house orphaned children in the capital city in the late nineteenth century. Budapest had numerous such homes that continued to function as children’s homes after World War II. They differed from most homes in state socialist Hungary that were originally built for other purposes.

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could be placed in homes in Budapest (see Table 1 in the Appendix). In 1952 the Municipal Council of Budapest had nineteen homes in the capital, mostly in the green and hilly Buda side of the town, and an additional nine children’s homes near Budapest and at Lake Balaton (see Table 4 in the Appendix). In comparison to the child protection institution of the capital, there are fewer available sources to describe the other two institutions included in this study and their conditions of work in the late 1940s and first half of the 1950s.

The Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County Szolnok County, called Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County before 1950, lay at the center of the largest agricultural region of the country in eastern Hungary. Despite its name change with the introduction of the council system and administrative restructuring in Hungary in 1950, the territory of the county changed little. Situated along the second largest river of the country, the city of Szolnok, which was the administrative center of the county, was wellconnected with the capital city. From the 1950s onwards, the county’s mostly agricultural population had to seek employment opportunities in the more industrialized regions of the country. The Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County opened in the city of Szolnok in 1952. Before the opening of the institution, the extensive network of children’s colonies and foster parents in the county were administratively connected to the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County. In 1952, the new institution took over 2,000 children who were previously in the care of Pest, Hajdú-Bihar, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén and Békés Counties.114 From 1952 on, there were 1,500–1,600 children in state care in the county yearly, and the inflow of children was around 700 a year. Until 1956 there were only two children’s homes in the county, one for primary school-aged girls, opened in 1953 in the town of Kisújszállás, and another for boys opened in 1954 in the town of Tiszakürt. The county did not have enough residential homes to meet the yearly inflow of children, so the great majority of children in state care continued to be placed with foster parents until the 1970s.115 In the early 1950s Dobos, Magyarországi bentlakásos, 233. Ibid., 235, 241.

114  115

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there were ten colony supervisors assisting in the placement of children with foster families. Their work was difficult because some children were placed in farms in the countryside detached from villages, whom they had to visit on foot or by bicycle.116 Gyula Patkós, who became the first director of the Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County, was active in finding an appropriate building and organizing the opening of the new institution in the early 1950s.117 He recalled that it was a villa house in the center of the city, which had previously been owned by a Jewish family that had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944.118 Most of the substantial amount of Jewish property that was transferred to the state in 1944 was not returned to Jewish ownership after the end of World War II, and it was common for newly opened children’s homes in the late 1940s and the early 1950s to be housed in such buildings.119 At its opening in 1952, there were fourteen boys and girls between the ages of two and fifteen in the institution. The director lived in the building with his own family, but the twenty-one employees of the institution lived elsewhere in the city.120 The villa contained two large rooms that were turned into sleeping rooms, one for boys and the other for girls. Among the disadvantages of the building in its new function as a child protection institution was the fact that it had only one bathroom and toilet, and that its yard was too small to allow for children to play. Nevertheless, the recollection of former inhabitants of these homes could still be positive. One of the first residents of the Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County, who was already fifteen years old and attending training school, remembered the home with affection. As opposed to the former children’s institutions where she had lived before and during the war,   Gyula Patkós, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 20, 2008, Szolnok. Patkós was director of the Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County between 1952 and 1986. See further biographical information in the appendix. 117   Ibid. 118  Only one person survived the Holocaust from the family, who upon his return to Hungary in the early 1950s found that the villa had already been turned into a child protection institution. Patkós has emphasized that he helped the former owner recover some of his belongings that were hidden in the cellar of the villa. Gyula Patkós, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 22, 2008, Szolnok. 119   Krisztián Ungváry, “Magyarország szovjetizálásának kérdései,” in Mítoszok, legendák, tévhitek a 20. századi magyar történelemből, ed. Ignác Romsics (Budapest: Osiris, 2002), 279–308; Róbert Rigó, “A zsidó vagyon sorsa Kecskeméten (1944–1949),” Forrás 40, no. 9 (2008): 42–80. 120   Dobos, Magyarországi bentlakásos, 233. 116

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she remembered this home as smaller in size, which she liked, because she could spend time with the family of the director.121

The Child Protection Institution of Szabolcs-Szatmár County Szabolcs-Szatmár County was created at the introduction of the council system and accompanying administrative restructuring in 1950 out of the former Szabolcs and Szatmár-Bereg counties in northeastern Hungary. SzabolcsSzatmár, together with the neighboring Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County, had one of the highest proportions of Romani population in the country. In the early 1950s, the county’s population of around half a million predominantly lived on agriculture. With the loss of employment opportunities in agriculture in the 1950s, as in Szolnok County, the former agricultural population had to commute or move to more industrialized centers to make a living. These were, for example, the mining regions of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County or Budapest itself. The Child Protection Institution of Szabolcs-Szatmár County opened in 1953 in Nyíregyháza. Before 1953, children from the county had been received by the Child Protection Institution of Hajdú-Bihar County in the city of Debrecen.122 The Child Protection Institution of Hajdú-Bihar County, one of the oldest children’s asylums of the Hungarian state child protection system of the early twentieth century, placed children with foster families in the former counties of Szabolcs and Szatmár-Bereg, among others. As a result, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Szabolcs-Szatmár County had an established network of children’s colonies that the new child protection institution in Nyíregyháza could rely on. For example, out of a total of 711 children in 1953 and 744 children in 1954 who were in state care, thirty percent were placed with foster families.123 Furthermore, three new residential homes opened in the county in the first half of the 1950s, all of which were located in former castles and villas. The children’s home in Tiszadob opened in 1951 as a mixed home for boys and M. interview by Eszter Varsa, October 28, 2008, Budapest. Gaál, A közigazgatás feladatkörébe utalt gyermekvédelem, 56. 123   Dobos, Magyarországi bentlakásos, 213. Gaál mentions 839 children in state care in Szabolcs-Szatmár County on April 15, 1953. Gaál, A közigazgatás feladatkörébe utalt gyermekvédelem, 54. 121  122

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girls but changed a year later into a home for boys.124 The children’s home of Balkány that opened with sixty places for school-aged boys in 1951 was then turned into a home for girls and housed eighty children. The third home had seventy-four places for boys and opened in Berkesz in 1954. Other children were placed in foster families, such as in colonies that had existed since the interwar period in the towns of Nagykálló, Újfehértó, Bököny, and Kisvárda. The new child protection institution in Nyíregyháza had a similar history as that of the institution in Szolnok County. It was first housed in a former villa built in the late 1920s.125 The building had numerous rooms, including five sleeping rooms, two entry-halls, two terraces, an office, two kitchens, two storage rooms for clothes and four for firewood, and three further storage rooms. Still, it had only one bathroom and three toilets, one of which was a non-flush toilet in the garden serving twenty children and eleven employees in 1953.126 Furthermore, there was much trouble with the water supply due to damage in the pipelines and the silting up of the well that supplied water to the building. A year later, the institution was already moved, this time to the buildings of the former synagogue and Jewish school of Nyíregyháza.127

Life in children’s homes Following the decentralization of the child protection system in Hungary, local guardianship authorities decided on the placement in state care and the distribution of children among homes and foster families. Former child protection workers recalled, however, that in practice the distribution of children looked very different in the 1950s. It boiled down to a random selection of children based on the first impressions of child protection representatives, who gathered in the building of the child protection institution to take with them the number of children they could house in the home under their direction. “Since personality tests were not yet applied in the field of child protection,” remembered one child protection worker, “children’s placement in practice worked as follows: Dobos, Magyarországi bentlakásos, 219, 221, 228.   Ibid., 213. 126 Gaál, A közigazgatás feladatkörébe utalt gyermekvédelem, 57–58. 127 Dobos, Magyarországi bentlakásos, 213. 124  125

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Figure 11. Bathroom at a home for children whose parents were employees of the Hungarian Railways, Kőszeg, 1956 (Fortepan/Donated by Endre Baráth). This home was well-equipped. In the early 1950s, bathtubs were not available to all inhabitants of children’s homes.

Figure 12. Dining room at a home for children whose parents were employees of the Hungarian Railways, Kőszeg, 1956 (Fortepan/Donated by Endre Baráth). Like sleeping arrangements, dining rooms were also created out of the large rooms available in villas and castles.

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A member of the education department of the local council and the directors of children’s homes decided where each child would be placed by simply looking at them, and so to say pointing at individual children.”128 Like child protection institutions, new children’s homes were also often housed in abandoned and confiscated villas of the former upper classes and in the buildings of private and religious organizations in late 1940s and the early 1950s. Again, the physical condition of these buildings after World War II varied greatly. Some were used as military barracks during and immediately after the war, as temporary hospitals for injured soldiers, or as accommodation for displaced and forcibly removed persons. The furniture and other movable items usually fell victim to looting. In some places the first children who arrived at these homes had to sleep in unheated rooms with mattresses on the floor. As described in chapter 4, some newly appointed directors of these children’s homes tried to turn the dilapidated condition of these buildings into an asset and mobilized children to work and get personally involved in the renovation and decoration of their new homes. Other children’s homes were in better condition. Former teacher and care worker Béla Kövecs, recalled that in the building where he stayed in Budapest in the winter of 1948, there was warm water only once a week. “There was a Bunsen burner in the toilet, not in order to keep us warm, but to prevent the water in the water tank from freezing, because the windows could not be closed.”129 A year later he was transferred to a small town in the vicinity of the capital, where conditions were quite the contrary. The newly opened children’s home was in a castle that had belonged to one of the wealthiest upper-class families of interwar Hungary. “This was a place child protection workers envied. There was heating even in the toilets. People had not looted the building. . . . While we were there in 1949 an old countess was still living in the castle, and some of the children befriended her, and she gave them books from her library. There was even a lift in the building, because one of the former counts was bound to a wheelchair.”130

  Dickmann, “A Fővárosi Gyermek- és Ifjúságvédő Intézet,” 6. Béla Kövecs, interview by Eszter Varsa April 28, 2008, Budapest. 130   Ibid. 128

129 

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Figure 13. The former castle of the Károlyi family at Fót in the 1950s (Fortepan/Donated by Béla Heinzely). This picture was most likely taken in 1957, just before the opening of the first children’s town in Hungary at Fót: note the red star and the slogan placed on the front of the building to inspire the incoming new inhabitants. The slogan “Be strong, and you are going to succeed” was taken from Lenin’s message to the participants of the communist revolution of 1919 in Hungary. Former child protection worker Béla Kövecs used to work in this building after it had been confiscated from the Károlyi family and turned into a children’s home in the late 1940s. He recalled that it was a far more comfortable children’s home than the other ones in postwar Hungary due to its heating, elevator, and library. He also remembered that children befriended the old “aunt Károlyi” who was still living in one part of the villa.

Two children’s homes that the stories of numerous children and one of the child protection personnel in the present study relate to were the Zsuzsanna Kossuth Children’s Home in Bicske, in the vicinity of the capital, and the children’s home of Tiszadob in northeastern Hungary. The history of the Kossuth Home illustrates that some former castles of the upper classes were already serving as children’s institutions in the interwar period. The Ministry of Welfare and Labor bought the castle from the wealthy Batthyány family in 1928 and rented it to the Municipality of Budapest for a small yearly fee on the condition that it be used for the purposes of child protection work. In 1929 the municipality opened a home for mothers and infants and abandoned girls between the ages of three and eighteen. The home was named after the

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wife of Regent Miklós Horthy and the supervision of children was entrusted to nuns. As opposed to the late 1940s and the early 1950s, when the state had little to no means to invest in the renovation of such buildings, in the interwar period the Municipality of Budapest financed a substantial restructuring of the castle, including the construction of a drinking water system, in order to adapt it for its new purposes.

Figure 14. The Zsuzsanna Kossuth Children’s Home at Bicske (Photograph by the author, taken at Bicske in 2009). The Municipality of Budapest used the former castle of the Batthyány family as a children’s home from 1929 onwards.

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The children’s home of Tiszadob, on the other hand, was first turned into a children’s home after World War II. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the castle of the Count Andrássy family. Bearing the features of romanticism, it had small towers and an English garden with an evergreen labyrinth. During World War II it served as a military hospital for the Romanian army. In the summer of 1945 it housed a summer camp for Austrian children and between 1948 and 1950 communist refugees of the Greek civil war. 131 When reorganized as a home for boys in the early 1950s, there were close to two hundred children living in the institution. In chapter 4, I devote attention to the first children’s town in Hungary, at Hajdúhadház, from where the first inhabitants of the children’s home of Tiszadob came from in 1950.

Figure 15. Tiszadob, the castle of the Andrássy family, 1939 (Fortepan/Donated by Gyöngyi). The huge gardens of these former villa houses were turned into playgrounds for the children in state care who started living there from the late 1940s. Former inhabitants interviewed in the framework of this research remembered that they used to play hide-and-seek in the labyrinth of the English garden that can be seen in front of the building. The lands surrounding the villas, however, also became these children’s place of work, where, as part of their daily routine in the 1950s, they were growing vegetables, keeping animals, as well as learning trades, like shoemaking. Sándor Csatlós, “A Tiszadobi Gyermekváros története” (master’s thesis, Nyíregyházi Főiskola, 1980).

131 

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Child protection caseworkers and care providers The professional-educational and social background of child protection personnel was varied in the early state socialist period. Most care workers in child protection institutions and children’s homes had teaching qualifications and experience in elementary school teaching. This was a pattern inherited from the interwar period. From the late 1940s on, institutional personnel were also appointed through the involvement of the party. This practice brought about mixed results. On the one hand, many of these people were without professional qualifications.132 On the other hand, the directors of the state children’s asylums, who had to be physicians, were originally exclusively men as a result of the gender breakdown of university education until the end of the interwar period. In consequence of party-mediated appointments following the onset of state socialism, female institution directors also appeared. Mrs. István Dési-Huber, who was director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County between 1951 and 1957, is a case in point.133 Although she acquired her position through her party connections without teaching qualifications, she obtained a diploma in pedagogy in 1953. She was among the few female directors of child protection institutions in the early 1950s in Hungary. Gender segregation was nevertheless typical in the field of child protection in the early 1950s. Mrs. Béla Nemeshegyi, who worked at the education department of a municipal council in Budapest at that time recalled, for example, that the head of department and the caseworker with a law degree in charge of decision-making concerning placement in state care were men, while other caseworkers, those visiting families, were women.134 The professional and gender composition of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/ Pest County in 1951 consisted of three male and ten female care workers, five of whom had completed secondary school education and two of whom were kindergarten nurses.135   Gyula Patkós, interview by György Kollmann and Mrs. Mária Szendrei, April 15, 2003, Budapest, Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok, FGYK-Tegyesz. 133  See further biographical information on Mrs. Dési-Huber in the Appendix. 134 Mrs. Béla Nemeshegyi, interview by Eszter Varsa, June 1, 2008, Budapest. 135  Dési-Huber Istvánné hagyatéka, FGYK-Tegyesz. 132

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Figure 16. Mother and Infant Home No. 18 at Álmos vezér Square in Budapest, 1954 (Fortepan/ Donated by József Samodai, Zuglói Helytörténeti Műhely). Child protection work in children’s homes was gender-segregated. While directors and physicians were mostly men, especially in former children’s asylums, in infant homes, like the one in the picture, care workers (typically nurses) were exclusively women.

Besides institution personnel, a major proportion of child protection workers remained foster parents in the early state socialist period. Foster parents and the supervisors of children’s colonies in the interwar period were usually “warm-hearted, well-meaning, elderly women” without special training concerning child care, most of whom had no more than at most a basic, fouryear primary school education.136 Only a few educated foster parents were available in the center of Budapest.137 Their professionalization started in the early 1950s.138 The Ministry of Education issued guidelines to regulate the work of child protection supervisors, who replaced former untrained colony supervisors. The guidelines included supervision by the directors of child protection institutions, limiting their caseloads to eighty children in foster care within their district, and requiring close contact with representatives of 136

Mátyás Dickmann, interview by Eszter Varsa, June 3, 2008, Budapest. Ibid. 138  Decree 100/1955, Tanácsok Közlönye 1955. 137 

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child welfare and child protection institutions, such as various local council committees, school teachers, parental working committees, people’s organizations, and the police. In practice, however, there could be more than one hundred children under the care of one supervisor, such as in Szolnok County in the 1950s.139 A summary of the major legal and historical changes in state child protection between the early and the mid-1950s in Hungary shows that state socialist child protection built on, rather than completely replaced, existing policies and practices in the field. In the area of legal regulations, this manifested clearly in the retention of moral and material abandonment/endangerment as the two major categories of children’s placement in state care. At the same time, the content and following application of these categories was modified according to the major ideological tenets of socialism, namely all people’s, including women’s, expected participation in productive work. Important legal transformations were introduced too, such as the Family Act of 1952, that signified a departure from previous frameworks of care by making the rights of children born out of wedlock equal to those of other children. The institutional structural changes of child protection in the state socialist period point in a similar direction. Despite the widespread belief that under state socialism foster care was dismantled and all children lived in large institutions, Hungarian authorities were already in the early 1950s pressed to face the realities of an insufficient number of children’s homes, and thus embarked on professionalizing the foster parent system. As a result of practical hindrances, such as a lack of financial means and the uneven distribution of children’s homes across the country, the ideologically motivated effort to leave the foster care system behind in favor of residential care, as in the Soviet Union, could not be fully realized in Hungary either.

139

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  Gyula Patkós, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 20, 2008, Szolnok.

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Child protection as a “solution to the Gypsy question” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungary The overrepresentation of Romani children in state care in Hungary and in the East Central, Eastern, and Southeast European post-socialist countries is well documented. International human rights and public interest law organizations, such as the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, the European Roma Rights Centre based in Budapest, and other nongovernmental organizations working for and on behalf of Roma, as well as a number of child protection experts, have repeatedly pointed out that in comparison to non-Romani children, there is a greater likelihood for Romani children to be placed in institutional care.140 Experts argue that this is largely due to structural reasons related to a combination of factors in access to education and employment and the functioning of the social service systems, as well as discrimination along the intersection of social background and ethnicity. The large-scale placement of Romani children in state care in Hungary started with the introduction of specific policies targeting the improvement of the situation of Roma through assimilation in the early 1960s in state socialist Hungary. The political transition after 1989, however, did not significantly alter this process. In its 2012 periodic report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Hungarian government admitted that “out of the Roma population of about 750,000, there are approximately 500,000 to 600,000 people living in deep poverty,” and “a great deal of the approximately 550,000 children living under the poverty threshold are of Roma origin.”141 The loss of employment following the closing of large segments of industrial production from the 1990s   Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding observations: Hungary, March 17, 2006, http:// www.refworld.org/docid/45377ed60.html; European Roma Rights Centre, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, Milan Šimečka Foundation and osservAzione, Life Sentence: Romani Children in Institutional Care (Budapest: ERRC, 2011), http://www.errc.org/article/life-sentence-romani-children-in-institutional-care/3923; European Roma Rights Centre, Dis-Interest of the Child: Romani Children in the Hungarian Child Protection System (Budapest: ERRC, 2007), http://errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=2960; Mária Herczog and Mária Neményi, “Roma gyerekek a gyermekvédelemben,” Család, Gyermek, Ifjúság 16, no. 6 (2007): 6–12. 141 Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 44 of the Convention, Third to fifth periodic reports of States parties due in 2012: Hungary, August 8, 2012, 8, http://tbinternet. ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC/C/HUN/3-5&Lang=en. 140

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onwards and the ensuing long-term unemployment and increasing poverty among Roma contributed to rather than decreased placement in state care. Due to the fact that a significant number of Romani children were placed in institutional care in state socialist countries, Romani children’s institutionalization has been established as one of the legacies of the state socialist period.142 The history of child protection in Hungary shows, however, that contrary to this assumption, child protection has had a much longer common history with the so-called “Gypsy question.” In the following I present the roots and some of the major turning points of the relationship between child protection and the “solution to the Gypsy question.” As in other fields of educational and social policy-making, I argue that the state socialist period also represented a time period in child protection history when some of the ideas on policy reform that had emerged during the interwar period were put into practice. The reform of the public school and higher education system that started in 1945 and continued following the onset of state socialism in 1948 provides one such example. The introduction of compulsory eight-year primary school, the opening up of secondary and higher education to children of the agricultural and working classes, and women’s entry to institutions of higher education had predecessors in reform movements in interwar Hungary.143 Similarly, in the field of public health care, increased state involvement in the institutionalization and extension of public health care services was an idea that social policy experts before World War II strongly advocated in Hungary. In the field of child protection, placement in state care was a measure towards the assimilation of those considered “Gypsy” that had emerged repeatedly at local and national levels as a possible “solution to the Gypsy question” since the eighteenth century in Europe, including in the territories of the Habsburg Empire and later the Hungarian nation-state. The presence of different Romani populations in pre-modern East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe was at times met by tolerance. With the establishment of multiethnic and nation states, however, there were increasingly regulative measures towards “suspicious” populations from the Ágnes Diósi, “Együtt—vagy külön? Az első cigány hivatásos nevelőszülői tanfolyam tanulságai,” Család, Gyermek, Ifjúság 3, no. 6 (1994): 32. 143   Béla Pukánszky and András Németh, Neveléstörténet (Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 1996). 142 

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eighteenth century onwards. These affected travelling people, such as “Gypsies,” vagabonds, tramps, or beggars, without a fixed place of residence and outside or on the margins of the productive labor force.144 The onset of industrialization and the establishment of civil administration required settled populations as the basis for the government of civil life. Mobility was increasingly marginalized since the civil obligations of populations without a fixed place of living, such as tax payment or military service, could not be enforced.145 These processes paralleled developments in Western Europe where repressive sanctions against vagabonds and “Gypsies,” such as physical punishment and the death sentence, were increasingly replaced by efforts to turn them into productive members of modern society through assimilation.146 One of the first state measures in which child protection and the “Gypsy” question” were connected in Hungary was related to the specific regulations that aimed at the settlement of itinerant groups, including Roma, in the Habsburg Empire in the age of Enlightened Absolutism. The emperors Maria Theresa and Joseph II attempted to assimilate Roma into the Hungarian peasantry in the late eighteenth century through a series of regulations that prohibited travelling, wearing traditional clothes and speaking their language. Called “new peasants,” “new Hungarians,” “new citizens,” or “new settlers” instead of “Gypsies,” Roma were to receive land and build houses, and were pressured to take up occupations such as road construction and agriculture. These measures reflected the Enlightenment belief in the ability of individuals to learn and improve themselves. A particular manifestation of this idea was the forced removal of Romani children from their parents for the purposes of “re-education.”147 Children were to learn new work habits from peasant foster families. These efforts were nevertheless largely unsuccessful due to both a Lech Mróz, Roma-Gypsy Presence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Fifteenth-Eighteenth Centuries (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015). 145   László Pomogyi, Cigánykérdés és cigányügyi igazgatás a polgári Magyarországon (Budapest: Osiris, Századvég, 1995), 51–52. 146  Michael Zimmermann, “Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerdiskurse im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Michael Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), 32–33. 147   Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); István Kemény “History of Roma in Hungary,” in Roma of Hungary, ed. István Kemény (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 15–17; Caludia Mayerhofer, Dorfzigeuner: Kultur und Geschichte der Burgenland-Roma von der Ersten Republik bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna: Picus, 1987). 144 

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lack of control mechanisms applied by the state as well as the resistance of Roma.148 Although in 1780 alone, over 17,000 “Gypsy” children were taken from their families and placed with non-Romani foster parents and schools, nearly all of them ran away within a few years.149 Attempts at the assimilation and settlement of itinerant groups in Central Europe between the late nineteenth century and World War I failed. This was not due to a defective implementation of the prohibition of travelling and vagabondage but rather to the complexity of administrative structures that hindered a “solution to the Gypsy question.”150 Local authorities responsible for providing for the poor in their municipal districts were not interested in settling these people, whom they considered work-shy and a burden on the municipality. Repressive poverty policy between the late nineteenth century and World War I in Hungary, aiming to eliminate the “visible public symptoms of poverty,” such as vagabondage and begging, exemplified this contradiction in national and local politics.151 Local authorities used the obligation of legal residency to expel all who were suspected of not having a “respectable means of living,” including those identified as itinerant “Gypsies.”152 Such practices contributed to the continuation rather than the desired “solution” of the perceived problem. In this time period social reform in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire also played an important role in the development of a close connection between child protection and the “solution to the Gypsy question.” Central to this connection was the establishment of the state-supported system of institutions and services at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the parallel emergence of the legal category of the abandoned child. One of the consequences of the appearance of the legal category of the abandoned child was that the “lifestyle” of Roma in general, and especially their perceived work-shyness, was frequently equated with conditions that Zimmermann, “Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerdiskurse,” 35.   Erin Jenne, “The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe: Constructing a Stateless Nation,” in The Politics of National Minority Participation in Post-Communist Europe: State Building, Democracy, and Ethnic Mobilization, ed. Jonathan P. Stein (Armonk, New York: East-West Institute, 2000), 195. 150  Zimmermann, “Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerdiskurse,” 35. 151  Zimmermann, Divide, Provide and Rule, 39–45. 152  Ibid. 148  149

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fulfilled the criteria of child abandonment. There were regular and repeated efforts throughout the first half of the twentieth century by local authorities to use children’s placement in state care as a “solution” to the “Gypsy question.” Roma were seen as unable to provide “proper care” for their children, and the authorities hoped to “save” the youngest generation and ensure their “civilized upbringing” by removing them from the care of their parents. They also found children’s temporary placement in state care a useful measure to exercise control over parents and achieve “improvement” in their behavior. The authorities believed parents would want to be “worthy” of receiving their children back, and therefore be ready to change. “Child removal was not an aggressive and forceful regulation,” claimed the commissioner responsible for “Gypsy Affairs” in 1916, “but a voluntary measure based on humanitarian values that might be a useful tool in improving [Gypsies].”153 The removal of children into boarding schools and residential institutions as a method to advance the assimilation of marginalized (ethnic) groups into mainstream society was not a uniquely Hungarian or East European phenomenon. White American and Australian settlers, for example, placed Native American and Aboriginal children in boarding schools in the United States and Australia beginning from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.154 Training Native American and Aboriginal girls to be domestic servants and boys to learn a trade in these schools—in other words their education for work—was a “necessary part of children’s curriculum aimed at their ‘uplift’ from savagery to civilization.”155 These examples from colonial history reflect a rationale about the assumed “backwardness” of certain social groups and ethnicities. An important difference between these cases and the Hungarian context of Romani children’s removal to state care in the first half of the twentieth century was that in Hungary local initiatives did not necessarily result in actual practice. Although there were numerous recommendations from local authorities   Pomogyi, Cigánykérdés és cigányügyi igazgatás, 212–13. Jacobs,”Maternal Colonialism”; Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Ann L. Stoler, “A Sentimental Education: Children on the Imperial Divide,” in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 112–39. 155   Jacobs, “Maternal Colonialism,” 8.

153

154 

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concerning Romani children’s placement in state care, these were overridden at the ministerial level, where final decisions were made. This was largely a consequence of the lack of resources to finance the rapidly increasing number of children admitted into state care, a problem that the social administration had faced since the beginnings of the state child protection system. Consequently, as early as 1907 the number of children placed in state care as materially abandoned had to be restricted.156 This affected the admittance of Romani children into state care too. In 1908, for example, local authorities arrested six “Gypsy caravans” in a northeastern county of Hungary and sent fourteen children to the state children’s asylum. The minister of interior rejected their placement in care, however, and warned local authorities not to take such action in cases when parents were “ready and able to provide for their children.”157 Vague terminology in child protection regulations, as well as in policies concerning Roma, nevertheless encouraged such local-level practices. In 1916, for example, a Ministry of Interior decree concerning “wandering Gypsies” allowed for children’s removal from their parents’ care if authorities found that they were not looked after “properly.”158 Following a consequent increase in the number of locally developed initiatives aimed at Romani children’s removal, the minister emphasized that the placement of “all the children of wandering Gypsies” in state care was not the goal of the policy-maker. The ministry instructed authorities to measure these children’s abandonment “against the circumstances of wandering Gypsies.”159 Despite their failure, the above cases nevertheless demonstrate that children’s institutionalization as a “solution to the Gypsy question” was already a widespread idea and practice at the local level in early twentieth-century Hungary. In consequence of growing nationalism, especially following the Paris Peace Treaty in 1920, and the spread of National Socialist ideologies in the 1930s, not just so-called “wandering Gypsies” but all those identified as “Gypsies” were seen to constitute a problem group. In the interwar period and especially during World War II when local and national-level debates about the “solution   Zimmermann, Divide, Provide and Rule, 56.   Pomogyi, Cigánykérdés és cigányügyi igazgatás, 211–12. 158  Ibid., 212. 159   Ibid. 156 157

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to the Gypsy question” were fused with racist ideologies and paralleled discourses about the “final solution to the Jewish question,” the placement of Romani children in state care remained on local actors’ agenda. In the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, work camps or internment camps where Roma would be pressured to do physical labor under strict police control and “Gypsy asylums” for children were widespread proposals. A minority but wellpublished group of medical and social professionals at the time advocated the “radical” or “final solution to the Gypsy question.” This position warned against “asylums for Gypsy children” as these children’s education would “encourage the blood mixing between Gypsies and Hungarians.” Fearing the consequent racial degeneration of Hungarians, they thus discouraged children’s placement in state care as a “solution to the Gypsy question.” 160 These ideas were based on racial hygienic thought, which was a variety of eugenics with a long history in the German-speaking countries in the twentieth century. Eugenic science, which gained popularity in Europe and across the Atlantic in the early twentieth century, aimed to mobilize scientific knowledge to improve the human genetic stock. In interwar East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, eugenics together with health and hygiene became central to modernization and state-building processes.161 Creating a eugenically healthy nation was an important part of the biopolitical state agendas of the region. Increased nationalism and anti-Semitism from the 1920s onwards resulted in a rising interest in racialized eugenic thought. While racial hygiene never became state policy in this part of Europe, unlike in National Socialist Germany, racial hygienic ideas gained influence in numerous countries, including Hungary. National Socialist race discourse and consequent practices aimed to separate a so-called racially “pure” group of Roma of Aryan origin from others considered to be “mixed blooded.” The “mixed-blooded,” among whom leading racial Marius Turda, “‘If Our Race Did Not Exist, It Would Have to Be Created’: Racial Science in Hungary, 1940–1944,” in Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945, ed. Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 237–58; Benjamin Thorne, “Assimilation, Invisibility, and the Eugenic Turn in the ‘Gypsy Question’ in Romanian Society, 1938–1942,” Romani Studies 5, no. 21 (2011): 177–206; Varsa, “The (Final) Solution,” 120. 161  Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda, “Framing Issues of Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe,” in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, ed. Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011), 12. 160 

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hygienists of the time, like Robert Ritter, counted ninety percent of the Romani populations living in Germany, were to be exterminated due to the “racial hygienic danger” they posed to the rest of society. These discourses and practices reflected a change from a social to a racial understanding of the “Gypsy question.” While radical voices concerning the “solution to the Gypsy question” did not disappear immediately following the end of the war, the dominant discourse and policy recommendation among professionals once again focused on assimilation. These included children’s placement in state care as a way to reeducate the young generations and also exercise control over the behavior of parents. A policy initiative in northeastern Hungary in 1947 and 1948, for example, emphasized that “the Gypsies would do anything asked of them in order to keep their children.”162 Child protection thus returned as a means towards the “solution to the Gypsy question” before the onset of state socialism in Hungary. Those “who do not wish to part with their children would be encouraged to take up a working life,” while those whose children were placed in state care would “get them back once they started to lead an orderly working life,” recommended the text.163 The idea of ensuring the participation of the “Gypsy population” in productive work was one of the continuities between solutions proposed before and after the onset of state socialism in Hungary. A central element to this thought was the supposed “work-shyness” of Roma. As I show in the following chapters, children’s institutionalization formed part of the imagined and desired assimilation of Roma in early state socialist Hungary. Importantly, however, the placement of Romani children in state care was not a socialist invention but part of a historical continuity in the connection between child protection and the “solution to the Gypsy question.” Political support for a residential-care-based form of child protection following the end of the 1940s and thus an increase in the number of children’s homes enabled the realization of this long-existing idea.

József Galambos, “A cigánykérdés megoldása,” Népegészségügy 28, no. 36 (1947): 1448–49. Ibid.

162  163 

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“THE MINOR WOULD HINDER THE MOTHER IN FINDING EMPLOYMENT”: CHILD PROTECTION REGULATING WOMEN’S LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION

Eleven-month-old Mária was placed in state care in 1954 because her lone mother “could not place her child in the local nursery.”1 The nursery opened at six in the morning, but Mária’s mother worked at a weaving factory and had to leave for work at half past four. “She was continuously on sick leave, because she was looking after her child.” The local guardianship authorities declared it was “necessary to place the minor temporarily in state care, while her familial situation was sorted out.” Nine-month-old Éva and her three-yearold brother were placed in state care in early 1955. In this case the guardianship authorities acknowledged that there was no seven-day nursery in the district, which contributed to the fact that “the [lone] mother, who was working, could not keep the minors.”2 In both cases the mothers relinquished their children to state care because of the absence of adequate child care services. Working mothers and their children bore the burden of the insufficient socialization of care work at the beginning of women’s large-scale entrance into paid work in Hungary in the 1950s. Lone mothers, whether widowed, divorced, separated, or unmarried, struggled especially hard to make ends meet, not just financially but also in terms of time management.3 The absence and insufficient capacity   Fővárosi Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára (Archives of the Budapest Special Service for Child Protection, hereafter FGYK-Tegyesz irattár), III. 55105/1954. 2   FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 55557/1955. 3  I call lone mothers all mothers who were the primary caregivers to their children and shouldered most or all of the day-to-day financial and care responsibilities for raising their children, whether they were widowed, divorced, separated, or unmarried single mothers. 1

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of child care facilities to meet demand resulted in a tension between women’s responsibilities in looking after their children and their employment. The stories of children placed in state care in early state socialist Hungary present a little-discussed aspect of child protection and residential institutions in the former Eastern bloc, namely their role in mediating the tension between women’s productive and reproductive responsibilities. At a time when an increasing number of women were entering paid work in the framework of state socialist industrialization but the socialization of care work was inadequate, these institutions substituted for missing public child care services.4 Participation in productive work was counted among the expectations towards women in state socialist societies. Child protection and guardianship caseworkers who were active in facilitating the employment of mothers viewed children as hindering women from fulfilling this expectation. They subsequently mobilized the already existing network of children’s homes and child protection institutions to enable women’s entrance to paid work as well as to put pressure on them to do so. Placement in state care, however, was not equal to child care. It involved the regulation not only of the children, who ended up in institutional care, but the behavior of their parents, especially their mothers. This latter process is also the focus of the present chapter. The files of children placed in state care between 1949 and 1956 show that children’s institutionalization allowed caseworkers to pressure mothers to take up paid work. This regulatory process worked differently in the cases of different mothers. While caseworkers generally negatively evaluated mothers without a job, a majority of whom were lone mothers, their judgment of mothers they identified as being “Gypsy” was also influenced by the widespread prejudice against Roma as work-shy. Such differentiation in the process of placement in state care is especially important to trace in the case files of children, since by the 1980s Romani children were overrepresented in state care. While representatives of the child protection system had a central role in regulating the behavior of mothers, placement in state care was not always initiated by the authorities. Mothers and at times fathers actively tried to ease the tension between their employment and family-related responsibilities. Kindergartens in the 1950s in Hungary were not only insufficient in number but were also restricted to the children of employed parents. Bicskei, “Our Greatest Treasure.”

4 

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They used their maternal and paternal ingenuity to secure care for their children by relying on the child protection system. This situation calls for the reexamination of the role played by the state in relation to women and families in state socialist societies. Since Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary society, studies dealing with the processes of social control need to position themselves in relation to his work. Foucault has given the exercise of power a new character in that he has described it as a diffuse instead of a one-dimensional force and connected it to the production of discourses reflecting accepted forms of knowledge and “scientific truth.” Analyzing the history of disciplinary institutions, such as orphanages and prisons, he has pointed to the central role they and the scientific study of populations played in defining norms of behavior and deviance.5 Jacques Donzelot has used Foucault’s model of how social and welfare institutions exercised implicit modes of state control over populations to analyze the role of professionals in surveilling and policing families.6 He has argued that social workers and medical and health professionals exercise control over and aim to change families. Critical of the functionalism embedded in theories of social control, numerous scholars have argued for more emphasis on agency and opposition when investigating these processes.7 In the field of the social history of child protection and residential institutions, Linda Mahood has, for example, emphasized the need to consider these social institutions not only as terrains of repression but also contestation, “where opposition, rebellion, and resistance was produced.” Their clients were not only “subjects of state intervention” but also “subjects or agents of social action.”8 Foucault’s work—together with the criticism it received for not devoting enough attention to resistance—has also profoundly influenced the historiography of Stalinism. History writing about Stalin’s Soviet Union has for a long time been dominated by the so-called totalitarian paradigm and concentrated Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1977). 6   Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1979]). 7  Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Michael Foucault,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 51–68; Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in ibid, 69–102. 8   Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family, 13. 5 

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on the characteristics of a monolithic and highly oppressive state and political leadership. Other historians have captured the essence of Stalinism through its program of catch-up industrialization, presenting the Soviet Union as an alternative, socialist form of modernization. A very different picture of Stalinism has been drawn by those historians who focus on everyday life. Revisionist historians, for example, who have questioned the totalitarian paradigm, have emphasized among others the role of the unintended effects and consequences of policies and the existence of popular support among the people towards the regime. These historians have presented a far more dynamic state-society relationship under Stalin, in which resistance, as well as local and individual level dealings with the authorities, especially in the peripheries of the Soviet state, were part of the lived experience of state socialism.9 The Stalinist state was no longer seen as a homogenous entity but as “an integrative part of the social whole.”10 Others, such as Stephen Kotkin in his foundational work on Stalinist industrialization and the city of Magnitogorsk, have attested to the importance of the profound cultural and social change that transformed Soviet society in this period through a variety of policies supporting the social mobility of the working class, women’s equality, the guarantee of employment, and access to health care.11 Welfare politics has received relatively little attention in the historiography of Stalinism. This is rooted partly in the long-lasting assumption that there was no social policy-making under state socialism. Furthermore, from a totalitarian perspective, social policies represented little more than the political-economic goals of the oppressive state, including the control and terrorization of citizens.12 Contrary to this, historians utilizing a bottom-up perspective on socialist states have attested to an effort towards the “advancement of the commonwealth” despite financial and administrative limitations in its application.13   On criticism of the totalitarian paradigm, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 77–91; Mark Edele, “Soviet Society.” On Hungary, see for example Michael Pittaway’s work on industrial workers. 10   Edele, “Soviet Society,” 364. 11  Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 12  Ferge, Fejezetek a magyar szegénypolitika történetéből. 13  Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 20. On Hungary, see Haney, Inventing the Needy. 9

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A growing body of feminist historical scholarship devoted to the state socialist period in Eastern European countries has combined these revisionist perspectives and everyday life history with attention to gender as a category of social difference. Concerning Hungary, Lynne Haney has testified in her history of welfare politics and gender to the importance of a “new approach to welfare” beginning with the onset of state socialism among the transformation processes that marked this era.14 She has also emphasized that clients of the new socialist welfare institutions had room for maneuvering and strategizing.15 This chapter analyzes children’s placement in state care between the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, relying on historical scholarship that focuses on processes of social regulation with attention to contestation and agency. It examines both the regulatory framework in which child protection institutions and caseworkers operated in early state socialist Hungary and the use of these institutions by parents to bridge tensions between paid work and care work responsibilities. Using the intersectional perspective of gender and ethnicity, it furthermore points to the differentiated forms of pressure child protection as an institution exercised on Romani and non-Romani mothers to enter paid work. The chapter examines caseworkers’ approach to parents identified as Roma and points towards continuities in racial/ethnic prejudice across the systemic divide of the late 1940s. In the following, I first show that it was the lack of a network of child care services that contributed to an increased presence of the institution of child protection in the lives of mothers. This was tangible among working mothers, especially when they were lone mothers, whose children often landed in child protection institutions because of a lack of appropriate care. Next, I turn to unemployed mothers, whom caseworkers evaluated negatively and whose children they conceptualized as hindering the employment of their mothers. Here, placement in state care served the purposes of pressuring these women to find a job. In their decisions, caseworkers were influenced by prejudices against all Roma as work-shy. Finally, the cases of parents who asked for the Haney, Inventing the Needy, 9. Ibid., 8.

14  15 

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institutionalization of their children show that they actively searched for ways to secure their care and used child protection for these purposes when other alternatives were unavailable to them.

A lack of child care services and “delinquent” children In the early 1950s, when women’s labor force participation was rapidly on the rise, the socialization of care work was weak, with a general lack of child care facilities and a limited number of places available for children in the few existing institutions. The statistical report of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office on health and culture from 1952 stated that only one fifth of working mothers’ children aged between zero and three were able to get a place in a nursery.16 Child care facilities in Budapest were sufficient for the placement of only eleven percent of primary-school-age children, while in the countryside they were even scarcer. Temporary child care institutions open for the period of inten- sive agricultural work covered eight percent of the child population aged between zero and six and only one percent of that below three. The situation became even more acute following the introduction of the population policy package of 1953, as a result of which abortion became tightly controlled. The subsequent increase in the number of small children was so great that even the increase in the number of places in nurseries by almost 4,000 in 1954 contributed little to easing the problem.17 In this situation the balancing of employment and child care for mothers was especially difficult. Caseworkers mobilized the long-existing countrywide network of child protection institutions, children’s homes, and foster families to fill the missing or weakly developed institutional infrastructure of child care services. In the capital, for example, approximately twenty percent of the places in children’s homes were reserved for children of working parents,   Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Egészségügyi és kultúrstatisztikai jelentés, 1952 (Budapest: KSH, 1952), 1; Bicskei, “Our Greatest Treasure.” 17 Tomasz Inglot, Dorottya Szikra, and Christina Rat, “Continuity and Change in Family Policies of the New European Democracies: A Comparison of Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Part I: Institutional Legacies and Path Dependencies in Family Practice—1945 to 2000,” NCEEER Working Papers (November 14, 2011), 23–24. 16

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who were received without being placed in state care. Children’s homes functioned similarly to boarding schools for these children, who spent the weekends with their parents.18 The countrywide system of child protection institutions, as well as their capacity to receive children immediately and house endangered children temporarily until a decision by guardianship authorities was made about their case, enabled caseworkers to place children here on a short-term basis. The fact that these institutions were used to ease the difficulties arising from the clash between women’s paid and unpaid work was reflected even in the statistical reports of the period that are known to have contained adjusted figures on problematic issues under state socialism. The statistical report of 1952, for example, stated that due to the “insufficient number of places” in child care facilities, “in case of temporary difficulties, such as lack of accommodation or unemployment,” parents were forced to place their children in the care of child protection institutions.19 According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, at the turn of the 1940s to the 1950s there were around 25,000 children in state care, approximately 1.1 percent of all children aged zero to fourteen (see Table 1 in the Appendix).20 The number of placements in 1952 was predicted to surpass the prewar figures of 1938.21 Most children were placed in state care due to “the temporary difficulties of parents, such as a lack of appropriate accommodation or unemployment.”22 According to “strictly classified” data from 1955, close to one third of the 6,020 placements were based on material reasons.23 These children mostly had separated parents, were being raised by single mothers, or were orphaned or completely abandoned.24

The cases of these children, as they were neither abandoned nor endangered and were not handled by the guardianship authorities but by the Budapest municipal council, is outside the scope of this research. 19 Ibid. 20  Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Szociális intézmények, 1950. évi adatok, 12. 21   According to the report there was an influx of 12,449 children into state care in 1938, adding up to 41,294 children in state care that year. 22   Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Egészségügyi és kultúrstatisztikai jelentés, 1952, 14. 23   Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Gyermekvédelem 1955: A Központi Statisztikai Hivatal (KSH) jelentése (Budapest: KSH, 1956), 2. 24  Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Gyermekvédelem 1955, 2. 18 

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The inadequate supply of child care services, coupled with the authorities’ wish to increase women’s participation in the labor force, contributed to an increased presence of the institution of child protection in the lives of both employed and unemployed mothers. The clash between paid work and care work was most tangible in those cases where children were institutionalized because of the danger of their “moral decline” or “inclination towards delinquency.” These dangers and inclinations had much to do with the lack of care children received as a result of missing child care services. Left alone during most of the day, children were “wandering,” not attending school regularly, or committing petty crimes such as stealing. In 1954, for example, thirteen-yearold Kata was placed in state care because she was wandering, not attending school, and committing small thefts. She was “on the way to delinquency.”25 Her parents were “employed people, occupied at their work,” claimed guardianship authorities, “who could not keep her under strict control.” Caseworkers referred especially to teenage children as “endangered by moral decline” due to their “inclination towards wandering” and school absenteeism.26 They described their parents as “orderly and honest people,” who could not secure their children’s care or exercise influence over their behavior “because of their day-long occupation.”27 Children’s case files indicate that the missing network of child care services hit lone mothers especially hard, since they had fewer chances than married women to secure care for their children while they were at work. In her historical analysis of Hungarian welfare politics, Haney draws attention to the difference between the societal/institutional positions of married and single mothers, the latter also including divorced mothers in early state socialist society. Among other issues, single women had little or no access to familial networks to help them with child care, and due to their peripheral status in the labor force had less access to welfare resources such as the benefits provided by enterprises or stable housing.28 “Based on the investigation [of the guardianship authorities] the minor is a regular school avoider, his behavior is 25

Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Gyermekvédelmi Központ és Területi Gyermekvédelmi Szakszolgálat irattára (Archives of the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County Special Service for Child Protection, hereafter JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz), 2816/1954. 26  Ibid. 27  JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 2790/1954; and FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 50479/1953. 28  Haney, Inventing the Needy, 65–88.

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uncontrollable, he lies and steals,” was a typical statement in the files of children raised by a lone working mother. Thirteen-year-old Péter, for example, spent close to a year and a half in state care between 1955 and 1956 because his widowed mother, who worked “from early morning to late in the evening, could not look after him.”29 Another twelve-year-old boy, whose mother was also at work “from morning to late in the evening,” spent his days in the street and at the local movie theater instead of attending school. In their report on him, guardianship caseworkers stated that “placement in state care seemed the best solution in the interest of the child.”30 The situation of mothers who lived in workers’ hostels was even harder, since these forms of accommodation did not accept children.31 Daily and weekly commuting affected an increasing proportion of the Hungarian working population from the early 1950s onwards, especially first-generation, unskilled factory workers, including both Romani and non-Romani women.32 By the 1970s and 1980s, sociological research in Hungary had critically addressed the inadequate conditions of workers living in these hostels as well as the harmful effects of commuting in severing familial ties. 33 The case files of children in state care support this point. Richárd, for example, a Romani child, was placed in state care before he turned one year old in 1954. His parents, who were separated, came from a town in northeast Hungary, but were both working as unskilled workers at a construction company in Budapest. “As both parents were living at a workers’ hostel, where the minor could not be taken,” Richárd was received by the Child Protection Institution of Debrecen that was the nearest institution to his place of residence.34 Two years later he was FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 55609/1955. FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 55596/1955. 31   There were only a few hostels for married couples; their proportion in the early 1960s was still only three percent, and a precondition for eligibility was a marriage certificate. Tamás Kohut, “‘Erkölcsi téren ma már a szállókon rend van’: Mindennapi élet a szocialista korszak munkásszállásain,” Korall 9, no. 32 (2008): 60–77. 32  Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete, 70–71; Eszter Zsófia Tóth, “A fekete vonat, Cséplő Gyuri, A pártfogolt—ingázók a dokumentumfilmekben,” Eszmélet 20, no. 77 (2008): 50–75. By the mid-1970s, public discussion concerning commuting was associated with social deviance and the “Gypsy question.” 33   Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete, 227. See also Katalin Láng and György Nyilas, “Ideiglenes állandóság: Tanulmány a munkásszállón élők életkörülményeiről és rétegződéséről,” in Peremhelyzetek, ed. Ágnes Utasi (Budapest: MSZMP KB Társadalomtudományi Intézete, 1987), 33–100. 34   SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz, 2780/1956. 29  30 

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transferred to the Child Protection Institution of Szabolcs-Szatmár County in Nyíregyháza, and within four months to a home for kindergarten-aged children, where he stayed until he was returned to the care of his parents in 1958. This story reflects well how the difficulties of commuting lone mothers and their children related to the lack of child care. In particular, factories traditionally employing male workers invested little in child care facilities.35 Many women, including Romanis women, working as unskilled workers, ended up in such factories and their workers’ hostels, where child care was unavailable. Magda’s story illustrates the trauma of these women’s children. She and her younger brother, who were of Romani origin, were raised by their maternal grandmother in the countryside in the late 1940s while their mother worked at a factory and lived in Budapest. Magda’s parents were separated, and she also had a twin brother and an older brother, who lived with their father and their paternal grandmother. Magda remembered how one day her mother, back for a visit, took them to the child protection institution: “She took me and my younger brother by train to Budapest. She told us she was going to show us her workplace. But instead we went to the collection center [the child protection institution] and my mother left us there. We cried very much. We wanted to go back home to our grandmother.”36 Newborn and small children could not be left alone while their mother was at work. Without child care services, these mothers were forced to have their children institutionalized once they had to return to their workplace. Three-month-old Lilla, for example, was institutionalized in 1954 in Budapest because her mother was “unable to look after her”: “The child could not be placed anywhere else, because there was neither a nursery nor any other person there [in the small town], who could take care of her.”37 Mothers raising their children alone had less access to support from in-laws. The four- and two-year-old sons of Mrs. Munkás were placed in state care in early 1955, because her husband abandoned the family and she was employed.38 In yet   Bicskei, “Our Greatest Treasure,” 174. Bicskei has pointed out that child care services provided by factories depended on, among others, “the ‘traditional’—in other words, utilitarian—attitude of each industry towards its female work force and the gender division of labor and segregation of work.” 36 M., interview by Eszter Varsa, May 27, 2010, Nagycserkesz. 37 FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 55221/1955. 38 FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 55851-52/1955. 35

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another case, three-year-old Anna was raised by her employed mother, who was divorced. Guardianship authorities found the child’s placement in state care necessary because “during the time the mother was at her workplace the child would be left without care.”39 These employed mothers’ cases illustrate the important function of child protection institutions in filling the role of missing child care services. They also show the importance of family, whether available or not, and the dynamic between families and institutions.

“The minor would hinder the mother in finding employment”: Child protection as a tool to force unemployed mothers to enter paid work The inadequate supply of child care services in the context of women’s growing participation in the labor force contributed to the presence of the institution of child protection in the lives of unemployed mothers as well. Children’s placement in state care served the purposes of pushing these mothers to find a job. In child protection policy, the category of moral endangerment revealed that caseworkers evaluated parents who were not employed, including mothers, negatively. As I write in chapter 1, in 1954 the Ministry of Education reshaped the preconditions of children’s placement in state care. As a result, those cases in which children of parents “able to work” were endangered counted as cases of moral endangerment. This measure aimed to decrease the number of children placed in state care based on the assumption that the employment of parents able to work, and thereby their ability to support their children, was secured in state socialist Hungary. Material endangerment was supposed to occur only when parents were physically unable to work. While limiting the number of children entering residential institutions that at the time operated over the limit of their capacity was an absolute necessity, this restriction also expressed the centrality of citizens’ participation in productive work in the early 1950s and the presumed immorality of those not employed or irregularly employed although “able to work.”

FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 41110/1951.

39 

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Guardianship caseworkers in the 1950s increasingly defined children as “hindrances” to their mothers in finding employment or performing well at work, and thus justified placement in state care. In a typical case from Szolnok County in 1955, they described a mother separated from her husband as “being hindered from finding employment” by her two-yearold daughter. As there were no other relatives to look after the child while her mother was at work, she was placed in state care.40 In another typical example, the nine-month-old baby of a lone mother working at a factory in Budapest needed to be placed in state care because he “hindered” the mother at work. His parents had separated a year before, and the child was with the mother, who, “being employed, could not look after him.”41 In their effort to orient women toward their employment-related responsibilities, caseworkers argued for children’s placement in state care so that their mothers could either take up work or continue being employed. They used child protection in this process to put pressure on mothers. The role of child protection in enforcing women’s employment is also clear from caseworkers’ negative evaluation of unemployed and temporarily or irregularly employed mothers. Cases in which the status of children in state care was changed from material to moral abandonment or endangerment when their mother was considered to be “able to work” but had no job or was only temporarily employed testify to this condemnation. The difference between these two categories of abandonment was also expressed in financial terms: parents or relatives were officially required to contribute to the costs of state care for moral but not for material reasons. When the seven- and thirteen-year-old sons of Márta Seres were placed in state care in Budapest in the summer of 1953, their mother had only temporary employment.42 Not married, she was the sole provider of the four-member family that included her sixty-eight-year-old mother. Her earnings were so meager that her children “lived in deep poverty,” and she finally had to relinquish their care.43 Guardianship authorities first established that without sufficient resources, Márta was “unable to contribute to the costs of their care,” and her two sons were 40

JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 3153/1954. FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 33849/1949. 42   FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 50047/1953. 43  Ibid. 41 

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institutionalized on grounds of their material endangerment free of charge.44 Two years later, however, when caseworkers revised the boys’ status, they put their mother’s situation in a different light. She was no longer the poor single mother of two without resources but a parent “able to work” whose children “could not be kept in state care for material reasons.” The children were categorized as morally endangered and thus their mother was obliged to contribute financially to their care.45 Sometimes caseworkers went as far as labelling mothers whom they found “able to work” but were nevertheless unemployed as work-shy and potential misusers of the child protection system. They assumed that these mothers would institutionalize their children to be free from the financial responsibility of their upbringing. For example, in the case of a single mother whose daughter was placed in state care in Szolnok County in 1956 “so that she could find employment,” caseworkers stressed that “it [was] intolerable to allow parents able to work to place their child in state care and continue with her [!] unemployed life.”46 The typo is suggestive of the extent to which unemployment contributed to the negative judgment of this mother. In another case, in 1955 a single mother’s baby from Szabolcs-Szatmár County was placed in state care on the basis of moral endangerment because “the mother was able to work, she was healthy, but had no permanent job, and was not willing to enter regular paid work.”47 In a further case, a baby “born out of wedlock” was placed in state care, because “although [the mother] was only twentyseven years old and able to work, she was unemployed; she had no proper paid occupation.”48 Young and “healthy” mothers had no excuse not to have a job and support their children. When institutionalized, these mothers’ children were therefore categorized as morally endangered.

Caseworkers revised the status of children in state care regularly in order to make sure that parents whose financial situation had improved removed their children from state care or paid for the costs of institutional care. 45   Caseworkers were usually unable to enforce these payments; see Gaál, A közigazgatás feladatkörébe utalt gyermekvédelem. 46   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 3926/1956. 47  SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz, 1797/1955. 48 SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz, 2471/1954. 44 

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Cases in which parents were denied the return of their children from state care show even more clearly how caseworkers were able to use child protection to force parents, including mothers, to enter regular paid work. In 1955, for example, Ms. Erdei’s request to get back three of her four children who had been placed in state care a few years earlier was rejected. According to the decision of the guardianship office, the danger that the children, aged ten, five, and three, would “return to delinquency” was too high. At the time of the children’s placement in state care, Ms. Erdei’s partner, who was the father of the children, had died. As a lone mother, Ms. Erdei had great difficulties in securing her family’s living. She had neither a “proper flat nor an income; she provided a very meager living to herself and her children from temporary work.”49 Caseworkers decided that despite the fact that Ms. Erdei had in the meanwhile obtained a job, her situation was not stable enough to look after her children: “It is undisputable that the financial circumstances of the mother have greatly improved since she has full-time employment now. But it is also undeniable that the time the mother has spent in regular employment is not long enough for her to rise from her previous fallen state and to secure a proper home for her children. In order to achieve this, she would need more time.” The decision to keep the children in state care was also motivated by the caseworkers’ opinion regarding “the general interest of the larger community,” since “state care would ensure that the children would become useful members of the society, while their release from care contained the danger that they would turn into criminals.” In another case from Szolnok County, it was the village community that requested in 1952 that the children of Mr. and Mrs. Bor be put in state care. Filing a petition with thirty signatures to the local guardianship office, the inhabitants of the village claimed that the behavior of the children, who “stole vegetables and fruit from the garden of others, shouted at elderly people and threw stones at them, was intolerable and posed a danger to the proper development of the children in the village.”50 Villagers stated that the siblings misbehaved because of the work-shyness of their parents, who “taught their children nothing better than to steal.” When in 1955 Mr. and Mrs. Bor 49

JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 1582/1952. JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 1526-29/1952.

50 

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requested that their three institutionalized children be returned to their care, child protection caseworkers denied their request. As in case of Ms. Erdei, they argued that it was “not the appropriate point in time yet” to release the children from state care since “that would endanger the achievements already gained” through the children’s institutionalization in the behavior of both the three siblings and their parents. According to their evaluation, the parents’ “attitude to work” had improved since the removal of their three children from their care substantially, but not enough. The family had in fact moved to a neighboring village where Mr. Bor had found employment. The local council furthermore was providing the family with a small apartment. Still, the return of their three children “would break the balance of the family and result in the resurfacing of earlier problems,” the caseworkers argued, adding that their apartment was not large enough to house all their children, nor was their income sufficient to support them “properly.” Additionally, the parents had “just started to think seriously about their family life” and were about to change their “world view” and earlier behavior. As these cases demonstrate, guardianship and child protection caseworkers were not simply friendly supporters of women’s entrance to paid work. They mediated the tension that arose in the early 1950s between work and family life as a result of the inadequacy of available child care services by relying heavily on the institution of child protection. They used children’s placement in state care not so much to facilitate but to force mothers to enter paid work and effect change in their behavior. Clearly, placement in state care was not a process in which authorities acted as agents of state power independently from the larger community. In the case of the Bor family, villagers made active use of the chance offered by state care to remove the family from the community. Employment played a central role in caseworkers’ evaluation of mothers and whether they could be entrusted with raising their children, or whether they endangered their moral development. In identifying mothers who had to enter paid work and whose unemployment or irregular employment they found endangered the upbringing of their children, caseworkers’ judgment was not only guided by child protection policies. Their evaluation of families and children was put together from different pieces of information, provided by neighbors, school teachers, police, doctors, or at times the activists of the local social policy committee.

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The files of Romani children placed in state care in the early 1950s examined in the next section furthermore show that caseworkers’ judgment about mothers was also affected by prejudice about the work-shyness of Roma.

“As they are Gypsies, they are not employed”: The negative evaluation of Romani motherhood Prejudice about Roma played an important role when guardianship authorities evaluated motherhood and the mothering of women they suspected of endangering the upbringing and development of their children. They were likely to find Romani mothers to be work-shy and potential misusers of the child protection system. Guardianship and child protection caseworkers’ prejudices are not surprising in light of the abundance of references to the “education” and “reeducation of Gypsies” with a focus on “work” in most reports about their situation in the 1950s in northeast Hungary. While the first party resolution on the “Gypsy population” was issued only in 1961, there were already efforts in the early 1950s to produce specific policies directed at the assimilation and “uplift” of Roma at both the local and ministerial levels.51 Furthermore, as I pointed out in chapter 1, the identification of Roma with work-shyness was not a state socialist invention. It was a long-standing prejudice about Roma in Europe that acquired a racialized meaning in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, and led to the annihilation of thousands of Roma during the Holocaust. The characterization of Roma as work-shy was also key to the connection between child protection history and the history of the “solution to the Gypsy question” in Hungary. Among other effects, it motivated the authorities’ efforts to remove Romani children from their families and place them in state care throughout the twentieth century. The work-shyness-biased approach to the employment of Roma also permeated the welfare-related work of local councils in the early 1950s. The program of the council of Szabolcs-Szatmár County for 1953 in the field of social policy, for example, framed the employment of Roma in factories and home craft cooperatives for traditional “Gypsy occupations” as a means to Feitl, “A cigányság ügye a napirendről lekerült.”

51 

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educate them for work.52 Romani children’s institutionalization also surfaced in this document. State actors believed it would secure the disciplining of Romani children and their parents, and put an end to their “work-shyness.” The case of the death of a newborn child in the Romani settlement of a small village in Szabolcs-Szatmár County in 1953, testifies to this belief. The child’s death stirred the sentiments of the non-Romani establishment of the village not so much out of concern for the parents, but rather due to fears of a possible outbreak of infectious diseases and the danger they thought the Romani settlement posed to the rest of the non-Romani population.53 A committee composed of the local doctor and council members, including the representative of the social committee that visited the settlement, recorded a shocking state of poverty and famine among Roma in the settlement: “the members of the [Gypsy] community were in a completely abandoned state . . . they lived only on water . . . because they did not have any food. The children suffered from edema caused by famine.” As a result, the local council sent a request to the county-level authorities asking for immediate food aid for eightysix persons at the Romani settlement and requesting that all children under fourteen be placed in state care on the basis of their poor health. The response of the county-level council was in line with the new child protection policy that did not allow the placement of children in state care on grounds of material endangerment when their parents were considered “able to work.”54 At the same time, it heavily emphasized the importance of employment for the “solution to the Gypsy question.” It squarely declared that the suggestion of the local council “did not serve the final solution to the Gypsy question,” and emphasized that “of primary importance was that Gypsy workers able to work got an opportunity to work.” The county council declared that “it was unimaginable that the eighty-six Gypsies . . . who did not work, although [they] were able to work, received financial support, because that would lead to the rearing of a crowd of work-shy.” In consequence it denied the request to place the children of the impoverished Romani settlement in state care. MNL SZSZBML, XXIII. 2.4/1953, Szabolcs-Szatmár Megyei Tanács VB jegyzőkönyvei [Minutes of the meeting of the Executive Council of Szabolcs-Szatmár County]. 53  Blaming “Gypsies” for the outbreak of epidemics was an argument used to segregate and discriminate Roma across centuries in Europe. See, among others, Promitzer, “Typhus, Turks, and Roma,” 88–89. 54  MNL SZSZBML, XXIII. 16. 8031-6/1953, Szabolcs-Szatmár Megyei Tanács VB Igazgatási Osztályának iratai. 52 

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The county council declared this would be possible only if the children “did not have relatives obligated and able to provide for their support.” Authorities’ refusal to provide financial support to these families and their denial of children’s placement in state care aimed to pressure parents “able to work” to find employment. Their assumption was that, without such pressure, Roma were inclined towards “work-shyness” and would push the responsibility of care for their children on the state. It is important to note too that authorities were concerned about the “final solution to the Gypsy question.” The expression used here, one that resonated with the National Socialist use of the term originally employed in the context of the genocide of the Jews, was also applied in discourses concerning Roma throughout the 1940s in Hungary. Thus not only were concerns about the work-shyness of Roma tangible in the Hungarian child protection documents of the early 1950s, but there was also a clear linguistic continuity with discourses on Roma from World War II. While in the end county-level authorities denied the placement of Romani children in state care as a means toward the “solution to the Gypsy question,” the case nevertheless testifies to a belief in institutionalization among local actors as a way to handle the care of children of unemployed Romani parents. It also shows that the characterization of Roma as work-shy lay at the heart of these discussions. The case files of children placed in state care show that such prejudice played an important role when guardianship authorities evaluated the mothering of Romani women. It influenced their identification of and decisions about women who needed to be forced to take up paid work. While caseworkers could find both Romani and non-Romani parents work-shy when they were temporarily employed or unemployed, the difference in the case of Romani parents hinged on the presumption that they were unemployed work avoiders because they were Roma. A Romani child’s file from Szabolcs-Szatmár County well exemplifies this process: The local health protection circle and social policy committee investigating the case of a newborn Romani baby in 1955 found that the child’s nourishment was not secured by the mother: “The mother of the child (!) as they are Gypsies they are not employed. The parents of the child support themselves only from temporary work and thus the nourishment and care of the child is not secured. The mother has no mother’s milk and

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the father has no long-term employment contract in perspective, so the child’s placement in state care is necessary.”55 While the child’s ensuing institutionalization expressed the authorities’ concern about his health, their prejudice against Roma as work-shy and the parents’ consequent inability to secure the appropriate care for the baby was also decisive in their evaluation of the case. Prejudice against Roma as work-shy not only led to an assumption about work-shyness as the reason behind Romani mothers’ unemployment but, as an extreme example from Szabolcs-Szatmár County shows, it could also result in caseworkers questioning the sincerity behind Romani mothers’ efforts to find employment. In a report about the situation of child protection in 1955, the county council complained about the high number of Romani children placed in state care upon the request of their mothers: Also Gypsy women are trying to find employment in the industry, especially those who live a youthful, lazy life outside wedlock [akik fiatal, léha, házasságon kívüli életközösségben élnek]. As a result of their entrance to paid work, they gave many children to state care or asked for their placement in state care. Approximately forty-fifty percent of the children placed in state care in the county were Gypsy children. The reason for these requests for placement in state care was that they wanted to improve their living [hogy saját megélhetésüket nívósabbá tegyék] and wanted to get rid of their parental responsibilities. Thorough examination [of these cases] enabled the prevention of the further development of this process, moreover to decrease it to such an extent that in the first half of 1954 there were fifty percent less children taken into state care than in the same period in 1950.56

Disregarding a lack of access to child care facilities for working mothers in the countryside, county council officials blamed Romani mothers for trying to make use of the child protection system to enable their participation in waged work. This excerpt underlines that they, like non-Roma, were also trying to meet the double expectation towards women in the spheres of productive and reproductive work. Unlike non-Romani mothers, however, Romani women were characterized as incompetent providers of care for their children 55   56  

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SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz, 2536/1955. MNL SZSZBML, XXIII. 2. 05-2/1955 Tük.

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when they turned to the child protection system in trying to reconcile their productive responsibilities with motherhood. Romani mothers therefore could find themselves in an especially contradictory position with increasing emphasis placed on women’s employment coupled with inadequate child care facilities. Furthermore, the formulation that the caseworkers at the county council used when they described “Gypsy women” as living a “youthful, lazy life outside wedlock” had sexualized connotations. They defined these women as having questionable morals as well as being selfish and incompetent mothers for becoming pregnant and giving birth without being married. In the caseworkers’ perception, “Gypsy” children represented the sexual immorality of their mothers. The case files of children placed in state care I have presented so far reveal how guardianship and child protection caseworkers used the institution of child protection to force rather than simply to facilitate the employment of mothers. The lack of child care services in Hungary in the early 1950s created a tension between women’s responsibilities for both paid work and care work, a situation in which the institution of child protection fulfilled a central role. In mediating this tension, child protection policy enabled guardianship and child protection caseworkers to regulate the behavior of mothers. Women’s lack of employment contributed to care workers’ negative evaluation of their mothering, a situation that lone mothers faced frequently. In the case of Roma, prejudice about their work-shyness led to their characterization as incompetent mothers even when they tried to reconcile paid work with raising children. Not only caseworkers were involved, however, in mediating between paid work and family life. Mothers and at times fathers were also active participants of this process.

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Parents requesting their children’s institutionalization for the purposes of child care Although the institution of child protection had a high potential for and was used by caseworkers and at times also the wider neighborhood or village community for the regulation of parental behavior in Stalinist Hungary, these processes cannot simply be labelled as forms of state intrusion in the private lives of individuals. Even in a dictatorship, subjects are not just passively “subject to something,” such as “surveillance, control or government, and law or rule;” they are also “initiators.” 57 The cases of parents, especially lone mothers and at times lone fathers, who turned to children’s homes to ease the tension between work and family life when child care services were not available in the early 1950s in Hungary were such “initiators,” who “strategized” and “maneuvered” their way along state-provided resources, using them to secure their own well-being.58 As so many women did in different historical times and places when they had no access to child care, or when the form of available care was inadequate or unsuitable, mothers in early state socialist Hungary used their “maternal invention” to secure care for their children while they were at work.59 With reference to the history of child care in early twentieth-century United States, historians Sonya Michel and Jessie B. Ramey have pointed to the efforts working women made to secure care for their children in the absence of formal or institutional services, and “constructed child care provisions from whatever resources were available.” 60 Besides hiring caregivers, including neighbors and siblings, Michel has highlighted women’s “appropriation of institutions intended for other purposes,” such as orphanages.61 Ramey has described such parental strategies among poor African Americans who also used orphanages as Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family, 13. Haney, Inventing the Needy, 18. 59  Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 3–4 and 40–46. Sonya Michel has used the term “maternal invention” to refer to the ingenuity of working mothers in early twentieth-century United States in securing care for their children when child care services were unavailable. I am applying the terms “maternal” and “paternal invention” to the similar ingenuity of working mothers and fathers in state socialist Hungary. 60 Ibid. See also Jessie B. Ramey, Child Care in Black and White. 61  Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 40. 57  58 

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alternatives to child care, because of their long hours at work.62 The difficulties especially of single mothers to bridge paid work with child care drove parents in European cities too to use out-of-home-care as an alternative. Economist Anita Nyberg has found that in early twentieth-century Sweden, where only a few working women had a chance to place their children in a nursery, mothers had to rely on the foster care system.63 Using the example of the Children’s Aid Society of New York in the late nineteenth century, historian Clay Gish has confirmed the findings of other researchers who argue, concerning destitute families in both the North American and European continents, that parents were not passive victims of child protection organizations. Rather, they used residential institutions “as a shelter for their children during times of duress, and later reclaimed them.”64 Gish has shown that for about half of the thousands of young boys who participated in the Children’s Aid Society’s emigration program under the leadership of Charles Loring Brace, participation offered an opportunity to enter the labor force. The decision to migrate was brought by the families of these boys as a strategy to ease economic crisis and “smooth young people’s transition from the home into the world.”65 Historian Barbara M. Brenzel has come to similar conclusions when examining the reasons for young girls’ placement in the first North American reform school for girls in the second half of the nineteenth century.66 She has found that due to a lack of social support for families in need, parents manipulated the system of admission to the school so that their daughters could be placed there. As a “desperate but last act of parental responsibility,” they “condemned and stigmatized their children as stubborn,” because the reform school provided food, shelter, and a job for their children.67 In the context of early state socialist Hungary, parents who had no access to child care while they were at work also either relied on their private networks or turned to institutions like children’s homes. Close to 5.5 percent of the 545 children admitted to state care in Budapest and Nyíregyháza between 1949 and 62

Ramey, Child Care in Black and White.   Anita Nyberg, “From Foster Mothers to Child Care Centers: A History of Working Mothers and Child Care in Sweden,” Feminist Economics 6, no. 1 (2000): 7–8. 64 Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays,’” 127. 65   Ibid., 125. 66   Barbara M. Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856–1905 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 67  Ibid., 63

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1956 were placed in state care upon the request of their parents. In one case it was a child who initiated his own placement in a residential home. There were also cases when parents left their newborns in a hospital after having given birth or did not collect them following treatment. I did not count these cases as parental requests, even though they could be interpreted as a wish on behalf of parents to receive support in providing for their children, because there was no indication in these children’s files of parents explicitly wishing their children’s institutionalization. The proportion of parental requests was 6 percent among the 252 children who were admitted to state care for socalled moral reasons in Szolnok. As Tables 6 and 7 in the Appendix illustrate, the majority of cases in all three locations were nevertheless related to the authorities’ evaluation of the economic and social situation of parents and the behavior of children. In Budapest and Nyíregyháza, 57.80 percent of children were admitted as a result of the authorities’ decision concerning lone mothers’ (lack of ) parenting capacity, 19.5 percent because of parental death, 17.5 percent due to parental illness, and 15.5 percent because their parents were unable to provide for them. Some 15.80 percent of the children ended up in state care following complaints about their misbehavior. While only in a minority of cases were children admitted as a result of their parents’ request, it is important to examine these more closely. They show how parents made sense of children’s homes and state care. The story of Géza illustrates such a case. His wealthy, middle-class family left Romania before the war to settle in Budapest in 1944. Following his parents’ divorce in Hungary, Géza’s mother, who used to be a housewife, earned only a meager living from selling drinking water at a railway station and later working in a small kiosk. “She worked all the time. When the first train arrived at three in the morning, she was already there, her kiosk was already open. When the last train left at half past twelve at night, she was still there,” remembered Géza.68 His mother had no time and his grandmother was unable to look after him and his sister. As a result, Géza became a “very mobile little boy” who spent time outside in the street rather than at home. It was Géza’s uncle, working at the Ministry of Health and familiar with the option of institutionalization, who convinced the children’s mother to have both Géza and his sister placed in 68

  G., interview by Eszter Varsa, April 4, 2008, Budapest.

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a children’s home, where they would be looked after during the day. The story of Géza not only exemplifies how the institution of child protection filled the role of missing child care services in the lives of working mothers. It also shows that lone mothers, like the mother of Géza, for whom it was close to impossible to balance work and family life without access to child care, turned to child protection institutions as an alternative. As Géza recalled during the interview, it was only at the point when he had started to spend time in the street that his mother agreed to his institutionalization. The case files of children in state care also confirm this pattern. Numerous mothers first approached the local guardianship office when they realized that their children, who spent a large amount of time without appropriate care, started to misbehave. Turning to caseworkers and requesting the institutionalization of their children, these mothers often emphasized their obligations towards the state as employees—a notion that was widely propagated in the early 1950s in Hungary. Mothers did not call on communist ideology about women’s emancipation to argue for the socialization of care work, however, but rather sought to excuse themselves for failing to look after their children properly. When they formulated their requests, possibly with the assistance of caseworkers, they claimed they were “occupied by their job” in order to explain why they could not “secure the moral development” of their children.69 This argument built on a shared understanding of the traditional gender breakdown of work, in which women were regarded as responsible for child care and care work more generally. A typical case in point was the mother of ten-year-old Mária, who asked for her daughter’s institutionalization by saying that she was at work and could not provide adequate care to her child.70 Caseworkers agreed that Mária took advantage of the fact that her mother was away. They placed her in state care claiming she risked becoming “morally delinquent.” Children like Mária were thus not forcibly removed from their mothers’ care, but their institutionalization followed parental requests as a way to bridge the tension between employment and child care. At times it was fathers who needed to use their “paternal invention.” The fact that there were far fewer occasions in which lone fathers rather than 69 70

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  FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 40021/1950; FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 50037/1953.   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 2519/1953.

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mothers turned to the institution of child protection confirms the prevalence of traditional attitudes towards the gender division of work. These cases also point to the lack of child care services in traditionally male-occupied places of work, such as industry. Situations in which fathers needed to mediate between their employment and the needs of their children occurred only following the death or absence of the mother and when other relatives were unwilling or unable to provide care for the children. The files of these children referred to the “tragic death” of mothers, no other relatives to help out, and the “factory” where fathers had to work.71 One of the interviews also presented such a case.72 Éva, who was in her sixties when the interview was made, recalled that her mother died when she was four years old. Her father, she claimed, worked during the day and “had no option” but to place her in state care. Her maternal grandparents agreed to raise her younger sister and brother but could not afford to raise a third child. Neither could Éva’s paternal grandparents, who lived in their former three-room house together with two other families. In one of the rare occasions when a child’s case file mentions that the placement in state care was initiated by a relative who was referred to being “Gypsy,” authorities explained their decision not only by pointing out the death of the child’s mother and the inability of other relatives to step in, but, according to the information in the child’s file, also by noting that a grandmother had requested her grandson’s institutionalization in 1949 claiming that “when left at the Gypsy settlement, the child would grow up to become work-shy.”73 While it cannot be proven whether the grandmother actually claimed that or whether this argument was suggested by the local authorities in formulating the request, the fact that the child was in the end taken into state care reflects the pervasive nature and power of the idea of work-shyness associated with being Roma. In contrast to the case files of children, interviews provide a rich background on how parents and children coped with the state care that had resulted from struggling with the tension between paid work and care work. They reveal that for some parents, it was the best available alternative. For both the children   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 612/1952. Anonymized interview, 1956 Institute OHA, Budapest. 73  SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz, 694-5/1949. 71 72

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leaving their families and their parents, it was important to see children’s homes and child protection institutions in this context as something positive. Interviewees emphasized the qualitative difference between former orphanages from before World War II, which they identified with child abandonment, and children’s homes, where they were brought by their parents. For Éva, it was a sign of her father’s care that he selected “a good place, a castle” for his daughter, and that he “did not simply give her away to an orphanage.”74 Géza explained that for her mother state care was acceptable because she perceived it as an alternative to a boarding school. Boarding schools were familiar to her as part of the education of upper-middle-class children before the war: “To her, this was not such a horrible thing, because in the social circles she came from, it was fashionable to send children to institutions. ‘Had the war not happened, were we well off enough, I would have sent you to a boarding school on a ship,’ she used to tell me. Or my parents would have sent me abroad, to learn English, German, Italian, or French.”75 Taking a Foucauldian perspective on the role of residential institutions in defining norms of behavior and deviance, this chapter has presented child protection as a means for the regulation of women’s behavior through the encouragement of as well as pressure on mothers to enter paid work. The insufficient socialization of care work at the moment of women’s fast growing labor force participation in the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s enabled the institutions of child protection to take an important function in filling the role of missing child care services and thus exercise greater influence over the lives of mothers. At the same time, parents also turned to child protection in order to ease the tension between their responsibilities for both productive and reproductive work. As in other times and places where parents had no access to child care, mothers and fathers in Stalinist Hungary used parental invention to negotiate with, and for, existing resources. Importantly, children’s case files show that prejudice against “Gypsies” as work-shy persisted in child protection work across the political divide of the late 1940s. This manifested not only in skepticism regarding Romani women’s sincerity about finding employment but also in the belief among local 74

Anonymized interview, 1956 Institute OHA. G., interview by Eszter Varsa, April 4, 2008, Budapest.

75

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actors that Romani children’s institutionalization would help eliminate workshyness among Roma. Through an examination of local-level practices in child protection, this chapter thus contributes to scholarship on state socialism and Stalinism that emphasizes the role of historical continuities. It also amends the existing gendered analysis of the state socialist period in Eastern Europe by using of intersectionality to highlight examples of the differentiated evaluation of mothers who were considered “Gypsy.” In the early 1950s numerous women, mostly lone mothers, including Roma, were struggling with poverty because they had only poorly paid or temporary jobs, or were unemployed. The case files of children used in this chapter show how child protection and guardianship caseworkers exerted pressure on these mothers to take up employment. In the following chapter I show that there was a further angle to the vulnerability of lone mothers related to the conceptualization of sexual immorality in the 1950s.

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“SHE OCCUPIED HERSELF WITH MEN”: CHILD PROTECTION REGULATING THE SEXUAL MORALITY OF LONE MOTHERS AND SINGLE YOUNG WOMEN

“The city guardianship authorities sent a police force to my home at four o’clock early on the morning of May 12, 1952, and had my daughter removed, allegedly to the child protection institution, without having listened to me or allowing me to present any counter evidence,” wrote Éva, the adoptive mother of ten-yearold Gabriella, in a desperate letter addressed to the secondary guardianship authorities of Szolnok County on May 14, 1952.1 She was distressed about the removal of her adoptive daughter and appealed to reclaim her. Éva argued that she was able to support Gabriella as she was employed as an unskilled worker at the No. 62/3 Construction Company. Referring to a letter of praise by the trade union about her “positive attitude to work” and “the over-fulfillment of her work norm” as well as a police certificate about her clean record, Éva wrote that she was “not only a working parent but a good working parent, whose right to her child [was] guaranteed by the constitution.”2 Éva and Gabriella, however, alarmed caseworkers not because of the employment-related responsibilities of women. Éva’s “neighbors and hostile or jealous lessors” reported her to the guardianship authorities for immoral conduct of another sort. “They accused me of immoral life,” wrote Éva, “because I was washing for two Soviet officers and because my colleagues sometimes visited me. But   “Horváthné panaszának kivizsgálása” [Investigation of Mrs. Horváth’s complaint], JNSZMGYKTegyesz, 1422/1952. 2  Ibid. 1

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there is nothing other than a collegial relationship between us.” When they suspected so-called morally endangering parental conduct, representatives of the child protection system were ready to take drastic steps “in the interest of the child.” The case files of children placed in state care show that caseworkers not only regulated women’s lives when it came to paid work, but also required them to demonstrate moral sexual behavior. In the following I argue that children’s placement in state care served the purpose of regulating women’s sexuality in early state socialist Hungary. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the institution of child protection mediated the tension between women’s responsibilities for paid and care work that resulted from the inadequate socialization of child care in the early 1950s in Hungary. Guardianship and child protection caseworkers used state care to put pressure on women to enter paid work. In this chapter I argue that child protection and guardianship caseworkers also used placement in state care to regulate the sexual behavior of, especially lone, mothers and young single women. I show that caseworkers achieved this by first claiming that these women transgressed the acceptable limits of sexual morality. The placement into state care of young girls who were considered morally endangered aimed to curb their sexual activity. Similarly, the removal of lone mothers’ children to state care was a means to put pressure on them to get married. The fact that most of the women involved in these cases were lone mothers and young and single reflects a fear of women who did not take part, or were considered unlikely to take part, in the nuclear family model, thereby posing a risk to the fulfillment of the ideal for the female citizen, who was expected to be wage worker as well as a care worker in her family. While these standards applied to Romani women as well, in the previous chapter I showed that presumptions about the work-shyness of Roma rendered their participation in productive work especially important. The sexual regulation of Romani women through child protection also aimed to ensure that they raised their children to become productive citizens and thus contributed to the assimilation of Roma into working-class Hungarian society. Social control theories and moral regulation studies, which build on Foucauldian post-structuralist approaches to the role of discourse in defining and normalizing certain behaviors and producing disciplinary practices, have

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contributed to understanding the ways in which sexual norms are socially constructed and internalized by individual citizens.3 Studies have revealed that the control and regulation of women’s sexual practices have long been important in preserving gender, class, and racial boundaries in different historical and geographical contexts globally.4 Sexuality has been a tool of new republics, nation-states, and empires. The middle and upper classes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, for example, regulated the sexual conduct of their own members as well as that of the urban poor in order to secure their class and political status and the social order.5 Gender-specific limitations on sexual behavior were central not only to the segregation of the elite and lower classes in the metropole, but also to the construction of racial hierarchies in European and American colonial empires. Underlying these practices was a theory that promoted the determination of racial identity based on the “one drop of blood” principle. Accordingly, the sexual control of colonizing and colonized women served to prevent racial mixing and thereby secure colonial power structures.6 A similar pattern could be observed in the United States, where controlling both white and African American women’s sexuality was essential to the preservation of racial differentiation.7 In early Soviet Russia, the politics of sexuality related to ensuring productivity as well as to reproductive issues. Following the October Revolution of 1917, party and education officials put great effort into regulating the sexuality of female youth, and there was a “profound social conservatism” when it came to femininity and sexual matters.8 Education officials posited that in order to ensure that Soviet girls grew up to be “productive members of Soviet society,” it was necessary to “get [their sexuality] under control” and “see the triumph   Joan Sangster, “Incarcerating ‘Bad Girls’: The Regulation of Sexuality through the Female Refugees Act in Ontario, 1920–1945,” in Moral Regulation and Governance in Canada: History, Context and Critical Issues, ed. Amanda Glasbeek (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2006), 189–216. 4   For example, Stoler, “A Sentimental Education”; Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. (London: Allen Lane, 1979). 6  Stoler, “A Sentimental Education,” 41–78. 7   Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 133–34. 8  Ann Livschiz, “Battling ‘Unhealthy Relations’: Soviet Youth Sexuality as a Political Problem,” Journal of Historical Sociology 21, no. 4 (2008): 397. 3

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of proper Soviet socialization over their female nature.”9A telling example is Lenin’s discontent in the early 1920s with the fact that in Germany communist women’s groups discussed “the questions of sex and marriage” as their main subject. He warned against letting young people delve into sexual matters and advocated instead that communists concentrate on the issues of the revolution.10 Thus much before the conservative turn in family and gender politics under Stalinism in the 1930s, ruling ideas concerning sexual relationships and morality in the Soviet Union limited sexuality to that which occurred within marriage for the purposes of childbirth. In the early Soviet Union, physicians and public health officials advocated a “heterosexual sexless sex-model” in which sexual activity was to take place only between a married man and woman.11 “Healthy” and “normal” sexuality excluded not only nonheterosexual but also extramarital relationships, masturbation, and early marriage. Although there is a common misunderstanding that communism destroyed marriage and the family, the criticism of bourgeois marriage and sexual relationships that socialist and communist theoreticians, such as Bebel, Lenin, or even Alexandra Kollontai, advocated were far from sexual libertarianism or the dismissal of the family. Known as a representative of the theory of “free love,” Kollontai claimed that, under communism, satisfying sexual desires would become as simple and unimportant as “drinking a glass of water.”12 By advocating “free love,” however, Kollontai did not refer to casual sex or the unbarred satisfaction of sexual desire, but rather the equality of men and women in a sexual relationship.13 She believed that liberating women from economic dependence on men by supporting their entrance into paid work and socializing care work would free sexual relations and marriage from being economic transactions, as they were in capitalist society. Communist   Livschiz, “Battling ‘Unhealthy Relations,’” 397. Klara Zetkin, “Lenin on the Woman Question,” in Lenin on the Woman Question (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 3–28. 11   Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). 12 Alexandra Kollontai, Love of Worker Bees, trans. Cathy Porter (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1978). 13   Lenin’s response to the “glass of water theory” is in Klara Zetkin’s interview with Lenin in 1925: “Lenin on the Woman Question.” 9

10

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morality, which held the free and equal union of men and women in marriage as a counterpoint to the financially motivated “bourgeois marriages” and the “loose bourgeois sexual morals” of capitalism, thus insisted on the primacy of the nuclear family. Scholarship on sexual control and the moral regulation of the population under state socialism has devoted special attention to the Soviet Union and dealt less with other regions of the former Eastern bloc.14 Studies focused on the politics of reproduction in Eastern Europe have, however, pointed to a conservative turn regarding the reinforcement of women’s roles as mothers in the nuclear family as early as the beginning of de-Stalinization in the 1950s.15 This has in turn been reinforced by a growing number of recent studies on the history of sexuality in state socialist Europe. Kateřina Liškova, for example, has argued that while in the early years of state socialism in Czechoslovakia medical experts discussed sexual relations, like social relations, in terms of a reform towards more equality between the sexes, attitudes changed after the Thaw.16 In the 1970s and the 1980s, sexuality was to reflect and serve conservative gender hierarchies in the family. Agnieszka Kościańska has described a similar conservatism in the publications of sexologists in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, in which they argued that women’s emancipation was an obstacle while adherence to traditional gender roles was a necessary precondition to good sex.17 At the same time, while there is much literature focused on the intersection of gender and race in the sexual control of women in imperial and colonial contexts, little is known about the role sexual control served in the relationship between majority and minority populations, especially in relation to Roma, For an exception, see Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender. Malgorzata Fidelis, “‘A Nation’s Strength Lies not in Numbers’: De-Stalinization, Pronatalism, and the Abortion Law of 1956 in Poland,” in Geschlechterbeziehungen in Ostmitteleuropa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Soziale Praxis und Konstruktionen von Geschlechterbildern, ed. Claudia Kraft (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008), 203–15; Anelia Kassabova, “Neue alte Normen: Die Versuchte Normierung der Sexualität im sozialistischen Bulgarien,” Ethnologica Balkanica 8 (2004): 155–78. 16  Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 17   Agnieszka Kościańska, “Sex on Equal Terms? Polish Sexology on Women’s Emancipation and ‘Good Sex’ from the 1970s to the Present,” Sexualities 19, nos. 1–2 (2016): 236–56.

14  15 

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in postwar Eastern Europe. In the following, I contribute to filling this gap by showing how child protection was used in early state socialist Hungary to exercise control over and regulate women’s sexuality. The case of Éva and Gabriella, as well as those of other lone mothers and young single women presented below, suggest that the sexual regulation exercised by caseworkers and other representatives of the child protection system targeted especially these two groups of women. Efforts by child protection representatives to regulate female sexuality were not isolated instances but part of a wider social concern in the early 1950s in Hungary about the changing role of women. I first discuss some examples of how these anxieties manifested themselves among teachers and in the field of school education. Then I focus on how child protection caseworkers approached and handled lone mothers and the cases of morally endangered single young women. Concerning lone mothers, I first argue that the suspicious attitude of caseworkers was a holdover from decades of child protection work in twentieth-century Hungary in which women who had children born out of wedlock were associated with bad morality. I then turn to the wide spectrum of “immoral lifestyles” that lone mothers were accused of in the early 1950s, from sexual libertinism to not looking after their children properly. Caseworkers put pressure on these mothers to get married by removing their children to state care. While this norm held for non-Romani mothers as much as for Romani, caseworkers also paid special attention to Romani mothers and emphasized their responsibility in raising their children to become productive members of state socialist society. In the second half of this chapter I examine case files of young single women placed in state care due to their alleged immoral sexual conduct and moral endangerment, which demonstrate that representatives of the child protection system associated young single womanhood as opposed to young single manhood with a high predisposition for sexual deviancy. Child protection representatives saw their role as protecting girls from their “bad sexual inclinations” by placing them in state care.

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Concern about women’s sexual morality in early state socialist Hungary Structural and social changes at the onset of state socialism triggered anxieties about women, and especially lone mothers and single young women in society. Not for the first time in Hungarian or transnational history, women’s changing social roles manifested in concerns about women’s sexuality and sexual morality.18 Communist discourse and policy-making concerning women’s equality, as well as the rapidly increasing number of women entering the labor force who earned their own wages and lived away from home, raised concerns about women’s new, non-traditional roles in society. Éva and Gabriella’s story shows that not only the representatives of the child protection system but also neighbors were alert to women’s conduct. Public discussion about female sexual delinquency and youth morality in the Hungarian post-World War II context involved educators, primary school teachers, and members of the general public. A series of articles and letter exchanges by primary and boarding school teachers in the pages of Köznevelés, the biweekly periodical of the Ministry of Education in 1956, for example, focused on the immoral sexual behavior of female youth.19 Teachers discussed several cases in which they observed the immoral conduct of teenage girls, which usually involved attending particular events, such as parties and weekend outings organized by sports clubs in the countryside, watching “destructive” films, reading “naturalistic passages” in novels written in a “realistic style,” or being seen by their teachers at locations associated with possible sexual misconduct. A teacher reported, for example, that she had seen one of her students at a dance club after midnight: “She was there without her parents in the company of a young man, who was about to get divorced. When she noticed me, she tried to leave together with her suitor without saying hello.”20 Disturbed by this event and On anxiety about women’s sexual morality in post-World War II Europe and North America, see Joanna Regulska and Bonnie G. Smith, eds., Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union (New York: Routledge, 2012); Amanda Glasbeek, ed. Moral Regulation and Governance in Canada: History, Context and Critical Issues (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2006); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945– 1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender. 19  “Vita ifjúságunk erkölcsi neveléséről,” [Debate about the moral education of our youth] Köznevelés 12, no. 10 (1956): 225–26. 20   Ibid., 225. 18 

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upset about her student’s behavior, the teacher emphasized not only the suitor’s divorce but the soon-to-be-divorced status of the girl’s mother, who was summoned to the school afterwards: “The next day we invited in the girl’s mother, who herself was also about to get divorced. She found nothing wrong with her seventeen-year-old daughter being out after midnight. It took us a long time to persuade her of the impropriety of her opinion.”21 Worried about their female students’ immoral behavior, teachers focused on specific sites where young girls were not supposed to be seen, parts of the day when they were not supposed to be away from home, and actions such as divorce or association with divorced persons they considered inappropriate for young women and took as symptoms of their declining sexual morality. Furthermore, articles on “unwanted children” and single motherhood published in the women’s magazine of state socialist Hungary between the 1950s and the 1980s demonstrate a mixed attitude towards women who gave birth to children without being married.22 The issue was tightly connected to the public discussion and concern about the changing norms and sexual behavior of Hungarian youth. Beside a positive approach that emphasized the necessity of helping single mothers, the magazine also gave ample space to negative moral judgment. Some articles underlined the support single mothers received from the state through child protection, meaning that, “contrary to the past,” when they had “no other alternative but to kill their babies,” in state socialist Hungary single mothers were offered support that enabled them “to avoid living with the shame that surrounded out-of-wedlock birth.”23 At the same time, having the same family name as one’s mother remained a sign of being born out of wedlock and a likely cause of psychological problems as late as the 1980s.24 The case files of children placed in state care between 1949 and 1956 demonstrate that the authorities were concerned about women’s sexual morality. They actively used the institution of child protection in an attempt to regulate the sexual behavior of two specific groups of women: lone mothers and single young women.   Ibid. Eszter Zsófia Tóth, Kádár leányai: Nők a szocialista időszakban (Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely, 2010), 75–102. Nők Lapja (Women’s Magazine) was the party-sponsored monthly addressed to women. 23  Ibid., 82–83. 24  Ibid., 85. 21

22 

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The regulation of lone mothers’ sexuality Before examining how representatives of the child protection system were engaged in regulating lone mothers’ sexuality and the discourses they produced about their immorality in early state socialist Hungary, it is important to recognize that the control and regulation of unmarried, single motherhood had been an integral part of child protection work focused on morally endangering parental conduct in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy since the early twentieth century.25 Giving birth outside wedlock carried the stigma of sexual immorality. By the 1950s, “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children had been at the forefront of child protection work for several decades. While municipal initiatives to alleviate the situation of unmarried single mothers already existed in the child protection work of Budapest in the early 1900s, it was not until the Constitution of 1949 and the Family Act of 1952 that single mothers and illegitimate children were legally equalized.26 The Constitution declared that it protected the rights of youth and placed “the structure of institutions for the protection of mothers and children” among policies intended to support “women’s equal rights with men.”27 Following, as mentioned earlier, the path taken by the 1946 legislation on the status of children born out of wedlock, the Family Act reinforced the legal protection provided to unmarried single mothers and their children. Nevertheless, traditional attitudes of stigmatizing such women prevailed in child protection practice long after the introduction of these legal reforms. Caseworkers in the early state socialist child protection system thus inherited the negative evaluation of single mothers from prewar child protection practice. The data sheets they used to collect information on family background and case histories of endangered children allowed prejudices and negative moral judgment to affect casework. Old forms from the interwar period that had a separate category referring to children’s “origin” were still in circulation in the early 1950s, meaning that among the first pieces of information collected about children was whether they were “born in or outside wedlock,” following Zimmermann, Divide, Provide and Rule, 52–56. “The Constitution”; “1952. évi IV. törvény a házasságról, a családról és a gyámságról.” 27 “The Constitution.” 25  26 

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their name, date and place of birth, gender, religion, and mother tongue. While new forms introduced after the Family Act of 1952 no longer inquired into children’s “origin,” they still retained questions concerning parents’ year and place of marriage and divorce as well as the name and place of residence of a possible “natural father” and data about the stage of legal procedures establishing biological fatherhood. Thus, although “born out of wedlock” as basis for differentiation officially ceased to exist, these forms still contained questions that enabled authorities to determine women’s marital status and their children’s “legitimacy.” While these pieces of information were necessary to be able to conduct paternity tests and eventually secure support for single mothers with up to twenty percent of the father’s salary to be paid as child support, they also allowed caseworkers to identify problematic single mothers. In cases of lone mothers, documents mentioned whether (natural) fathers were identified and if they were willing to pay child support. Files were otherwise silent about fathers’ sexuality except for cases of violence committed against young girls. In 1.8 percent of placements in Budapest and Nyíregyháza and 2.4 percent of the moral endangerment cases in Szolnok, caseworkers referred to sexual violence and/or rape committed by (step)fathers against their (adoptive) daughters (see Tables 6 and 7 in the Appendix). These cases were, however, only registered as the reasons for the young girls’ placement in state care and not discussed in further detail.

The representation of lone mothers in the case files of children in state care In contrast to the limited mention of fathers, the sexual regulation of lone mothers through the institution of child protection was explicit. This manifested in the wide spectrum of categories such as “immoral lifestyle, immorality” or “morally questionable life” that caseworkers and other representatives of the child protection system accused these mothers of. A typical concern was the capacity of lone mothers to raise their children properly. Some 57.8 percent of all placements in Budapest and Nyíregyháza and 27.8 percent of placements on moral grounds in Szolnok were children of lone mothers (see Tables 6 and

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7 in the Appendix). Caseworkers questioned the moral status of mothers living outside marriage as well as their ability to mother. Their disapproval of these women was tangible in that motherhood outside the framework of marriage could become ground for the moral endangerment and removal of children from their care. In 1953 in Szolnok County, for example, a caseworker explained a boy’s moral endangerment as a result of his mother’s behavior, since she “did not look after her child” and “lived together, outside wedlock” with “an irresponsible natural father.”28 In another case from Szolnok County, guardianship authorities described Mrs. S. as a person who did “not care for her children [gyermekeivel nem törődő egyéniség]” and who was married “after the children’s birth [utólag férjezett].”29 In other cases, women’s unmarried status in a relationship aggravated the endangerment of their children. In the moral abandonment case of a nine-month-old baby in Budapest in 1951, where the local social secretary accused the mother of excessive drinking and neglecting the care of her infant, an additional proof of irresponsible motherhood was the mother’s “wild marriage” with the father of the child.30 The negative connotation of the expressions and formulations that caseworkers used to describe women in out-of-wedlock-relationships reflect the importance of marriage in evaluating motherhood as good or bad. Numerous further cases demonstrate that caseworkers questioned the moral status of lone mothers and their qualities as mothers. Women’s partnerships, that is, relationships that were not officially regis-tered as marriages, were among the family forms authorities easily associated with lone mothers’ immorality. When Dr. György Hámos, head of the Child Protection Department of the Budapest Police called guardianship authorities’ attention to the moral endangerment of the five- and ten-year-old daughters and three-year-old son of Mária Galamb in 1949, he emphasized the fact that the three children were born out of wedlock. He accused the mother of not looking after her children as she did not make sure they attended school and had sent them begging. Although the data sheet of the three children states that they were all born from the same father, with whom the mother 28

JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 2480/1953.   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 3088/1954. 30  FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 41. 578/1951. 29

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had a domestic partnership (közös háztartásban éltek), Dr. Hámos found that the “moral development” of the three siblings “was not secured” due to the mother’s lifestyle: the children were “born out of wedlock and their mother still led an immoral life.”31 He made no mention of the father. Not surprisingly, single mothers who had more than one child born out of wedlock could also be labeled immoral. In a case from 1956, guardianship authorities decided to remove a three-year-old girl from her mother’s care, not only because she was unemployed but also because she had “a morally seriously questionable lifestyle.”32 Caseworkers doubted the security of the child’s upbringing with an unmarried mother who “already had another child born out of wedlock.”33 In another case from Budapest, authorities declared the moral endangerment of a boy who “kept running away from home.” The explanation of the decision focused on the fact that “the mother had three children, the third one not from the father,” and that the mother “lived a lively and a little bit irresponsible life.”34 In yet another case from Budapest in 1950, authorities found the young daughter of a single mother to be “endangered morally with her mother,” because the mother had “several children born out of wedlock” and “all these children had a different father.”35 In a further case from Budapest, a boy was placed in state care for moral reasons in 1951 because his “family background was more than suspicious.”36 The medical examiner explained that the boy “was born outside wedlock, and according to his mother, he had an elder sister of the same father.”37 Although “the mother’s husband had adopted these two children,” the couple separated and “the smallest and now seven-month-old child’s origin was also very dubious.”38 The caseworker’s suspicion regarding the sexual morality of the mother was clear from his account of the story. He highlighted that contrary to all earlier reports, including the mother’s testimony that referred to “the negligence”   FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 34186-88/1949. Domestic partnership means two individuals who live together and share a common domestic life, but are not married. 32  JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 3320/1955. 33 Ibid. 34 FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 40. 826/1951. 35 FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 35. 522/1950. 36  FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 41. 505/1951. 37   Ibid. 38  Ibid. 31

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of the husband and the poverty of the mother and her children, “suddenly it turned out that the mother’s financial existence was secured.” He emphasized that despite the mother’s unemployment, when he last saw her, “her clothes were in order.” He finally concluded that the mother had lied to him when she said that her husband had given her all these things. “From a slip of the tongue a man’s name was given away, who is presumably the father of her smallest child.”39 The medical examiner’s meticulous description of this lone mother’s case, including the quality of her clothes and the order of her statements, reveal caseworkers’ efforts to prove the suspected immorality of lone mothers. Another accusation caseworkers made against lone mothers concerned their relationships with men. They condemned these women for prioritizing their sexual desires and thereby endangering their children. According to a former educator, for example, who worked in both children’s homes and reformatories for girls between 1945 and the 1980s, the sexual harassment and violence committed against young women and girls in the postwar period had primarily to do with widowed mothers, who were more interested in finding a new husband than in the well-being of their own children: The war had left numerous mothers alone with small children. . . . This was very typical. She went to work in a factory, because usually these women were factory workers, . . . and she got together with a younger man . . . because the woman felt lonely . . . that is, the mother. Because it was not good to be alone. . . . [This had happened] when the child was still small. Yes, but then the child, the little girl began to grow up, and then the mother at one point had to choose: the younger husband who had set his eye on the little girl or herself. And then she had either sent the child away, told her to go away, or . . . I mean, that happened.40

This child protection worker accused a specific category of lone mothers, namely factory workers, of morally endangering their daughters by enabling a family context where they faced sexual abuse and violence. Recalling how young girls ended up in residential care, she directly attributed their sexual immorality and delinquency to their mothers’ irresponsible and sexually immoral conduct. She provided several examples to support her argument. Ibid. Anonymized interview by Eszter Varsa, June 4, 2008, Budapest.

39  40 

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In one of these, she recalled a former student of hers who despised her mother for not leaving the man who sexually harassed her: This girl just could not stand her mother, that her mother was so primitive. She used to say, “My mother is so primitive, my mother and this chap too. And I was always feeling that his eyes were on me.” They lived in a small one-room thing. And she said: “I am not going to take this any longer. My mother does not want to get rid of this chap, no matter how I beg her. And of him,” she said, “I am sure. And I don’t want to become a victim.”41

The negative depiction of the mother was reinforced here by the effect of the victimized young girl, to whom, according to the storyteller, her mother’s immorality was clear. In another more generalized example, the educator made lone mothers responsible for the moral endangerment of young girls in postwar Hungary: These are all well-known things. So in [another] case, the mother told her daughter, to go out while her friend was there. She told her: “Go to the movies.” And she gave her some money. “And then go and take a short walk afterwards.” She was not allowed to go home. “You don’t need to come before 10 p.m.” She was only around fourteen. And then as she was looking at shop windows, she met an elegant, beautiful, and sweet-fragranced old lady, who started talking to her: “What are you doing my darling?” “I am just looking.” “But it is already getting late.” “Yes, but,” and she said this or that. “I can’t yet go home.” “Well, why don’t you come up to my place? It is getting cold already, and I live nearby, just around the corner. I’m going to give you some tea and cookies.” She went to her place. “Come tomorrow too!” And she went tomorrow too. And then it turned out this woman was hunting for such wandering young girls who were just walking around. And she also invited a guest to her place. And she handed the girl over to him. So this was also a way girls got into homes.42

Despite the obvious role male sexuality and violence played in these stories, the child protection worker did not blame lone men but instead accused lone mothers of sexual immorality and the endangerment of their daughters.

41

Ibid.   Ibid.

42

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Concentrating on female children without mentioning young boys and the sons of lone mothers, these stories are telling examples of the extent to which the regulation of lone mothers’ sexuality was part of child protection work. The importance the educator gave to the context of employment of these women reflects the anxieties caused by women’s changing social role in early state socialist society. The wide spectrum of “immoral lifestyles” that lone mothers were accused of also included prostitution. In five out of the total of eight cases in Szolnok in which caseworkers identified mothers’ “immoral lifestyle” as the cause of children’s moral endangerment, the mothers were lone. Caseworkers accused them of extramarital sexual activity and prostitution. While prostitution, which was criminalized in Hungary in 1955, was never named in these cases, the phrase “immoral lifestyle” clearly alluded to such an accusation. For example, about the mother of two children placed in state care for moral reasons in Budapest/Pest County in 1950, guardianship authorities wrote that she had an “immoral lifestyle, keeping up relationships with men, but not doing that at her flat but in the woods of Kispest and Népliget.”43 In another case authorities explained the moral endangerment of two children in Budapest in 1953 by the fact that their mother “neglected them” and was having “an immoral lifestyle.”44 She was able to carry on “this activity” because “the father of the children was always away working on a boat,” caseworkers explained. In a further example, the eleven-year-old son of a single mother of three was removed from home in 1954 because, according to caseworkers, he did not “receive proper upbringing in his mother’s care” whose “moral life [was] questionable.”45 Reference was also made to a daughter who was “already” in a reformatory home for young girls, “exactly because of her mother’s lifestyle.”46 Without offering evidence as to whether these women were really involved in clandestine prostitution or not, these cases illustrate the variety of sexually “immoral” forms of behavior that lone mothers were associated with. The prostitution of mothers formed an unquestionable case of morally endangering Kispest, a suburb of the capital, and Népliget, the People’s Park, were both working-class living and amusement quarters of Budapest. FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 35. 663/1950. 44   FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 50. 109/1953. 45  FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 51799/1953. 46  Ibid. 43 

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parental conduct and sufficient ground for the placement of these mothers’ children in state care, especially when they were girls. Historian Linda Gordon has noted a similar correlation between the moral endangerment of girls who had “immoral” mothers. Studying the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury child protection records of American welfare agencies, Gordon found that, because of “daughters’ assumed closeness to mothers and mothers’ assumed greater influence over their daughters,” it was considered to be “dangerous for a girl to love her immoral mother.”47 Putting pressure on lone mothers to get married was another way in which child protection caseworkers got involved in the private lives of these women and tried to regulate their sexuality. Guardianship authorities were directed to “settle the legal standing” of minors born outside wedlock as part of their official duties by conducting paternity tests and registering the biological father in the birth certificate of the child.48 The records of social policy committees that supported the welfare work of local councils reveal, however, that in practice this often boiled down to convincing unmarried mothers to get married. The guardianship caseworker of the region of Jászapáti in Szolnok County, for example, urged the child protection caseworkers present at the regional social policy committee meeting in spring 1952 to “encourage parents of children born outside wedlock to get married,” in order to secure their children two officially recognized guardians. 49 This was important, in her opinion, in order to “decrease the number of children born outside marriage.”50 In another case, the head of the social policy committee of Tiszaszőlős reported at the monthly regional committee meeting in 1952 about the exemplary work in their town. Committee members “found a father for a child born out of wedlock.”51 One of them visited the father “and talked 47

Linda Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence; Boston 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988), 134. 48  Haney, Inventing the Needy, 45. 49  “A Jászapáti Járási Tan. VB. Szociálpolitikai Bizottsága havi ülésének jegyzőkönyve, 1952. május 14-én Jászapátiban” [Minutes of the monthly meeting of the Social Policy Committee of the Executive Committee of the Regional Council of Jászapáti, on May 14, 1952, in Jászapáti], MNL JNSZML, XXIII. f. Tanácsok iratai. 50  Ibid. 51  “A Tiszafüredi Járási Tan. VB. Szociálpolitikai Bizottsága havi ülésének jegyzőkönyve, 1952. május 22-én Tiszafüreden” [Minutes of the monthly meeting of the Social Policy Committee of the

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with him, and as a result, the natural father married the mother of the child,” summarized proudly the committee their success. Children’s placement in state care was another means caseworkers had to put pressure on mothers to get married. Marriage was a way for lone mothers to repeal guardianship authorities’ charges about their sexual immorality. In a 1952 case from Szolnok County, the institutionalization of a single mother’s child was deemed necessary, because after her day at work she “spent her free time in the company of men,” and “even more, she was receiving her friends in the company of her son.”52 Within half a year authorities considered sending the boy back home to his mother, writing that she “might get married in the near future and if her living conditions change, we recommend that she get her child back from state care.”53 The case of Éva and her adoptive daughter Gabriella at the beginning of this chapter also demonstrates the pressure that the institution of child protection was able to exercise on lone mothers to marry, charging them with sexual immorality and questioning their capacity to raise their children properly. Éva made numerous efforts and addressed authorities at different levels of the child protection hierarchy to reclaim her daughter. She understood that it was not enough to demonstrate her qualities as a good worker, but in order to counter accusations about her “immoral life,” she needed to clarify her virtuousness as a woman too. She first addressed the county council with a letter about her plans to get remarried, and described her fiancée as “a serious, fifty-four-year-old man” with whom she worked together at the construction company. 54 As soon as her divorce from her first husband was officially arranged, her daughter would have a “new father.” Her fiancée testified to the truth of Éva’s words in a hand-written letter addressed to the county authorities: “I have known my future wife for a year now, and I am convinced that she is an honest working woman. She has worked with me for over a year now at the Construction Company of J. and I know her as a very honest woman who has lived a respectable social life with her small daughter.” Like Éva, her fiancée Executive Committee of the Regional Council of Tiszafüred on May 22, 1952, in Tiszafüred], MNL JNSZML, XXIII. f. Tanácsok iratai. 52   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 1358/1952. 53   Ibid. 54   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 1422/1952.

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addressed Éva’s qualities both as a worker and as a morally upright woman, who was a good care provider to her daughter. The accusations against Éva were false, he claimed: “It is true that Soviet officers frequent her home, but only because of matters of cleanliness, because she lives close to the caserne and has undertaken washing their clothes. But she was paid for this job.” As proof of Éva’s morality, he added that their wedding was already arranged to take place in a month’s time. A marriage promise was, however, not enough to reverse the council’s decision: “When you get married to Mrs. Horváth and your financial situation allows for the support of the child, you can reclaim her from the city council of J,” answered the caseworker in charge. The fact that council authorities refused to accept anything else but a marriage certificate shows the extent of pressure that they were able to exercise on lone mothers. Finally, in her desperation, Éva appealed to party general secretary, Mátyás Rákosi, whose office represented the highest authority in Hungary at the time. Despite all her efforts, however, the local council caseworker who was sent to examine her living conditions following her appeal undermined Éva’s claims of being a good mother. In her report she claimed that Éva failed to meet the expectations of a good mother in terms of both her work record and her moral reputation. She wrote that “the mother had been on sick leave since a year ago and was not employed” and referred to an earlier police report about Éva’s “infraction of work discipline.”55 She also mobilized “witness testimonies” and started a police investigation against Éva based on her “immoral lifestyle”: “There are several men in her rented room during the night, who spend half of the night there. Against the mother and her two girlfriends there has been a report made to the local police that is at present being investigated. The further development of the child necessitates her placement in state care for moral reasons,” the caseworker concluded. The local council therefore found it justified that they had Éva’s daughter removed by the police at night. It “matched the extent” of Éva’s alleged sexual immorality: “The mother had briefly lived together with several men, but they had always left her, because of her moral debauchery. . . . She still occupies herself with men. Sometimes four to five men visit her a night, civilians as well as soldiers, who spend some “Horváthné panaszának kivizsgálása,” in ibid.

55 

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time with Mrs. Horváth in her apartment.” Éva’s immorality was established in her capacity both as a worker and as a mother unable to provide exemplary behavior to her daughter. Károly Juhász, head of the county council’s child protection department, addressed Éva directly: “During the procedure it was determined that due to your behavior there is a police procedure against you concerning moral offence. There is another procedure against you concerning the infraction of work discipline. In such circumstances we do not find the child’s upbringing secured.” In a paternalistic tone, he advised Éva to “try to manifest exemplary behavior” both at her workplace and in her private life: “Then it will not be objected to that you receive your child back.”56 It is impossible to establish on the basis of these documents whether the placement of Éva’s daughter in state care was justified or not. Nor can it be verified whether Éva really lived from occasional prostitution or instead had jealous lessors and angry neighbors. Linda Gordon mentions similar accusations towards mothers in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American child protection work that “cannot be taken at face value. The presence of any male visitor could lead to an allegation of sexual promiscuity, especially if they were drinking and a husband was not present.”57 As Patricia Hill Collins has written concerning the control of African-American women’s sexuality in the United States, factual reality mattered less than the ability of women to socially construct themselves as virtuous.58 Éva lost in her attempts against local and county level guardianship authorities to establish that she was a good mother. Her daughter’s removal was Éva’s punishment for her perceived sexual immorality. Through sexual regulation, representatives of the child protection system conveyed an explicit message to women about the limits of good and bad motherhood. Éva’s story at the same time also shows that this division between good and bad motherhood was clear not only to caseworkers but to Éva and her neighbors as well. The arguments Éva presented in her own defense indicate that she knew about the expectations towards her as a mother regarding both productive work and sexual behavior. Thus sexual regulation exercised through the institution of child protection 56

Ibid. Gordon, Heroes of the Own Lives, 134. 58  Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 133–34. 57

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formed part of a wider regime of disciplinary practices focused on female sexuality in early state socialist Hungary.

The regulation of Romani women’s sexuality The regulation of motherhood and female sexuality through child protection and guardianship casework with morally endangered children extended to Romani mothers as well. The case files of lone Romani mothers from Szabolcs-Szatmár County demonstrate the pressure that the institution of child protection was able to exercise on Romani women to get married. This is well illustrated by the following two cases. In the first, the one-year-old daughter of Ilona had to be placed in state care when Ilona was imprisoned for two months in 1954.59 The reasons for her imprisonment remain undisclosed in her daughter’s case file. What the documents make clear is that Ilona had worked as a mudbrick maker and was a lone mother. Her parents were no longer alive, and the whereabouts of the biological father of her daughter were not known either. She had been living in a “partnership outside the framework of marriage” with the foster father of her child, but caseworkers decided that her daughter’s development was better secured in state care than with the unemployed foster father during Ilona’s imprisonment. It was only two years later that Ilona’s daughter returned to her mother’s care. An important ground for this decision was the fact that by that time Ilona had gotten married to a Romani man. Caseworkers found that her marriage, by which she secured an adoptive father with an income for her child, was a satisfactory condition for the release of her daughter from state care. In the second case the newborn daughter of Anita was placed in state care in 1950 because the parents, who already had a two-year-old child, were “financially not in a condition to support her.”60 Caseworkers explained their decision by stating that Anita was without income and was not married to the father of her daughter. In this case it took six years before the child was returned to her mother. While the documents do not mention how the exact conditions of parenting changed, the text of the SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz, 2351/1954. SZSZBMGYI-Tegyesz, 997/1950.

59  60 

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decision to end state care clarifies that Anita’s marriage was important in her daughter’s return: “The mother, as a result of her marriage, has better financial circumstances and can support her child,” caseworkers claimed. While pressuring on mothers of out-of-wedlock children to get married and “legalize” the condition of their children by securing them a father affected non-Romani lone mothers as well as Roma, the expectation nevertheless had diverse consequences for these two groups of mothers. Among some Romani communities, such as the Lovara living in northeast Hungary, moving in with a man, even when that happened without prior parental agreement, counted as marriage and required no further official sanctioning.61 Anthropologist Michael Stewart writes of a Lovara couple in the 1980s in Hungary, for example, who “had married ‘in the Gypsy way’ (romanes) long before they went to the registry office” to get officially married, which they did only to obtain a marriage certificate which enabled them to take a bank loan as a “newly married couple” to build a house. These groups of Romani women were likely to face child protection authorities’ negative evaluation concerning their lifestyle and sexual morality. Besides the norm of marriage, caseworkers also emphasized the need for Romani mothers to fulfill their responsibility to raise their children to become productive members of state socialist society. Caseworkers and other representatives of the child protection system perceived shaping Romani mothers’ parenting habits as a significant step towards the disappearance of “work-shyness” among Roma and thus their successful assimilation into mainstream working class society. A former child protection caseworker in the ninth district of Budapest, Mrs. Béla Nemeshegyi, recalled in an interview, for example, that during her visits to the district’s poverty-stricken shantytown, the “Mária Valéria Gypsy settlement,” in the mid-1950s, she devoted extra time to talking with Romani parents, especially mothers and grandmothers, in order to convince them of their responsibilities as mothers.62 “I checked on them and we talked, not just once, and not just for only ten minutes.”63 She claimed that this form of “dealing with” children and parents was effective and Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies, 31. Mrs. Béla Nemeshegyi, interview by Eszter Varsa, June 1, 2008, Budapest. 63 Ibid. 61  62 

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Figure 17. Buildings in the Mária Valéria Settlement in district 9 in Budapest, 1957 (Fortepan/ Budapest City Archives, HU.BFL.XV.19.c.11). The partly wooden, partly brick buildings of the settlement were set up for the care of wounded soldiers during World War I. Following territorial rearrangements after the end of the war, they served as housing for Hungarian refugees, most of whom arrived from Romania in the early 1920s. Although intended as temporary housing, this settlement—without sanitation, running water, or electricity—existed for almost four decades as home to the poorest people living in Budapest. This photograph was taken when the settlement was being pulled down in 1957, and the site gave way to a new block housing district.

had a measurable impact: “I think we were not wrong to do it this way because in general [the children] became very decent people and the parents too, they pulled themselves together a little bit.” She placed special emphasis on the change she and later her colleagues effected in Romani mothers’ lives, and the learning process through which they understood and absorbed the norms of good parenthood: “When the approach of a mother changed there, and she did not say anymore that ‘oh, it was because of my drinking husband that I did not look after the children,’ and all that, but she started to feel that this was her responsibility, that she had to look after her child and look after her husband a little bit too, if she could; to try to change him as well.”64 Ibid.

64 

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Mrs. Nemeshegyi understood that her role as a child protection worker in shaping the mothering of Roma extended to the regulation of young Romani women’s sexuality. She found that many Romani mothers did not meet the expectation of a good mother because they “let their daughters grow up too early.”65 Talking about the inhabitants of the Mária Valéria Settlement, she identified delinquency among Roma along a gender divide: Romani boys “followed” their fathers’ example and girls, their mothers. “[Stealing] was done by boys. Not girls. With girls . . . it was . . . the problem was rather that . . . let’s say . . . their mothers let them grow up too early. The girls were, as if left to grow up as soon as possible; [they were left to] focus on their womanhood. . . . I am not saying most of [the girls], but many. And one brought the other into this kind of life. All of them wanted to earn money and have nice clothes, a better life, but their lives had gone a little bit astray this way.”66 While Mrs. Nemeshegyi emphasized that prostitution among young girls was not particular to Roma, she put the blame on Romani mothers for allowing their daughters to become morally delinquent. This opinion resembles the comment made by the child protection worker described earlier who blamed lone mothers for the sexual endangerment of their daughters. Mrs. Nemeshegyi, however, had previously accentuated the role of Romani mothers in raising their children to be productive members of state socialist society. When Romani mothers allowed their daughters to “focus on their womanhood” and the lives of their daughters to “go astray,” they were in fact allowing a form of work avoidance. According to this caseworker, influencing the parental behavior of Romani mothers was thus important to control young Romani women’s sexuality and thereby reduce the “work-shyness” of Roma.

65

Ibid. Ibid.

66 

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Regulating the sexuality of single young women The case files of single young women placed in state care due to their alleged sexual immorality demonstrate that representatives of the child protection system associated single young womanhood, as opposed to single young manhood, with a predisposition for sexual deviancy. In the following I show that child protection caseworkers and educators considered children’s deviant behavior to be gender-differentiated. The case files of children indicate that the deviancy of girls was sexualized. This is clear from the meaning that caseworkers attached to the school absenteeism and wandering of girls that was missing from their evaluation of the deviancy of boys. I then present the means of sexual regulation visible in the files of young single women who were placed in state care. Underlying these efforts was the notion that teenage girls entering their sexually active years were endangered—and thus special attention should be devoted to their bodily development—as well as the perception that certain groups of young girls were especially inclined to engage in prostitution, thus posing a danger to their peers that needed to be checked. Finally, I draw attention to the role of the state in controlling single young women’s sexuality, as described by a child protection representative. As in the cases of lone mothers, young girls’ “immorality” denoted undesired forms of female sexuality. This gendered difference of youth delinquency was not visible in child protection policy. The ministerial decree from 1949 on the conditions of children’s temporary placement in state care declared, for example, that school absentee and runaway or so-called “wandering” children formed the two main groups of minors who were considered to be “in danger of moral delinquency” due to “reasons in their own person.”67 The gendered meaning of absenteeism and running away is visible in caseworkers’ discussion of the moral endangerment of girls, as opposed to an absence of such worries in boys’ files. Finnish historian Kaisa Vehkalahti, looking at the gender-specific ways of defining the deviance of girls and boys in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reform school case files, argues that “the powerful image of the ‘fallen girl’” influenced caseworkers’ judgement.68 Because the sexuality “128.100/1949 N.M.sz. körrendelet az állami gyermekvédő intézetekbe történő ideiglenes beutalások tárgyában” [Decree 128.100/1949 of the Ministry of Welfare on temporary placement in state care], TRHGY 1949, 1314. 68  Vehkalahti, Constructing Reformatory Identity, 24. 67 

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of young single women was perceived as a problem and became the focus of public anxiety, there was also an emphasis on sexuality in discourses about girls’ crimes. However, Vehkalahti has found that in fact, as with boys, most cases of girls’ crimes were theft and not sexual promiscuity or prostitution. In the early state socialist Hungarian context, where anxiety about women’s sexuality was also high, children’s case files demonstrate a somewhat similar pattern. Among the case files of children placed in state care for moral reasons in Szolnok, there were forty-two children whose placement was primarily related to their assumed vagrancy (see Table 7 in the Appendix). Theft was mentioned together with vagrancy in twenty-four cases out of these forty-two. In eleven cases, that is close to half, girls were involved. Despite this closeness in the proportion of girls and boys in these accusations of theft and vagrancy, only in the cases of girls was there also mention of immoral sexuality and/or prostitution. When representatives of the child protection system, including the police, faced cases of vagrancy, they associated the wandering of teenage girls with sexual immorality. Terms like “vagrancy, running away or spending the night away from home” usually accompanied activities related to the sexually improper behavior of these girls. In a typical case from Szolnok County in 1954, guardianship authorities ordered the institutional placement of a girl whose foster parents had refused her further care on the grounds that she was “wandering” and “making friends with boys.”69 In another case, guardianship authorities found twelve-year-old Mária morally endangered because of her wandering and school absenteeism. She was placed in state care because “she had spent the night away from home more than once” and it was the police that had returned her home.70 In a further example, in 1956 the director of a primary school for girls in Budapest wrote that one of his students, “being only ten years old . . . had spent the night away from home more than once, ran often away from home and committed self-pollution [sic] very often.”71 The school director accused this ten-year-old of serious sexual misconduct, which was evident from the medicalized and highly negative image he had given of her. “Self-pollution” was a term that was used for masturbation in literature on 69

JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 2898/1954. MNL OL, XIX-c-1-g (Népjóléti Minisztérium Anya- és gyermekvédelmi főosztálya) 144d., 3365/42/1950. 71  JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 3984/1956. 70 

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sexual education internationally until the mid-twentieth century. It denounced masturbation as unnatural and harmful to physical and mental health. Not surprisingly, in a follow-up to the school director’s report, guardianship authorities found that the child was “delinquent.” They ordered state care due to her “unbearable” behavior that involved among other things “taking boys to her parental home.”72 The gendered difference embedded in the interpretation of deviancy of youth absenteeism and running away is also visible in the way the police handled cases of runaway girls. When police spotted a young girl in the city who seemed to be a runaway or a wandering child, they also tried to establish whether she was involved in prostitution. This was not the case for runaway boys. As a former investigator at the Child Protection Department of the Budapest Police in the 1950s recalled, they looked out for young girls at cheap restaurants and bars, especially near train stations, where they expected that petty crime and prostitution took place. They took her, for example, from the White Ox and asked her—she was seventeen— they asked her: “What do you do?” She said: “Nothing.” It would have been possible to start a case against her based on work-shyness. But it was often hard to prove. When she had no job for three months, she could not say she was unable to get a job or this or that. But when we let her go, an hour later they took her again from the same place, the train station or the Milk Buffet.73

The former investigator claimed that young runaway girls were likely to be involved in prostitution: She was wandering, but it was impossible to prove whether she was really selling her body, but people said so. . . . “Where were you the day before yesterday?” we asked her. Here or there. A girl. Fifteen or fourteen. . . . But one could figure it out, because she could not say with whom she was living, what she had for lunch or where, or who supported her. Did she go to school? She did not. That in itself was already suspicious.74

Ibid. Dr. Géza Axmann, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 9, 2008, Budapest. The White Ox and the Milk Buffet were cheap restaurants and pubs near the Western and Eastern Railway Stations in Budapest where the police carried out raids regularly, Gergő Havadi, “Egyes budapesti vendéglők bűnügyi ‘fertőzöttsége’ 1955-ben,” Archívnet 6, no. 3 (2006), http://archivnet.hu/pp_hir_nyomtat.php?hir_id=209. 74  Dr. Géza Axmann, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 9, 2008, Budapest. 72  73 

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Figure 18. The Ilkovics Buffet in Budapest in the 1950s (Fortepan/Donated by István Mihalik). The Ilkovics Buffet, a pub across from the Western Railway Station in Budapest, can be seen on the right-hand side of the picture. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, it was one of the places in the capital city where police suspected criminal activity and carried out raids regularly, until the pub was finally closed down in 1957.

A similar vision of the “danger of moral delinquency” and the suspected prostitution of wandering young girls appeared in the case files of children. In 1956 police investigators arrested a sixteen-year-old girl at a train station during a Saturday night raid in Szolnok County and charged her with prostitution because she had been observed there in the company of men: “She was a well-known person by the police comrade. She appeared several times at the train station at night and was wandering there, and was seen several times, according to police comrades, in the company of various men.” The minutes of the girl’s statement focused on the history of her sexual encounters. “At B. I got together with an unskilled worker, called Sz. L., with whom I had a sexual relationship. I have not been with a man before, this was the first man in my life. When I left B. on May 1, the sexual relations with Sz. were discontinued.”75 JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 3815/1956.

75 

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Her presence at the train station at night was interpreted in light of her supposed prostitution, reinforced by the fact that she had lived together with a man outside of wedlock in the past. The regulation of the sexual behavior of single young women took several forms. Representatives of the child protection system, for example, paid special attention to young girls who entered their early teenage years and were expected to have reached a sexually active age. Girls in their teens were seen to be in a “dangerous phase” of their lives because these years were associated with an increasing inclination towards immoral sexual behavior. This led caseworkers to highlight the age and bodily development of girls as risk factors. For example, writing about the eleven-year-old daughter of a mother who lived in “the worst [financial] circumstances” with her children, caseworkers wrote that “due to her age she was in danger of moral delinquency.”76 Guardianship authorities found her placement in state care was the only way to ensure that she “grew up to become an honest working person.” In another case from 1954, guardianship authorities wrote of a twelve-year-old girl that, since “numerous mistakes surfaced on moral terrain,” she could not be “left without parental supervision.”77 In a further case initiated around a twelve-year-old girl whose school performance was weak, caseworkers noted that she was left alone during most of the day and concluded by cautioning that a “lack of proper supervision in the case of a twelve-year-old young girl may lead to further negative conse-quences.”78 For older children, delinquency was already a perceived threat when they arrived home late. This was the case with a fifteen-year-old girl in Szolnok County in 1953, whom the director of the local child protection institution found was “not living a life appropriate to her age” because she was “going home late at night.”79 Guardianship authorities called another seventeen-year-old girl’s behavior “immoral” because she had moved out of her parents’ home and “appear[ed] in various places, especially in the company of men, who [took] advantage of her weakness.”80 Caseworkers also phrased their concerns about young women’s sexuality by labeling their bodies   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 2197-99/1953.   JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 3080/1954. 78  FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, P. 9551-6/3/1956. 79 JNSZMGYK-Tegyesz, 2527/1953. 80  FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, 4032/1956. 76 77

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“over-developed.” In a statement about an eleven-year-old girl in 1954, for example, it is written that she was “over-developed, relative to how old she was [korához képest túlfejlett],” as a result of which she had “inclinations of the sort [olyan hajlamai vannak] that might lead her to leave her parental home.”81 Disapproval could also be expressed through comments about a young girl’s inappropriate “lifestyle.” A document from 1949 states that a girl was “searching for an irresponsible, libertine lifestyle” that “seriously decreased her moral behavior.”82 Another form of sexual control exercised over young girls was the declaration that they posed a danger to their peers and to society at large. At the small town near Budapest where thirteen-year-old Mónika was placed with foster parents in 1955, she was soon singled out as a problem child. About a year after her placement, the parent-teacher association of her primary school addressed the local council asking for Mónika’s “most urgent removal.”83 They also wrote a letter of complaint to the director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County, Mrs. Dési-Huber, who was responsible for Mónika as her public guardian. Teachers and parents argued that her removal from the school was necessary because she was “leading an immoral life inappropriate to her age, letting herself be courted by young lads,” on top of which she was “explaining to her girl classmates matters inappropriate to their age.”84 They accused her of having lost a two-month pregnancy. “Her behavior is not acceptable in the company of young girls of her age,” the upset parents and teachers claimed, “because they learn no good from her.”85 Teachers and parents united in their efforts to exercise sexual control over Mónika and impose discipline on female sexual behavior in the larger school community by declaring Mónika a danger to her female peers. Young girls’ sexuality was also considered a threat to larger society and work morality because it was associated with presumed refusal to participate in productive work. The former investigator of the Child Protection CIPSZ, 3255/1954. FGYK-Tegyesz irattár, III. 33711/1949. 83   MNL OL, XIX-c-1-g (Népjóléti Minisztérium Anya- és gyermekvédelmi főosztálya), 144d., 3365/42/1950. 84  Ibid. 85 Ibid. 81  82

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Department of the Budapest Police recalled that among prostitutes in Budapest in the early 1950s, it was typical to find young girls under eighteen from the countryside, and he claimed that there was a “pattern” through which they ended up as prostitutes: She arrives from the countryside to the capital looking for a job. She finds one. In three shifts. Imagine, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. for example, then from 2 to 10 p.m. and maybe not in case of minors, but maybe also from 10 p.m. to 7 in the morning. And she received 400–500 Forints in wages. She quickly found out that if she sold her body, she earned the same money in about two-three days. And there was a social layer . . . that chose to live like that.86

Although the investigator identified the badly paid jobs and hard work conditions as grounds for these young girls’ involvement in prostitution, he nevertheless maintained that certain women “had an inclination” to become prostitutes.87 Representatives of the child protection system became actively involved in controlling and regulating single young women’s sexuality because they believed that the state should play a role in disciplining female sexuality. Mrs. Dési-Huber, director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County in the early 1950s, eloquently expressed this view. In her opinion the task of families as well as schools was to protect young girls from having sexual encounters too early. In the abovementioned case of Mónika, Mrs. Dési-Huber informed the parent-teacher association in a sharply worded letter that despite being accused by parents and teachers of sexual immorality, Mónika’s virginity was proven by a gynecological test. She accused the parentteacher association of irresponsibility and reluctance to “fulfill the missing role 86

Dr. Géza Axmann, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 9, 2008, Budapest. The concept of the “born prostitute” comes from the late nineteenth-century work of the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso; see Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, translated by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, originally published in Italian as La Donna Delinquente, La Prostituta e la Donna Normale in 1893). In this work, as in his 1876 book on “the criminal,” Lombroso introduced a new concept of biologized criminality. The “born prostitute” and the “born criminal” were people who differed biologically from the rest of the population by specific, recognizable “signs of degeneration,” such as an asymmetrical head or a heavy lower jaw. Lombroso’s theories of biological determinism in human nature had a formative influence on the development of criminology.

87 

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of the smart and loving mother especially needed by youth of such an age. . . . That she liked to be courted by young men: that could have been prevented by the people around her. It can happen to a thirteen-year-old young girl that her head turns due to her youthful age and the curious eyes of men.”88 She further accused the school of “refusing to stretch out a helping hand to a girl who picked up bad character traits and habits in her home environment,” and asserted that the role of schools and parent-teacher associations was to be “the arms of the protective state.” This vision of the protective state included the institutional system surrounding children and identified the “normalization” of the sexual behavior of young girls as central to the mission of school education and child protection. As this and other cases show, child protection and guardianship caseworkers used a variety of means, including but not limited to placement in state care, to regulate the sexual behavior of lone mothers and single young women. Caseworkers’ claims that lone mothers prioritized their sexual pleasure and thereby endangered their children, that they were incapable of raising their children properly, or that single young women transgressed the acceptable limits of sexual morality tapped into discourses that defined certain women and forms of womanhood as deviant. Declaring the children of lone mothers morally endangered and placing them in state care were forms of disciplinary practice that aimed to promote an ideal female citizen who was a productive member of socialist society. Sexuality outside the framework of marriage and the nuclear family posed the danger that women would refuse to participate in the productive work that was considered essential to build communism and reject their traditional roles as wives and mothers in the family. Discourses and practices of women’s sexual regulation in the field of child protection in Hungary between 1949 and 1956 show that efforts in early state socialism to promote women’s legal equalization in marriage and the family and secure their equality in the world of productive work occurred parallel to the reinforcement of their traditional responsibilities as wives and mothers. This finding challenges feminist scholarship on state socialist gender regimes in Eastern Europe that has identified a turn in state socialist policy-making 88

  MNL OL, XIX-c-1-g (Népjóléti Minisztérium Anya- és gyermekvédelmi főosztálya), 144d., 3365/42/1950.

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concerning women around the mid-1960s.89 According to this literature, it was only following this turn, in the last two and a half decades of state socialism, that women’s traditional roles as care providers in the family were reinforced, marking a retreat from former discourses of gender equality. What the case of child protection shows, however, is that when it came to gender equality, there had been an ambivalence from the beginning of state socialism: while authorities encouraged and even enforced mothers’ entrance to paid work as productive and independent individuals, expectations in terms of these women’s sexuality retained an emphasis on marriage as a desired unit of society. The transnational history of the regulation of sexuality presents several instances and contexts in which such practices served to preserve racial and ethnic boundaries. While in the United States, for example, controlling white and African American women’s sexual behavior aimed to maintain the racial status quo, the sexual regulation of Romani women in state socialist Hungary aimed at their assimilation. Accordingly, Romani mothers were responsible for raising a new generation of children who would become productive citizens of the People’s Republic.

Penn and Massino, Gender Politics and Everyday Life; Mária Adamik, “Az államszocializmus és a ‘nőkérdés’: A legnagyobb ígéret—a legnagyobb megaláztatás” (PhD diss., Budapesti Közgazdasági Egyetem, 2000).

89 

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“MAKE THEM EXPERIENCE THE GOOD TASTE OF PRODUCTIVE WORK”: RESIDENTIAL CARE AS AN INSTITUTION OF EDUCATION

Each new day filled with joy and work, Birds are singing, black birds are whistling, we sing together with them.1 Songs about happy children working for a better and peaceful future were typical elements of children’s musical education in state socialist East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.2 They reflected the political-economic transformation of the region following the end of the 1940s, with its ensuing emphasis on participation in productive work. While all children sang these songs at primary schools and in pioneer camps, the experience of work they sang about was not part of their everyday lives. Despite the fact that Hungarian pedagogical journals in the early 1950s were filled with articles on the importance of involving children in so-called education for work and teaching both theoretical and practical subjects related to the field of productive work, these discussions hardly affected educational practice in primary schools in this time period. In this respect, however, education of children in residential care differed from the regular school education of From the marching song of the Children’s Town of Tiszadob. In the Hungarian original: “Új napunk, új örömmel, munkával van tele, Madár dalol, rigó fütyül, mi éneklünk vele.” Composed around the mid-1950s by Sándor Tátrai, music teacher of the home. Gy., interview by Eszter Varsa, October 9, 2008, Nyíregyháza. 2   111 Songs for Pioneers, for example, a collection of songs from the international workers’ socialist and communist movements, was first published in Hungary in 1959 and was used in primary school music education until the end of the 1980s. One of the best-known songs from the collection, entitled the “Happy Pioneer,” pictured children as happy and hard-working. 1 

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non-institutionalized children. Participation in work activities formed the center of the educational program of children’s homes at the time. While this difference might be puzzling in light of the importance productive work gained in the context of state socialist catch-up industrialization, the comparative history of residential care and reformatory institutions and reform pedagogies for children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals that these educational programs, unlike those practiced at regular schools, had historically entailed rigorous training for work. In the first part of this chapter I argue that the education of children in the residential homes of early 1950s Hungary cannot be understood without paying attention to the long-term and cross-national history of these institutions. While in regular primary school education the idea of introducing physical work into the curriculum first appeared only following the onset of state socialism in East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, including Hungary, reformatories and progressive reform pedagogies had combined physical work activities with processes of learning since the late eighteenth century in Europe. I first present these two historically different socialeducational fields, which contributed to education for work becoming part of residential care curricula. Then I show how a mixture of reformatory and reform pedagogy in the educational profile of residential institutions assured the continuity of education for work in their everyday practice under state socialism. In the second part of this chapter I outline practices of education for work as reflected on by former teachers, educators, and students in residential care, highlighting their disciplinary purpose. Using Foucault’s theory of the docile body, I show that everyday life in children’s homes and the education for work at its center aimed to foster a form of self-disciplinary practice by creating habits of work among children in order to turn them into productive members of state socialist society. Interviews with former teachers and residents of children’s homes reveal that these practices both reinforced and changed existing patterns in the gendered division of work. At the same time, children’s homes also aimed at advancing the assimilation of Roma into Hungarian society by erasing their perceived work-shyness by exposing Romani children

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to education for work. Both of these goals highlight continuities with earlier developments in the history of pedagogy and the history of Roma. Focusing on discipline and children’s homes as disciplinary institutions in the Foucauldian sense begs the question of what forms of resistance and dissent were present within the walls of these homes. While running away from children’s homes has been a constant phenomenon in the histories of residential institutions, this chapter is not about the techniques parents and children applied against institutionalization or to negotiating the terms of care. Without implying that the voices of former teachers and residents of children’s homes presented here stand for all the personnel and inhabitants of these institutions, the present chapter investigates why and for which purposes education for work remained part of the daily practice of these homes, and how former inhabitants make sense of this aspect of their institutionalization retrospectively. Furthermore, contemporary sources and interviews with former teachers and residents of children’s homes convey a picture of life in residential institutions that differs from what has become commonplace wisdom about the child protection system in “communist” and especially “Stalinist” Hungary after 1989. In post-state-socialist discourse, it was seen as nothing more than a mechanical copy of the Soviet model that harmed rather than helped children and their families. Despite the obvious flaws of residential care practice that were identified and increasingly voiced by child protection professionals in the 1980s and especially after 1989, it is worth noting that the child protection pedagogy of the early 1950s aspired to do far more than just execute top-down educational imperatives. The documents presented here contribute to refining our understanding of the Stalinist period in Hungary.

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Reformatory and reform pedagogy: The origins of education for work in residential care education The origins of making children accomplish work tasks as part of their education go back far in history and are related to the development of two different social-educational fields: educative labor in the framework of work houses and reformatories for “the poor” and the “morally abandoned” that existed in Europe at least since the sixteenth century, and the reform of school pedagogy since the late eighteenth century.3 Teaching and imposing “education for work” on those perceived to be “unwilling to work” and “inclined towards criminality,” including the poor, has a long tradition both in crime prevention and punishment and in the history of welfare provisions.4 Workhouses were intended to give the poor not only the means to earn a living but also moral training in the usefulness of work. The eligibility criteria for public and charitable welfare provisions that appeared during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and North America divided the poor into “worthy” and “unworthy” of support according to their perceived inclination to or refusal of work. Workhouses and selective state welfare practices that pressured the needy to do “productive work” also existed in Hungary between the eighteenth century and the beginning of World War II.5 Thus the connection between poverty and one’s lack of determination to work and make an “honest living” was already deeply ingrained in the concepts of poverty and moral abandonment by the mid-twentieth century. Reformatory schools established in Europe and North America predominantly in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were part of a separate juvenile justice system that differentiated between the criminality of adults and of minors. The new regulations that emerged as part of the establishment of a state-funded child protection system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Hungary were also paralleled by “Poor” in quotation marks refers to the fluidity of this category and the changing conditions of whom, in different times and at various geographic locations in history, were considered to be or were officially defined as “poor.” 4 Andreas Gestrich, Steven King, and Lutz Raphael, eds., Being Poor in Modern Europe: Historical Perspectives, 1800–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006). 5   László Ulicska, “A munka mint büntetés,” Esély, no. 3 (1997): 86–91. 3 

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amendments in criminal law. As a result, several reformatory institutions, both privately-run and state-financed, for the corrective education of minors under the age of criminal responsibility were established between the late 1880s and the 1910s.6 Children’s participation in productive work was central to the educational concept of reformatory institutions internationally. As these children were “regarded as lazy, dishonest, slothful, ignorant, and unruly,” work was to contribute to “learning new work habits and self-discipline.”7 The work and industrial training children in these intuitions received differed according to gender.8 In the state-funded reformatory for girls at Rákospalota opened in 1890, for example, girls learned household management and a variety of sewing and weaving professions and cleaning, while in the reformatory for boys opened in Aszód in 1884, boys were trained in skilled industrial and factory work.9 The wide-scale appearance of work education in alternative school pedagogy goes back to the pedagogical reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and North America. These movements took a critical view of the traditional schoolbook-based methods of teaching and developed a variety of alternative child-focused pedagogical approaches. In the field of reform pedagogy, the Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was the first to connect children’s labor with education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His child-centered educational methods focused on sense perception and students’ self-activity, and linked physical exercise and activities to the general, moral, and intellectual education of children.10 The New Schools in Britain and the Landerziehungsheimen in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, represented new types of boarding schools that aimed to develop children’s skills, abilities, and creativity in an institutional setting in the countryside.11 They wanted to facilitate the development of adults with harmonious personalities who were capable of independent action and decision-making. A central element of the daily schedule of these institutions   8  9 6

Zimmermann, Divide, Provide and Rule, 49. Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family, 137. Ibid. “A Rákospalotai Leánynevelő Intézet,” http://leanynevelo.hu. 10  James Bowen, The Modern West: Europe and the New World vol.3. of A History of Western Education (London: Methuen & Co., 1981). 11   Pukánszky and Németh, Neveléstörténet. 7 

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was work in various workshops, vegetable gardens, and agricultural areas of the homes. Adolphe Ferrière, a Swiss pedagogue and founder of the so-called active schools in the 1920s, summarized the essence of these new institutions as “boarding schools in the countryside that were run by the self-government of teachers and students, in which education was based on children’s own interest and experience and in which studying was combined with physical work in workshops and on agricultural land.”12 Between the two world wars there were numerous such schools in Germany, France, England, and the United States, and the movement had followers in Hungary too.13 Another branch of reform pedagogy advocated children’s involvement in physical work as part of their general education. Representatives of this pedagogy did not consider work as a facilitator of creativity but a means for the development of skills that were necessary to carry out mechanical labor. The concept of the work school that was developed by Georg Kerschensteiner in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s focused intensively on children’s participation in physical work.14 Work served the purposes of education and the development of the ideal citizen who was a useful and obedient member of the state. The American philosopher and educational reformer, John Dewey’s theories were also highly influential at the time.15 He emphasized the importance of including practical, hands-on tasks as well as intellectual exercises in elementary education, and believed children should be involved in shaping their own curriculum and learning process. In early Soviet Russia, the notions of European and North American reform pedagogy were fused with the pedagogical conceptions of Marxism.16 According to Marx, the educational process consisted of three parts: theoretical, physical, and polytechnic education. Through the latter, children could learn the processes of industrial production and get to know different occupations and the use of work tools. The purpose of the Marxian work school was work education. While Ibid. Ibid. 14  Philipp Gonon, The Quest for Modern Vocational Education: Georg Kerschensteiner between Dewey, Weber and Simmel (Bern: Lang, 2009). 15   John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas influenced education and social reform well into the twentieth century. 16  Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001); Kelly, Children’s Worlds. 12  13 

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in the 1920s the socialist work school was embedded with the psychological and pedagogical concepts related to developing children’s creativity and free upbringing through work, by the 1930s children’s education in Soviet schools had shifted towards educating obedient subjects of the state.17 Following the Stalinist Revolution, the image of the “liberated rising generation building the bright Soviet future” remained a central icon of socialist transformation but “in the most conservative sense,” as the young generation was to “devote itself to the tasks laid out by the state.”18 In Hungary, as in other former Eastern bloc countries, the best-known representative of Soviet pedagogy was Anton Semyonovich Makarenko. Makarenko’s pedagogy developed out of his experience with street children in post-civil war Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s.19 Rejecting the reform pedagogical concept of free upbringing, he stressed the formative power of physical work on the character development of children. He believed in the subordination of the individual to the common will and the concept of the collective. His understanding of education was related to discipline and self-discipline, and he maintained a military-style regimen to achieve this. He insisted on the importance of a highly structured and predictable daily routine in order to effect change in children’s behavior.20 Makarenko’s Pedagogical Poem, in which he summarized his convictions, was among the compulsory readings in the teacher training curricula in Hungary from the 1950s onwards. Although his theories were often interpreted in an over-simplified form, especially his views on corporal punishment, his ideas on self-governing child collectives and the combination of physical and intellectual work also inspired schoolteachers in Hungary. Thus the combination of education with physical work in residential care institutions in early state socialist Hungary had two different historical origins: one stemming from reformatory corrective education and the other from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reform pedagogies, including those stemming from Marx and Marxists. During this period, the educationfor-work programs of children’s homes defined work as a form of corrective Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 158–59. Ibid. 19   Götz Hillig, ed., Hundert Jahre Anton Makarenko: Neue Studien zur Biographie (Bremen: Temmen, 1988). 20   Bowen, The Modern West, 518. 17  18 

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labor, but numerous teachers also expressed their belief in linking physical work to the general education of children and thereby developing their learning abilities in the sense of earlier reform pedagogies. A mixture of both of these traditions of work education in residential care assured that, unlike in regular primary schools, work remained part of the everyday educational practice in children’s homes. The first state children’s town in Hungary, however, predated the onset of state socialism. It was set up following the end of World War II to house children who were abandoned or had lost their parents in consequence of the war.21 The institution also represented an effort that manifested internationally in postwar Europe to democratize children’s education. The pedagogical concept of the children’s town of Hajdúhadház in eastern Hungary encompassed the progressive and reform pedagogical ideas of collective education, children’s self-governance, and the combination of work with education.22 Makarenko’s children’s colonies also gave legitimacy to this cause. Minister of Welfare Erik Molnár—delegated by the Communist Party which then was part of the postwar coalition governing the country—commissioned the State Children’s Asylum of Debrecen in 1945 to search for a location for this new institution. In April 1946, the ministry assigned Zsigmond Ádám, a teacher who had an established publication record on child abandonment and endangerment, to be the director of the children’s town. Before the war Ádám had already advocated for the opening of more children’s homes as a solution to the education of “problematic children.”23 Concerning the idea of a children’s town, he was strongly inspired by a film entitled “Boys Town,” which was made in the United States in 1938 and screened in Hungary a year later.24 This suggests that Ádám relied on a variety of 21

Csatlós, “A Tiszadobi Gyermekváros.”   Similar initiatives also emerged within the Christian (Protestant) churches during the war and the first postwar years. One of the best know examples was a home for orphaned Jewish and other endangered children established after the war by the Lutheran pastor Gábor Szthelo, who during the war saved more than thousand Jewish children with the help of the International and Swiss Red Cross. Before it was nationalized in 1950, the home, called “Gaudiopolis” (The City of Happiness), promoted the democratic education of children. It operated as a republic, where children held different functions and ran self-governed units. Another initiative called “Boys Village” (Fiúkfalva) existed between 1943 and 1948 in southern Hungary, in the vicinity of the city of Debrecen, providing shelter for boys who had become homeless during the war. Building on the principles of education for work, its inhabitants worked in a self-organized way and grew their own agricultural produce. 23   Zsigmond Ádám, A problematikus gyermek (n.p.: 1942). 24  “Boys Town,” directed by Norman Taurog, 1938, Hungarian Movie Database, http://www.mafab. 22

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examples, both Western and Eastern European, in the conceptualization of the pedagogical program at Hajdúhadház. With Ádám’s guidance, the nearly nine hundred inhabitants of the children’s town, who lived in a former military barrack near Hajdúhadház, read Makarenko. In designing the children’s daily routine, Ádám used different elements from scientific pedagogies that progressive and reform movements shared with the principles of early school education in the Soviet Union of the 1920s.25 The children’s town was, for example, a mixed home for both boys and girls, which was atypical for residential homes before the war. Another new and central concept Ádám applied was children’s self-government. Children elected a mayor, a notary, a judge, and police among themselves, who then participated in the organization of after-school programs and in running the children’s town. They also had a choir and a football team, and published their own newspaper. Ádám furthermore emphasized having children and teachers establish the rules governing the life of the institution together. These included respect towards one another, attention to cleanliness, and a commitment to both schoolwork and manual work in different workshops. Accomplishing work tasks was also an important element of the pedagogy of the children’s town. Children worked in vegetable fields and on an animal farm.26 They received officially recognized training in a variety of skilled workers’ professions, such as shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry, locksmithing, and masonry. The children’s town was an exemplary institution in postwar Hungary that received much publicity in the press and was supported by the communist party. With political changes at the onset of the Rákosi regime, however, Ádám was removed from his position, the children’s town was relocated to another small town, Tiszadob, also in eastern Hungary, and soon ceased to exist in its postwar form. Although the institution at Tiszadob retained the name “children’s town,” from 1951 on it functioned as a home for boys, abandoning the reform pedagogical aspirations that marked Ádám’s original educational program.

hu/movies/boys-town-55116.html (last accessed June 29, 2016); Czike, “Gyermekvárosok.” Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades. 26 Csatlós, “A Tiszadobi Gyermekváros,” 17. 25 

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The continuity of education for work in the curricula and educational practice of residential homes under state socialism There was a wide-scale effort to introduce education for work into teaching children from kindergarten through secondary school in the early 1950s in Hungary. While education for work was adopted into the teaching curricula of these institutions, it did not become a central part of their educational practice. The Ministry of Education, for example, stressed teaching children “a communist morality and the love of work” and saw the raising of a new generation of active workers as one of the main goals of the educational process.27 The ensuing primary school curriculum of 1950 identified the purpose of the primary school as teaching children to become, among other things, “faithful sons of the working people .  .  . in the name of love and the appreciation of work.”28 The secondary school curriculum published in the same year cited among its tasks the “organic connection of school education with education for work and practical life.”29 Articles in Köznevelés, the biweekly periodical of the Ministry of Education, demonstrate that from 1951 onwards secondary school children were mobilized to take part in seasonal agricultural and, occasionally, construction work in the summer.30 Kindergarten Education, a journal launched by the Ministry of Education in 1953, also held up the image of the “working and fighting child” as an ideal, and advocated education for work in kindergartens as a primary pedagogical goal. Kindergartens were to raise “peace fighters, who love[d] work and nature, who [were] happy participants in well-planned and well-organized work activities.”31 Even children with disabilities were to become “productive István Mészáros, A magyar nevelés- és iskolatörténet kronológiája, 996–1996 (Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 1996). 28  Tanterv az általános iskolák számára: A Vallás- és Közoktatási Miniszter 1220-10/1950 VVKM. sz. rendeletével (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1950). 29   Tanterv az átalános gimnázium számára: A Vallás- és Közoktatási Miniszter 1280-10/1950 VVKM. sz. rendelete (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1950). 30  Numerous articles from Köznevelés demonstrate the effort to make education for work part of the school curricula. See, for example, Lajos Duró, “Tanulóifjúságunk nyári munkája,” Köznevelés 7, no. 12 (1951): 569–70; Tibor Horváth, “Iskoláink részvétele a gyapottermés begyűjtésében,” Köznevelés 7, no. 23 (1951): 925–26; “Diákfiatalok a Dunai Vasműért,” Köznevelés 7, nos. 15–16 (1951): 667– 70; Ferencné Vadász, “A tanulók nyári termelőmunkája,” Köznevelés 8, no. 11 (1952): 342–43. 31  Katalin Kéri, “Gyermekkép Magyarországon az 1950-es évek első felében,” in Két évszázad gyermekei—A tizenkilencedik-huszadik század gyermekkorának története, ed. Béla Pukánszky (Buda27 

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members” of the socialist labor force. Gusztáv Bárczi, director of the Teacher Training College of Special Education of Children with Disabilities in the early 1950s, asserted that work and work education were two of the tools of special education. Work education served the purposes of creating productive adults out of “those capable of working, to whom learning work processes [was] otherwise impossible.”32 Despite such persuasive rhetoric about the importance of education for work in socialist pedagogy, Hungarian primary and secondary schools did not treat work seriously in their everyday practice. Compared to the amount of space given to the subject in educational publications, practice lagged behind. It was only toward the mid-1950s that the need for a new subject, called polytechnic education, appeared in the rules and regulations governing primary and secondary school education.33 The subject was introduced into some primary school curricula in the academic year of 1956–1957.34 Reports in Köznevelés on the results of students’ participation in agricultural work in the summers also indicated a lack of widespread enthusiasm for familiarizing children with physical work. Authors listed several schools where the issue was “not handled with sufficient responsibility.”35 Nor, except for some rare, showcase occasions, did Hungarian kindergarten teachers put into practice toddlers’ education for work.36 Instead of making them carry out work tasks, “they let kindergarten children play, walk, and sing, and told them fairy tales.”37 Perhaps not surprisingly, in 1950 the Hungarian Workers’ Party stated that one of the main mistakes of educational practice was that neither secondary schools nor universities had enough contact with “real life and production.”38 Five pest: Eötvös József Kiadó, 2003), 237. Zoltán Máriafalvi et al., A munkára nevelés kézikönyve a gyógypedagógiai intézmények számára (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1954), 3. 33   Rendtartás az általános iskolák és gimnáziumok számára (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1955). 34  Mészáros, A magyar nevelés- és iskolatörténet, 142, 144. 35   Duró, “Tanulóifjúságunk,” 569. 36  Kéri, “Gyermekkép,” 7. 37   Ibid. 38 “A Magyar Dolgozók Pártja Központi Vezetőségének határozata a Vallás- és Közoktatásügyi Minisztérium munkájával kapcsolatos kérdésekről. 1950. március 29” [Decree by the Central Leadership of the Hungarian Workers’ Party on questions related to the work of the Ministry of Religion and Public Education, March 29, 1950], in Dokumentumok a magyar oktatáspolitika történetéből I. (1945–1950), ed. József Kardos and Kornidesz Mihály (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1990), 377. Originally published in: Az MDP Központi Vezetőségének, Politikai Bizottságának és 32 

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years later, the Ministry of Education still complained that primary schools in Budapest “performed insuf-ficiently” on paying visits to factories.39 Although polytechnic education remained part of the primary school curriculum and secondary school students regularly participated in summertime agricultural work, education for work never became a central guiding principle of school education. While in the context of regular primary school education the concept of education for work was hardly translated into practice, in the new residential homes opened for children in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was part of children’s daily routine. Regulations published by the Ministry of Welfare and the Ministry of Education on the general rules and the organization of the daily life and education in children’s homes specified as early as 1950 the importance of work-related activities for children in state care.40 Even at kindergarten age, the concept of work was to be central to the education of children in residential care. Well-organized work closely supervised by teachers counted as the source of children’s emotional well-being. The section devoted to kindergarten teachers in the Rules for State Child Protection Institutions in 1950, for example, started with a passage emphasizing the difference between children in regular kindergartens and kindergartens within the system of child protection.41 While children attended regular kindergartens for a period of three years, in the kindergartens of child protection institutions children stayed only temporarily. Kindergarten teachers working in these institutions were therefore to pay special attention to the experiences these children gathered during this short period. Since these first impressions would affect “the future development of [their] character and skills,” it was considered important to make them positive and “reassuring”: “For the new, incoming child, it is reassuring if they arrive among peers immersed in play or work. Szervező Bizottságának fontosabb határozatai (Budapest: Szikra Kiadó, 1951). Miklós Mann, Budapest oktatásügye, 1873–2000 (Budapest: Önkonet, 2002), 174. 40  Historian Ferenc Gergely has identified the final version of this document as the joint publication of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Interior, entitled Szabályrendelet az Állami Gyermekvédő Intézeteknek [Regulations for state child protection institutions]. Gergely, A magyar gyermekvédelem története, 92. 41  “Állami gyermekvédő intézetek keretében működő ovónők feladata” [Tasks for kindergarten teachers working in child protection institutions], MNL OL, XIX-c-1-g (Népjóléti Minisztérium Anyaés gyermekvédelmi főosztálya), 144d., 3365/49/1950. 39

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If they arrive among peers just hanging about, being bored or noisy, or among fighting children, they will feel themselves terribly distressed and lonesome.”42 The emphasis on work was central to this curriculum: “no matter how simple children’s pieces of work are,” kindergarten teachers were to “value” them so that children would “feel that they [were] able to do work, and that they [would] feel like doing [work].” Children were to be “motivated” during the short time spent at the temporary home to “appreciate work.”43 These ideas were similar to the pedagogical concepts of early Soviet pre-school education, in which education for work was central. In the kindergartens of early Soviet Russia, children were viewed “as naturally interested in labor,” and were sometimes exposed to work tasks far beyond their capacities and interests, such as washing their own linen, working in the vegetable garden, or making educational field trips to factories.44 The curricula of residential homes explicitly formulated the importance of work in the education of primary-school-aged children in state care. The Rules and Regulations for Residential Homes issued by the Ministry of Education in 1952 declared that residential institutions were to be the sites for education for work as well as for school education: “Life in residential homes must be organized in such a manner that it allows for students’ education for work. Besides careful preparation for the school, students must also participate in the daily work around the homes (in keeping the homes clean and in food service). In the time remaining after preparation for school and in their free time, children must do gardening or agricultural work on the land belonging to the institution.”45 They were to familiarize themselves with different work processes and “the joy of work,” stated the guidelines.46 In order to motivate children to become good workers, children were also to study the lives of “the heroes of socialist work, work champions, outstanding workers, and the Stakhanovites.”47 Furthermore, the 1952 Rules and Regulations encouraged teachers to invite Stakhanovites to residential homes so that students would get to know them personally. These events were to be organized in such a way that they remained “unforgettable   Ibid.   Ibid. 44  Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 73–75 and 120–23. 45  Rendtartás a tanköteles tanulók gyermekotthonai részére (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1952), 38–39. 46  Ibid., 34. 47  Ibid. Based on the Soviet model, Stakhanovites were workers, who received official recognition for working harder and producing more than required. 42 43

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memories and motivating forces” to all children. Finally, in the summer, children in the homes, like the students of regular secondary schools, were to take part in the work of state farms and agricultural cooperatives.

Education for work in the socialist context: Reform pedagogical and reformatory traditions Despite radical changes in the structure and organization of child protection in Hungary in the early 1950s, work remained a central element in the daily routine of residential homes. This built on the long tradition of using corrective labor in the education of children in state care. It also relied on traditions in reform pedagogy that conceived of work as serving the development of children’s learning skills. The former director of a children’s home, Ede Peterdi, captured eloquently the moment of continuity between an orphanage for girls that had been run by Catholic nuns since 1929 and the new children’s home he organized in the same building in 1949: “I was sent by the Ministry of Welfare in 1949 to Bicske to do there something different. But I did not change everything; . . . I kept what was good. For example, in the orphanage children were grouped to do work according to their place in the alphabetical order. I continued doing that. And the order and cleanliness. I did not alter everything.”48 The amount and the form of work that the former inhabitants of the orphanage were made to do imp-ressed Peterdi: “Everything was shining from cleanliness there. There was such cleanliness and order there it was unimaginable. . . . And what an education they had! They got fortified with an all-round education in school subjects and in physical work. And this order, they created themselves. They worked for it themselves. So not somebody else, a cleaning lady or so. It was wonderful. And they were very disciplined.”49 The new director could identify with the tradition and goals of educative labor practiced in children’s homes before World War II in Hungary. But at the same time, children’s obligation to work in residential institutions gained a new meaning through communist ideology. Guidelines published Ede Peterdi, interview by Mrs. Mária Szendrei and György J. Kollmann, April 23, 2004, Budapest, Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok, FGYK-Tegyesz. 49   Ede Peterdi, interview by Eszter Varsa, June 16, 2008, Bicske. 48 

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by the Ministry of Education between 1950 and 1955 concerning children’s education in these homes listed the development of a “socialist attitude to work” among its most important pedagogical goals. The Rules and Regulations of 1952 listed among nine basic educational tasks and six governing principles of the educational work of children’s homes that these needed to develop “work skills, a love for work and a socialist attitude towards work” among children in state care.50 Children were to learn that work was their “moral obligation: It was no longer a means of oppression but the source of real happiness” that was a “necessity for the healthy body.” The ministry encouraged educators to rely on socialist pedagogy in the physical, mental, polytechnic, moral and esthetic education of children in residential care.51 The spirit of collectivity was also part of the desired goals to be achieved through education for work. Children needed to learn to work not only in a disciplined manner individually but also as a community. The guidelines defined work as “all people trying to give the most to the community.” Through work, children were to develop “a socialist attitude towards common property, socialist humanism, team spirit, friendship and comradeship.”52 The more rigid requirements of school education in terms of obedience towards the state, similar to those of the work school in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, also surfaced in the guidelines. Educators were to pass on the importance of “increasing work productivity in order to advance the fulfillment of the economic plans or even over-achieve them.”53 The concept of education for work that was used in residential care also built on traditions in reform pedagogy in which work in combination with studying was to serve the development of children’s learning skills. These dual sets of ideas are evident in a booklet published in 1955 laying out methodological guidelines for teaching in residential institutions in Hungary. The Organization of Education in Residential Homes conceptualized education for work as a means to develop characteristics such as the ability to concentrate or a desire for knowledge. According to the five authors of the publication, who were all teachers and directors of residential homes, these values were especially hard 50

Rendtartás a tanköteles tanulók gyermekotthonai részére, 27. Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 51

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to teach to “the special child material of residential homes [a nevelőotthonok speciális gyermekanyaga számára].”54 These children, the authors explained, were “unwilling to learn at school, because they [did] not know the good feeling that accompanied studying and the happiness caused by the accomplishment of well-done work.”55 This point reflects a longstanding assumption in corrective education that children came from family backgrounds where work had no value. In order to improve the educational performance of children, the authors advised their colleagues to make children do physical work. They claimed that making children carry out tasks, which “brought about results faster” than studying, “roused the pleasure of well-done work.”56 They suggested that physical work, such as “making children keep their immediate living environment, their beds, and their wardrobes in order, or work in the garden of the institution, in the workshop, or do handyman work, sports activities, cultural work, etc. were all able to fulfill this goal.” They also recommended that teachers show public appreciation for the work accomplished by children, and underlined the formative power of the community of peers: “Following some conversation on ethics and the help of the larger community, those children who had already taken part in work were usually able to shift to studying with pleasure.” The authors found that persuasion was necessary only at the beginning, after which children gradually came to like “the work of studying and learn[ed] to produce mental work with self-confidence and persistence.”57 In other words, there were teachers and caregivers in child protection institutions and children’s homes who saw the pedagogy of education for work as helpful for academic achievement as well. They claimed that it provided a progressive alternative for children whom they perceived as not having an appropriate work morality. The goal of children’s involvement in physical work in order to improve their school performance had much in common with nineteenth- and twentieth-century reform pedagogies that aimed to connect physical labor with developing children’s learning skills, but it also retained the reformatory and corrective tradition of children’s education in state care. Ferenc Csaba, ed., A tanulás megszervezése a gyermekotthonokban (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1955), 16.   Ibid. 56  Ibid., 17. 57  Ibid. 54  55

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“Make them experience the good taste of productive work”: What education for work meant to child protection professionals during and after socialism Child protection professionals claimed that abandoned/endangered children in residential care needed to “experience the pleasure of well-done work.” In reflections from the 1950s, recollections from later in the state socialist period, and interviews conducted after 1989, former teachers and educators underlined the usefulness of children’s involvement in work. They identified work as central for the development of children in state care but also argued that making children carry out manual or physical work tasks enabled them to learn to appreciate all types of work, including mental work and studying. Ede Peterdi, the director of the home for girls at Bicske and one of the five authors of the abovementioned booklet, continued to identify education for work as an important means for the social integration of abandoned/endangered children even fifty years later. In his opinion it was disadvantageous to the character development of children if they “received everything ready-made [and] . . . in the best of quality.”58 When children did not have to work in order to get something, they could not have the feeling that “it was really theirs.” Peterdi considered it “a grave mistake” to provide for children this way, because when they “entered the real world,” this was not “what they found there.” He therefore found it important to “transform” children while they were in state care and “make them do work.”59 Education for work to him was thus about making children carry out work tasks on a regular basis and transforming them into working adults. Lajos Barna, who was the director of several newly established children’s homes following the end of World War II, argued in his doctoral dissertation in the 1960s that physical work was a stepping stone towards engaging children in the pleasure of work: My conviction grew stronger about the fact that without making use of the enormous educational power of work we could not reach lasting results in our homes. Where there was no opportunity [for children] to work it was necessary to create that Ede Peterdi, interview by Szendrei and Kollmann. Ibid.

58  59 

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opportunity. Making a mental effort of a higher sort and conscious studying must stand on the educational basis of physical labor, which produces faster and easier results. Especially before the formation of self-consciousness, we like to do work only when we can see the results immediately. This fills us with enthusiasm and noble self-esteem. With children who are not used to doing work, or more than that, who even feel an aversion for work, it is much easier to make them experience the good taste of productive work through physical work than through mental work and studying, which require much more patience and produce results only with time. The easiest way to make children study voluntarily and with pleasure is through physical work. This is what I have found to be the most suitable path to reach our first and immediate goal, that is, to achieve the normalization of children and to make them like working and studying in the first place.60

Barna wrote that the way he could transform “destructive” children who were disobeying, fighting, and stealing was by finding a collective goal such as renovating a building or creating a sports facility.61 Because of his success in running residential homes along the principles of education for work, his colleagues used to call Barna “the Hungarian Makarenko.”62 The renovation of children’s homes was in fact the main means by which teachers could involve children in work activities in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Former child protection professionals reflected back on the decade and a half between the end of the war and the end of the 1950s as a specific period in Hungarian child protection history that they called the “home-building” (otthonteremtés) period. The war-ruined and looted former castles and villas that housed children’s homes provided teachers with an opportunity to involve children in the restoration of these buildings. Barna recalled the renovation of a residential home in Szabolcs-Szatmár County after the war as the joint effort of four teachers and thirty children: “There were no children who had worked so much for their home as those thirty, but there were no children who had grown that much attached to their home either, as they have through their drops of sweat!”63 In the words of one of his former students, Barna “did Lajos Barna, “A Fóti Gyermekváros” (PhD diss., ELTE University Budapest, 1967). 24–25. “Lajos Barna, Director of the Children’s Town of Fót,” interview with Tivadar Kemenesi, László Kosztics, and Gáborné Kuncz by Mrs. Mária Szendrei, April 7, 2004, Fót, Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok, FGYK-Tegyesz. 62   “Lajos Barna, Director of the Children’s Town of Fót,” interview by Szendrei. 63  Ibid., 24. 60  61 

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not place children into readily available rooms, but he created these rooms together with the children.”64 Ede Peterdi also remembered “home-building” as an opportunity to practice the pedagogy of education for work, claiming that it was work that made the former mansion of the Count Batthyány family into the residential home it had become.65 He recalled with nostalgia how meager financial resources often resulted in teachers and children working side-by-side repairing windows and doors, painting walls and floors, installing furniture, and getting the sometimes sizable gardens of these buildings under control: In the beginning we worked day and night. Work hours and timetables were unknown in those times. . . . The residential home was not our workplace but a home to all of us, where we wished, if not from nothing but from very little, to build up a new world. . . . Our teachers, aside from their pedagogical work, repaired children’s socks, knitted winter hats, scarves, and gloves, washed and cut children’s hair, scraped old paint, carried debris, varnished floors, and cleaned windows together with the children and the technical staff.66

“Home-building” also framed the histories of children’s homes that child protection professionals wrote during state socialism about their own institutions. They acknowledged the early 1950s as a time when teachers practiced education for work with dedication. The former castle of the Count Andrássy family in Szabolcs-Szatmár County, according to one such author in the 1980s, was “put into a habitable state by children and teachers together” and thus became “their new home.”67 The twentieth anniversary history of the Makarenko children’s home in Budapest published in 1976 underlined how, by working together, teachers and children turned from strangers into a small community: “Moving into the building and getting it furnished happened mostly with the help of teachers’ and children’s voluntary work. Everybody involved was enthusiastic. Work carried out side-by-side brought teachers and children close to one another, and without noticing it we befriended each other.”68 P., interview by Mrs. Mária Szendrei, October 1, 2004, Budapest, Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok, FGYK-Tegyesz. 65   Ede Peterdi, interview by Szendrei and Kollmann. 66  Ede Peterdi, “A bicskei gyermekotthon története, I. rész: 1861–1987,” in A bicskei gyermekotthon története, ed. János Vásárhelyi (Bicske: Fővárosi Kossuth Zsuzsa Gyermekotthon, 2006), 5–86, 48–49. 67   Csatlós, “A Tiszadobi Gyermekváros,” 26. 68 Antal Simek and Kornél Babura, “A Makarenko Nevelőotthon 20 éves története,” in Tanulmányok, 64 

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Teachers also transferred the idea of “home-building” to smaller daily work activities in order to motivate children to do work. The director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County, Mrs. Dési-Huber, claimed that formerly misbehaving teenage girls were ready to take part in the work activities of the institution once they understood that their work contributed to the quality of their own home: “They value each other’s work and take care that the institute stays clean, because they know this is their home now.”69 Teachers and caregivers reflected on education for work as a way to turn misbehaving children into a community of “working” children. The fact that education for work remained important in the recollection of these teachers not just in the 1950s or the later decades of the state socialist period but also after 1989 suggests that for numerous child protection professionals education for work was not seen as an empty slogan but as an effective means to educate children as well as reform or correct them.

Turning work into a habit Foucault has described institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons, and children’s homes as disciplinary institutions, where bodies were trained, “manipulated,” and “drilled” in order to render them useful and docile.70 Techniques of surveillance, such as rigid daily schedules or buildings that allowed for the easy policing of individuals, served to facilitate the creation of a disciplinary society. Erving Goffmann describes a tight schedule of daily activities as characteristic of what he terms “total institutions.” 71 Total cikkek a fővárosi gyermekvédelem köréből, ed. János Kóti (Budapest: Fővárosi Tanács V.B. Művelődésügyi Főosztály Nevelőotthoni és Kollégiumi Osztály, 1976), 115. 69   “Leányrészleg munkaterve egy napra, amikor a pedagógus nem csak nevel, tanít, de gondozó munkát is végez,” [The daily work plan of the girls’ section of the institute, in which the teacher not only provides education but protection as well], Dési-Huber Istvánné hagyatéka (n.d. 1950s?), FGYK-Tegyesz. 70  Michel Foucault, “Docile Bodies,” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 135–69 and “Lecture from March 17, 1976,” in Society must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1979 ed. Allesandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 239–64. 71  Erving Goffmann, “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” in The Prison: Studies in Institutional Organization and Change ed. Donald R. Cressey (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 16–17.

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institutions in his definition are places of residence and work that are cut off from social intercourse with the outside world and where people led an enclosed and formally administered life. Such institutions were suitable for the social control and regimentation of their residents. Foucault has established a link between disciplinary and regulatory processes directed at individual bodies and wider regulatory efforts to optimize and improve life in a wellfunctioning state. Historical scholarship on children’s education in orphanages and state care has added class, gender, and ethnic specificity to these regulatory processes and efforts. For example, in her study of reformatory schools in Scotland at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Linda Mahood has claimed that the moral regulation of young workingclass women resulted in the construction of not only proletarian subjects but female proletarian subjects.72 Mahood has adopted the Foucauldian concept of discipline to describe how students were made to internalize distinct class differentiated and gendered social structures. Historian Ann L. Stoler, focusing on the European colonial context of the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth century, has pointed out the special concern of colonial authorities for the education of European children and children of mixed parental origin.73 She describes how guidelines for European mothers on child care specified exact regulations on the amount of time children were to spend in the presence of native servants. These guidelines also provided strict schedules for the structuring of the daily life of children in order to ensure that children learned their proper “place and race.”74 The recollections of former teachers and inhabitants of children’s homes interviewed for this research also point to the importance of the disciplinary function of institutions. Disciplining children in the Foucauldian sense, residential institutions in Hungary in the early 1950s were active in creating docile bodies that would grow up to be productive members of state socialist society. Interestingly, the new structural element in the system of child protection introduced with the onset of state socialism, namely the placement of children into sex-segregated residential homes rather than with foster parents, enabled Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family, 13.   Stoler, “A Sentimental Education,” 112. 74  Ibid., 119. 72  73

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the internalization of new and somewhat more egalitarian patterns in the gender breakdown of work than those that were common in larger society. In the following I first describe how former teachers, educators, and students who spent part of their childhood in residential care have reflected on their lives in child protection institutions and children’s homes. I show that they assign an important role to the daily routine and draw attention to its disciplinary purpose in shaping children’s characters. The repetitive nature of the daily routine and positive reinforcement of well-accomplished work tasks aimed to contribute to the internalization of the moral nature of work by turning work into a habit. In order to turn them into working adults, children were exposed to the same routine on a daily basis, which involved a combination of physical and intellectual activities. Then, turning to the gendered character of these self-disciplinary practices, I show that although male and female areas of work were separated, children in homes for boys were made to acquire skills in areas of daily work that were traditionally assigned to women. The daily routine was an element of life in residential care that framed and regulated the lives of both teachers and children. It is the first and most vivid recollection that former residents of children’s homes have of their everyday lives. Andor, who spent several years in different homes in Budapest as a small child, emphasized the structural and regulative character of the routine: “There was a daily schedule based on which we knew what comes when. And we had to abide by that, without bypassing it, without resistance; there could be no exceptions based on one’s mood; it had to be followed.”75 Life was tightly organized through a series of activities in children’s homes from early morning until well into the evening. This is how György, a former resident of the Children’s Town of Tiszadob remembered an average day in the mid-1950s: “Six in the morning wake-up time, flag raising, breakfast, school until one in the afternoon, then lunch and until three or four free time. From four to six study-room, then dinner, flag lowering, and sleeping time.”76 He underlined the monotony of the daily routine: “Each day was like that. Like, how shall I put it, like in the army or in a prison . . . how shall I say, monotonous. And so . . . repetitive, on a daily basis repetitive.”77 Lajos, another inhabitant of Tiszadob 75

A., interview by Eszter Varsa, April 4, 2008, Budapest. Gy., interview by Eszter Varsa, September 17, 2008, Nyíregyháza. 77  Ibid. 76 

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in the same time period, although less sure about the order of events, recalled this process in more detail: Wake-up time was at seven in the morning, then the quick cleaning of our room. Or rather, wake-up time was at half past six, then cleaning, um . . . then brushing teeth and cleaning ourselves; all of this had to be done including the cleaning of our room. And then lining-up, then um . . . breakfast, or rather, flag raising. There was a flag and a park and all classes had to line up. There was also a marching song, but I wouldn’t be able to recall the words of the song any more. And then when we had sung the marching song, then we went to have breakfast. Or rather, the other way around, because . . . breakfast took place before the flag raising, when we went to school, and after flag raising all the groups went into their classrooms.78

The lives of teachers and educators followed a similarly regulated pattern. József Tar, a teacher and educator in a home in Hajdú-Bihar County between 1954 and 1957, recalled that his morning shift was between six and eight. When he had woken the children up, they had breakfast and prepared themselves for the day.79 In the afternoon shift, once children returned from the school, there were a couple of hours for free-time activities, when children could work in the vegetable garden or at the animal farm of the home. Afterwards, during the so-called silencium, educators helped children do their homework and prepare for the next school day. In the evening, children had dinner and washed themselves before going to sleep. Béla Kövecs, a former educator in Budapest from the 1940s to the 1990s, also remembered the strict morning routine. In the morning we woke the children up. The form depended on the person in charge. Some did it in a military style: “wake up, open the window,” a few gymnastic movements, then “let’s go to the bathroom.” Then all quickly picked up their towels, went to wash themselves, returned, got dressed, and made their beds. There was half an hour for all of this. Then again, depending on the actual institution, they went straight to breakfast or had another half an hour beforehand for the revision of school material. Then we went together to the school or the classroom and waited for the teacher to come, who then took the group over.80

  L., interview by Eszter Varsa, September 22, 2008, Kállósemjén. József Tar, interview by Eszter Varsa, December 3, 2009, Hajdúnánás. 80  Béla Kövecs, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 7, 2008, Budapest. 78

79 

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Inspection served as a method to regularly control the quality of work per-formed by children. Lajos recalled that “Saturday meant group activities time” in which we had to learn how to sew, how to sew on a button, iron, and wash clothes. That is, we learned self-sufficiency. . . . Then on Sunday there was inspection. When we got up, we had to clean our room, the bathroom and toilet and the corridor. Sweep the carpets and the wooden floor in our room, then wax the wooden floor and brush it, so that it would shine, like a mirror. Remove the dust from the tapestries, and the beds had to be neat and tidy. . . . Inspection meant that when we had cleaned our rooms, made the beds and the wardrobes, everything had to shine from cleanliness. The shoes had to shine, all the clothes had to be folded neatly in a line one above the other in the wardrobes. So everything. . . . Then the director and a number of teachers came and they inspected all the rooms. When not the director, then another head teacher, in a senior position and a group of teachers, they came and did the inspection.81

Teachers checked the beds and “how well the bathroom and toilets were cleaned. They checked the wardrobes, the shoes, everything. From the toothbrush to whether any buttons were missing from our clothes.”82 In sum, children living in residential institutions as well as their teachers and educators had a highly regulated life and were involved in carrying out different tasks all day long. This daily routine framed and shaped the lives of the inhabitants of children’s homes—and their memories. Former teachers remembering the work tasks of the daily routine present them as a way to shape the character of children. Peterdi, for example, emphasized the necessity of “creating habits.” Referring to children’s daily work in and around their home, he remarked: “They got used to it. The force of habit is powerful. It is a great power. And you have to keep creating and creating and creating habits. . . . And you have to take to doing things. You know, if you get used to doing something you keep doing it. So you have to get them [children] used to it.”83 L., interview by Eszter Varsa, September 22, 2008, Kállósemjén. Ibid. 83 Ede Peterdi, interview by Eszter Varsa, June 16, 2008, Bicske. 81  82

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Figure 19. Sleeping arrangements at a home for children whose parents were employees of the Hungarian Railways, Kőszeg, 1956 (Fortepan/Donated by Endre Baráth). Halls stuffed with beds, one next to the other, were typical in children’s homes in the 1950s. Few in number but large in size, the rooms in villas and castles converted into children’s homes hardly allowed for any privacy. The well-made beds were not merely a consequence of the photographer’s visit; instead, as former residents recalled, teachers were especially strict about making up beds meticulously.

Béla Kövecs, who worked in residential homes for boys in Budapest, also drew attention to how education for work became a technique for shaping children’s character. He pointed out that teachers had an important role in making children realize that certain work tasks, such as cleaning the courtyard, needed to be done. “The teacher of course exerted an influence on children, saying something like: ‘How dirty is it here! Shouldn’t we do something about it?’ Then children would say: ‘Uncle Béla, we are going to pick up the rubbish.’” Kövecs also stressed that collecting garbage with the group of children under his supervision was to be an event other children and the entire home had to know about: “This had to be done in a spectacular way so that the news would be spread to other classes as well.” Collecting garbage in the courtyard was therefore not simply a form of work in order to clean up the home but, with the guidance of teachers, it was turned into an opportunity to create habits of work and cleanliness.

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Kövecs also reflected on the need to elevate work into a matter of honor. He pointed out that in the institutions where he had worked, teachers placed special emphasis on the educational nature of accomplishing work tasks with children.84 He recalled, for example, that when their institution had decided to build a footballtennis court, teachers spent days choosing the children who would be allowed to participate in this work: “We selected the children who were diligent and trustworthy. . . . Preparations would go on for days, the selection of children and the organization work, and God knows what around it. So that by the time we got to the point of doing it, it was God’s special grace sort of, if someone was allowed to participate.”85 Kövecs emphasized that elevating work tasks to positions of honor among children was a means of education. “So these became outstanding things. . . . And by this, all kinds of disciplinary, rewarding, and other tasks became easier, because this [work] could and in fact had to be used for such purposes. Because there were no other [pedagogical] means available.”86 He added that education for work was one of the main means teachers had to effect change in children: “This [education for work] was a fashionable slogan of the times, but it was useful, and it enabled us to achieve something.”87

Education for work as education for life: Creating gendered habits The habit of work that children were to internalize was gendered. Although the guidelines to teaching and the daily routine in children’s homes did not contain any specific instructions concerning the gender breakdown of work tasks, in practice boys and girls largely followed a gender-segregated pattern. Most of the tasks boys had to accomplish were outdoor physical work and small repair tasks, while girls had to do indoor household work or learn embroidery and sewing. Mrs. Dési-Huber, the director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County, summarizing the daily work plan of the girls’ section of her facility in the early 1950s, specified in detail the activities girls carried Béla Kövecs, interview by Eszter Varsa, April 28, 2008, Budapest. Ibid. 86   Ibid. 87   Ibid. 84  85 

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out: “In the case of girls we develop education for work, in such a direction that we send them regularly to help out in the kitchen, where they get to know the techniques of cooking, portioning, and serving food,” she explained.88 Young girls’ education for work consisted of the daily tasks of a housewife. As an anecdote illustrating the transformation girls went through during the time they spent at the institute, she described how “one day, they [the educators] heard that the girls were quarreling. Two girls were fighting about who had the right to clean the toilets. Both girls were at the institute, because they were skipping school and wandering. For the girls it is a special honor if they can

Figure 20. Embroidery made by girls living at the Zsuzsanna Kossuth Children’s Home for Girls at Bicske (Photograph by the author, taken in the private historical collection of the Zsuzsanna Kossuth Children’s Home at Bicske in 2009). The habits of work that children in state care were to internalize largely followed a gender-segregated pattern. Girls were encouraged to excel in sewing and embroidery. Pillow cases, like this one, were used as decoration or were given as presents to boys’ homes. Note the mixture of traditional Hungarian embroidery motifs and the international peace symbol of the dove.

88

  “Leányrészleg munkaterve egy napon,” Dési-Huber Istvánné hagyatéka, FGYK-Tegyesz.

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wash the plates after lunch, or clean the bedroom and the dining room.”89 The work plan specified the household work girls had to carry out from seven in the morning until late in the evening, such as making the beds, cleaning their bedrooms, watering the plants, washing the dishes, laying the tables for lunch and dinner, cleaning shoes, and washing and mending their clothes. Gender-segregated children’s homes reinforced segregation in work. Teachers and caregivers used the context of the “home” to motivate children to internalize gendered habits of work. Ede Peterdi reported that he encouraged his students living in the home for girls in Bicske to do sewing and embroidery: “Each child’s bed was covered by an embroidered bedspread prepared by them. The dormitory looked like a flower bed.”90 Children were to learn from this kind of work that “they could make their own future homes beautiful too if they invested some work in it, even if they had little money.”91 Girls were also expected to make tablecloths to be donated to homes for boys. Writing about the history of the home for girls at Hajdúnánás that was opened in 1953, its former director recalled: “there was a lively group activity life from the very beginnings. In the sewing and the cooking activity groups our students got well prepared for practical life.”92 Boys, on the other hand, were expected to participate in small-scale repair work in the homes. In the Children’s Town of Tiszadob, for example, boys repainted the furniture, their beds, and the wooden flooring of the corridors as part of the redecoration of the institution for the celebration of its ten-year anniversary in the summer of 1956.93 At the home for boys in Hajdúnánás that was opened in 1954, children had to work in the vegetable and animal farm of the home, but as males, they had no responsibilities for daily household maintenance work.94 The former director recalled that students from the local primary school for girls regularly came to help with the cleaning, while the boys in return chopped wood for their school. In some homes for boys, however, the gender-segregated context resulted in a break with gender-segregated work. There was a structural, not an Ibid.   Ede Peterdi, interview by Szendrei and Kollmann. 91   Ibid. 92  József Tar, “40 éves a Hajdúnánási Nevelőotthon,” The personal documents of József Tar, n.d. 93   Csatlós, “A Tiszadobi Gyermekváros,” 32. 94 József Tar, interview by Eszter Varsa, December 3, 2009, Hajdúnánás. 89  90

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ideologically motivated basis for involving boys in forms of work that had previously been considered women’s work, such as sewing or cooking, namely the absence or insufficiency of female staff and the absence of female children to carry out these tasks necessary for daily life. For example, Kövecs explained that in addition to small repair work such as mending the locks of windows, boys were also asked to help in the kitchen or learn how to sew on a button. He identified these forms of work as “work that [was] in some way useful, either for the institution or for the child himself,” and said that he had used this argument to encourage boys to carry out such tasks. While teachers and caregivers did not formulate and conceptualize the content of education for work in gendered terms, they nevertheless used the slightly modified notion of “education for life” instead of “education for work” to explain to boys why they had to participate in these forms of work.95 Accounts by former residents of children’s homes about the content and meaning of education for work have reinforced this point. According to György, a former inhabitant of the Children’s Town of Tiszadob, teachers tried to give them “so-called education for life.” He recalled, for example, that there was no cleaning lady in the different homes for boys he had lived in, which he explained in educational terms: “They tried to educate us already in some way about life, in order that children would have some practical relation to life.” He defined “cleaning, making order in the dining room, helping in the kitchen” as various forms of education for life.96 Lajos, another former resident at Tiszadob, claimed that by doing work in the home such as cleaning and making the beds in the morning, children were “taught to be self-sufficient, to have their things in order, to be able to appear neat if they had to go somewhere. They learned to have clean clothes, to have them in a normal way, in order, and their rooms in order and neat.”97 Lajos also recalled that repetition was a method his teachers preferred: “If the bed was not arranged well, they threw [the blankets] up. ‘My son, you have to learn these things,’ they talked this way. Not in a rude way, just softly: ‘Next time, you have to do it better.’ And when they left, you had to remake your bed.”98 95

Béla Kövecs, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 7, 2008, Budapest. Gy., interview by Eszter Varsa, October 9, 2008, Nyíregyháza. 97  L., interview by Eszter Varsa, September 22, 2008, Nagykálló. 98 Ibid. 96 

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Some of the former residents of children’s homes for boys claimed that these experiences affected their adult life and their approach to the gendered division of labor. György, for example, stated: “It is not beneath my dignity to peel potatoes at home, or to cook a meal.”99 He said that his willingness to participate in household work, which he attributed to the progressive character of education for work in residential care, placed him in conflict with social customs regulating life outside residential institutions. Lajos went so far as to criticize the gender segregation of household work. He saw this as a problem within his own family and described it in terms of an educational difference between himself, who was raised in residential care, and his sons, who were raised at home. They in fact neglect this thing. They accept instead that mother should put in front of them everything, she has to arrange everything, mother irons the shirts, mother puts . . . I mean, everything, everything. And if I say: “Son, you tell your mother to give you this, to give you that. She almost cleans your dear ass,” I say to him. “But you would rather keep grumbling instead of opening the door of the wardrobe yourself. There is your clean shirt, there are all your things, and you could take them out yourself. Or, there is the food. You rather ask what is for dinner, and say that this is not good, and that is not good. . . . You are twenty-five years old now,” I tell him. “You should be more self-reliant by now.”100

These men found their training and readiness to take on their share of household work as a source of positive differentiation between themselves and other men who were not educated in residential care. Lajos also recalled how useful this knowledge had been for him in a later period of his life when he was working as an unskilled factory worker and living in a workers’ hostel: “I had what I learned at Tiszadob. I could sew on a button and I could mend a simple thing on my clothes if it was necessary. And we cooked dinner ourselves at the workers’ hostel.”101 In the accounts of these former inhabitants of homes for boys, education for life was understood positively. Their stories presented it not just as a useful practical learning experience but also as a way to recognize the gendered character of work. Gy., interview by Eszter Varsa, October 9, 2008, Nyíregyháza. L., interview by Eszter Varsa, September 22, 2008, Nagykálló. 101   Ibid. 99 

100 

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Education for work as a means towards the assimilation of Roma The personal recollections of teachers, caregivers, and former inhabitants of residential homes have shown that education for work formed a significant element of daily life in residential care. It served the purpose of shaping the character of children in state care, including teaching them the value of work, so that they would become productive members of state socialist society. As I write in chapter 1, the importance of work in the educational practice of child protection and state care had been key to the so-called “solution to the Gypsy question” since the early twentieth century. Documents related to the placement of children in state care between 1949 and 1956 reveal that prejudice concerning the work-shyness of Roma influenced child protection and guardianship caseworkers’ decisions. The idea that the large-scale placement of Romani children in residential homes would contribute significantly to raising a new generation of Roma who conformed to the majority society’s norms appeared in various official documents at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, from the county to the ministerial level. As a result, caseworkers and teachers perceived the state care of Romani children as useful and advantageous to their development. The institutionalization of Romani children in state socialist East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe bears striking parallels to the education of indigenous children living in colonial contexts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The removal of Native American and Aboriginal children in the United States and Australia, respectively, from the care of their parents served the purpose of assimilating them. Identifying children of mixed parental origin as a “burden to the social order,” authorities hoped that the placement of these children with white middle-class missionaries and families would ensure that they were “absorbed into the white population.”102 Similarly, in the nineteenth century concerns about children of mixed parentage in the Dutch East Indies led authorities to remove them from native mothers’ care. Fearing that these children would become resentful towards the colonial state if they stayed under the influence of and in contact with the indigenous Jacobs, “Maternal Colonialism,” 457.

102 

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population, the authorities made special efforts to separate these children from native society. The education of children and parenting practices were thus key issues of political concern.103 Teachers and caregivers recalling the presence of Romani children in Hungarian state care in the early 1950s underline the extent to which bringing them up in residential homes aimed to contribute to the process of assimilation. They claim that Romani children’s education in children’s homes, away from their parental environment, was necessary to teach these children new habits and practices of self-discipline, through which eventually their difference was to disappear. Peterdi, for example, referred to the change that residential care education brought to the lives of girls of Romani background at his institution: “They came from the real depths of life. Most of them became good working people; they work and maintain a nice family; this is the majority, and this is a huge achievement considering where they came from. From Mátyás Square. . . . You must know where Mátyás Square is in Pest; it is a Gypsy camp.”104 In Peterdi’s opinion, it was the institution that overcame the cultural deficit of these girls’ ethnic background. Gyula Patkós, the former director of the Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County, also emphasized the effect of residential care on Romani children’s lives. “Many children have become honest industrial workers. There was a percentage that was impossible to be saved; you can find them at the bus stations; they have become homeless.”105 Reflecting back five decades later upon her work as a caseworker at the 9th district Guardianship Office in Budapest in the mid-1950s, Mrs. Nemeshegyi was convinced that her regular visits and advice on proper child care to Romani mothers at a poverty-stricken area in her district, the Mária Valéria Settlement, positively affected the lives of those families, including their children. As an example she presented the case of a Romani mother she used to visit, whom she accidentally met several years later. “‘Mrs. Nemeshegyi,’ she said to me, ‘I am eternally grateful to you for saving my son from delinquency. He became a very proper adult man, he has a family and looks after his children and has a proper job.’” Stoler, “A Sentimental Education,” 114, 117.   Ede Peterdi, interview by Szendrei and Kollmann. 105   Gyula Patkós, interview by Szendrei and Kollmann. 103  104

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Figure 21. Children at the Mária Valéria Settlement in Budapest, 1957 (Fortepan/Budapest City Archives, HU.BFL.XV.19.c.11). Former child protection caseworker Mrs. Béla Nemeshegyi recalled that, unlike her colleagues, she visited Romani parents regularly at the settlement in the mid-1950s. She believed that through personal visits she could affect mothers’ responsibility toward raising their children so that they would become working members of Hungarian society.

Mrs. Nemeshegyi claimed that her influence as a child protection worker played a central role in this Romani man becoming a good worker and a good father. When reflecting on the presence of Romani children in state care, teachers and caregivers who worked in children’s homes in the early 1950s emphasized their equality with the other children. They asserted that Romani children took part in the activities and educational work of homes like all the other children. “There have always been Gypsy children [in residential care]. They participated just like the others,” stated Béla Kövecs. “There was, for example, Kálmán Kovács. He was a good boy and studied well. His nickname was ‘csoki’ because of his brown skin. But this had no pejorative content. Rather, it was

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a sign of warning when I said to him ‘Kovács’ instead of ‘csoki.’ He felt there was something serious coming then.”106 Former residents of children’s homes who were of non-Romani origin made the same point: There were Gypsy children [in the home]. There were. And they were raised the same way as us. We ate at the same table. I don’t say there was nobody among the children who teased them. Because there were. And they had fights. But [Gypsy children] got employed when they finished school like we did. So from the community, they were not excluded. That is, teachers and caregivers did not differentiate between them, like “you were a Gypsy and you were Hungarian.” No, not at all. A child was a child. And they received clothes, and studied, and had to do everything the same way we had to.107

Many pointed out that there were only a few Romani children in state care at the time or could hardly recall whether there were Romani children with them in the home. For example, a former female resident of the Child Protection Institute of Szolnok in the early 1950s, as well as several other children’s homes across the country, said: “I do not know about this. Interesting, but I have never paid attention to this. Who was a Gypsy or who wasn’t . . . this . . . this was . . . this was not a question, I think. . . . I think this was not really a question. Um. I do not know. Such things were not an issue at all.”108 Another former resident, who spent ten years in different homes for boys in Budapest starting in 1951, claimed that children had no idea about the pejorative content of someone being called a “Gypsy”: “We knew the word, in the sense that we knew who among us had brown hair. But we surely had not heard something like that we needed to be careful with those who had brown hair.”109 He guessed there were two or three children of Romani origin in their group of twenty-four children. Another former male resident of different children’s homes in Budapest in the late 1940s and the early 1950s said that there were no “Gypsy” children there.110 According to a resident who spent several years in different children’s   Béla Kövecs, interview by Eszter Varsa, May 7, 2008, Budapest. “Csoki” is short for chocolate in Hungarian. 107 L., interview by Eszter Varsa, September 22, 2008, Kállósemjén. 108  M., interview by Eszter Varsa, October 28, 2008, Budapest. 109 I., interview by Eszter Varsa, October 31, 2006, Budapest. 110 A., interview by Eszter Varsa, April 4, 2008, Budapest. 106

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homes in eastern Hungary in the 1950s, the reason for this relative absence was that “Romani families did not let their children be institutionalized.”111 Not remembering the presence of Romani children in children’s homes is certainly related to the low number of Romani families in the Hungarian capital as well as in Szolnok County in the early 1950s. However, it may be a reflection of the emphasis teachers and caregivers put on the “equal treatment” of Romani and non-Romani children in order to assimilate Roma. Highlighting the positive influence of state care on the lives of Romani children could also result in blaming the children themselves rather than institutions when assimilation failed. In one extreme case, the former director of a home for boys argued that despite the education and support that Romani children received in state care, “the bad character traits they had inherited from their parents came to be manifested in their teenage years. According to the pedagogy of the past, inclinations were not inheritable. But this turned out be false. They can be inherited.”112 This former director explained the failure of children to succeed in life following the end of their term in state care not only by blaming individual children’s character traits but by also claiming that Roma were born with certain negative “inclinations” that could not be altered by education. This argument is closely related to the racialized eugenic vision of “Gypsies” propagated in the 1930s and 1940s in national socialist Europe which, in its most extreme form, aimed at the elimination of Roma from society due to the danger of “degeneration” they posed to the body of the nation.113 At the same time, the director was also critical of the socialist vision of child education in which pedagogy and the shaping of children’s character and habits had a central, and according to him a far too central, role. The opinion of these teachers and caregivers was necessarily affected by the negative evaluation of the institutionalization and care of endangered children   P., interview by Mrs. Mária Szendrei, October 1, 2004, Budapest.   Anonymized interview by Eszter Varsa. 113  On eugenics and racial hygienic discourse concerning Roma in Eastern Europe, see Marius Turda, “‘To End the Degeneration of a Nation’: Debates on Eugenic Sterilization in Inter-war Romania,” Medical History 53, no. 1 (2009): 77–104; “‘If Our Race Did Not Exist, It Would Have to Be Created’: Racial Science in Hungary, 1940–1944,” in Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945, ed. Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 237–58; Benjamin Thorne, “Assimilation, Invisibility, and the Eugenic Turn in the ‘Gypsy Question’ in Romanian Society, 1938–1942,” Romani Studies 5, no. 21 (2011): 177–206. 111 112

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under state socialism that became more prominent after 1989. This included a critique of the overrepresentation of Romani children in state care.114 This post-state socialist context might also have contributed to an effort to justify the presence and just treatment of Romani children in state care in the past. Yet if some believed that socialist state care failed to truly transform Roma children, others argued that it actually did, although in a way that often deprived them of their own culture. Since the late 1980s, Romani activists and a growing number of child protection professionals have called attention to the problematic premises and outcomes of assimilatory efforts in residential care education regarding children’s ethnic identity and personal integrity.115 They have frequently cited a loss of ethnic identity as one of the unfortunate outcomes. They are supported by researchers claiming that an approach in which Romani children’s ethnic difference was “not an issue” in the name of the equal treatment of children actually contributed to Romani children denying their ethnicity.116 One of the interviews conducted for this research with a former resident of different children’s homes between the 1950s and the 1960s who was of Romani origin represents this issue well. Mária, who was in state care for fourteen years, recalled that she was not “raised as a Gypsy.”117 It was not until she was fourteen, when her identity card was issued, that she learned that she was of Romani origin. “But I did not care. I did not know that I was a Gypsy. I did not look like a Gypsy. I had curly hair. I did not talk differently, I did not speak in Gypsy.” Even later, she claimed, she was often mistaken to be non-Roma. While for many children, leaving residential care was a difficult experience, for Romani children this was even more so because it often entailed their first confrontation with their ethnic origin and the prejudices attached to it. This chapter has focused on the pedagogical origins of education for work and the processes of creating self-disciplinary work practices in residential homes in early state socialist Hungary. The daily routine of institutional life, the elevation of work tasks into a matter of honor and positive reinforcement “1997. évi XXXI. törvény a gyermekek védelméről.”   Majtényi and Majtényi, A Contemporary History of Exclusion, 122–23. 116  European Roma Rights Centre et al., Life Sentence, 54–57. 117 M. interview by Eszter Varsa, May 27, 2010, Nagycserkesz. 114  115

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were intended to create the “habit of work” in children. Children’s work activities in gender-segregated homes were structured according to a gender divide that followed conventional social expectations towards women as homemakers and house-wives and men as skilled in handiwork in and around the home. In some homes for boys, however, under the notion of selfsufficiency and education for life, boys learned to participate in tasks that counted as women’s work, such as cleaning, clothing repair and kitchen work. As adults, this experience led them to reject conventional ideas about gendersegregated roles. Besides education in gendered patterns of work, children’s homes also had a mission of racial/ethnic assimilation in relation to Roma. Authorities in state socialist Hungary inherited a centuries-long idea and practice in which Romani children’s removal from their families was seen as a means to assimilate all Roma into Hungarian society. Children’s homes were to inscribe habits of work into their inhabitants and thereby contribute to the elimination of “work-shyness” among Roma, which was perceived as the main obstacle to their assimilation. When talking about their Romani students in the 1950s, former teachers and caregivers emphasized that part of the goal of assimilation was the equal treatment of Romani children with other children of non-Romani origin in state care. While in the 1990s one of the most criticized issues concerning Romani children’s institutionalization in the state socialist period was the erasure of Romani ethnic identity by this assimilatory drive, it is still important to consider that former teachers’ and caregivers’ recollections were likely to have been influenced by the present-day equality discourses that condemn the distinguishing and discriminating against ethnic minorities.

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Chapter 5

“HE WAS THREE YEARS OLD BUT COULD NOT SPEAK AND HAD NO EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO ANYBODY”: STATE CARE AS DISCOURSE ON STALINIST POLITICAL TERROR IN SOCIALIST HUNGARY

In 2000 French filmmaker Martino Bernard surprised Hungarian child protection professionals with his documentary on a home for infants in Budapest named “Lóczy” that was about to close down after more than four decades in operation. Contrary to the widely-held professional opinion in Hungary at the time that declared residential institutions to be harmful for children, the French director spoke in favor of this particular institution, and his film clearly testified to the quality of care children received there. A western filmmaker praising a children’s home that for Hungarian professionals represented a dated form of practice that had to be discontinued was an unexpected turn in the post-state-socialist discourse about child protection in Hungary.1 The infant home at Lajos Lóczy Street in Budapest was founded by the wellknown Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler in 1946.2 By the end of the state The controversy which the film provoked is well summarized in an article by Rita Boronyák, “Ahol a kicsik nagyok lesznek” Filmkultúra, https://filmkultura.hu/regi/2000/articles/essays/martino. hu.html (last accessed: November 5, 2018). The article bears the name of Bernard’s 2000 documentary. The French director had worked with the institution for several decades. His earlier documentaries on Lóczy include Le bébé est une personne (The infant is a person), 1983, and Le bébé est un combat (The infant is a fight), 1994. 2  The infant home was called “Lóczy” after its location in Lajos Lóczy Street in Budapest. Parallel to the extension of its activities, the official name of Lóczy changed several times: Methodological Center for Infant Homes (Módszertani Csecsemőotthon, 1961), Methodological Institute of the Ministry of Health for the Care and Education of Infants and Small Children (Egészségügyi 1 

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socialist period it had grown to be an influential methodological center for early childhood development and infant care, but the home had to close as a result of the restructuring of the child protection system following the systemic changes of 1989. Act of 1997 on the protection of children was one of the first major policy decisions in the field of child protection in post-statesocialist Hungary.3 In line with Western European developments and the recommendations of the World Bank and other international child protection actors and organizations, the law prescribed family-centered types of care, such as foster care and adoption, rather than institutional care for abandoned/ endangered children and especially for infants. It also expressed a majority position among child protection professionals in post-state-socialist Hungary as well as other countries of East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe that condemned such institutions as remnants of the communist past that harmed the healthy development of children.4 This law left little doubt about the future of Lóczy. It was not by accident, however, that the film was made by a French director. Ten years after the end of state socialism, the Lóczy infant home was in fact far better known and appreciated in France, Germany, or the United States than in Hungary. Despite Lóczy’s history as a as a center for early childhood development in residential care settings from the late 1960s onwards in Hungary and its international acknowledgment as an institution of infant care, it was heavily criticized by Hungarian child protection professionals at the time. Not only was it seen to represent an outdated form of child care, but in the late 1980s Lóczy had been identified as one of the state institutions where, during the political purges under the Rákosi regime at the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s, children of the arrested, imprisoned, and executed had been placed. This chapter addresses the controversy around the infant home by examining its pedagogy and professional work as well as its connection to the purges through the cases of two children placed in the infant home in 1949 and 1951. Minisztérium Csecsemő- és Kisgyermekgondozási és Nevelési Módszertani Intézet, 1964) National Methodological Institute for Infant Homes (Csecsemőotthonok Országos Módszertani Intézete, 1970), Emmi Pikler National Methodological Institute for Infant Homes (Csecsemőotthonok Pikler Emmi Országos Módszertani Intézete, 1986), and Pikler Institute (Pikler Intézet, 1998). 3 “1997. évi XXXI. törvény a gyermekek védelméről.” 4  Czike, “Gyermekvárosok.”

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I argue that it was one of the unintended consequences of the Stalinist political purges, rather than the particular methodology of infant care developed along progressive and socialist educational principles, that this child protection institution retrospectively became an object of criticism and a negative symbol of the communist regime in Hungary. This criticism eventually contributed to the closing of the infant home in 2011.5 Little is known about the fate of children in Hungary whose parents fell victim to efforts to “eliminate” the political and class “enemies of the people” in the Stalinist period, efforts that included execution, imprisonment, internment to labor camps, and forced (internal) displacement. Concerning displacement, scholars have examined the population exchanges and forced removal of ethnic minorities in East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, including Hungary, after World War II.6 Some historians of political repression in Hungary have focused on the displacement of “class aliens” and the so-called “Hungarian Gulag,” labor internment camps in the country between 1949 and 1953,7 while others have endeavored to reveal the silenced details of international and national political processes behind the best-known show trials against leading political figures during the Rákosi regime.8 The majority of existing histories related to these topics consist of personal recollections.9 In Hungary in 1953, there were 100 internment labor camps with 44,000 prisoners.10 The number of death sentences carried out in consequence of show trials during the Stalinist period is estimated to be several hundred.11 Concerning the Soviet Union, where imprisonment and the internment of political and class enemies and their families between the 1930s and the 1950s took place at a much larger scale than in the countries of the former Eastern   After 2011 Lóczy continued to function as a nursery.   Krista Zach, ed., Migration im südöstlichen Mitteleuropa: Auswanderung, Flucht, Deportation, Exil im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: IKGS Verlag, 2005). 7   Barbara Bank, György Gyarmati, and Mária Palasik, “Állami titok”: Internáló- és kényszermunkatáborok Magyarországon 1945–1953 (Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, 2012); Zsuzsa Hantó, Kitiltott családok (Budapest: Magyar Ház, 2010). 8   László Varga, ed., Kádár János bírái előtt: Egyszer fent, egyszer lent, 1949–1956 (Budapest: Osiris, 2001); István Soltész, ed., Rajk-dosszié (Budapest: Láng Kiadó, 1989). 9  Sándor Bíró, Gulag in Ungarn: Erinnerung eines Gefangenen von Recsk (Budapest: Seriart Nyomdaipari Stúdió, 2015). 10   Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, 273. 11   Ibid. 5 6

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bloc, substantial attention has been devoted to both the show trials and the Gulag, including the experiences of women.12 Between 1936 and 1938 alone, approximately 2.5 million people fell victim to such violence in the Soviet Union, from both the political and intellectual elite and the wider population. In the Soviet case, scholarship has also addressed the fate of the children affected, who are estimated to number several hundred thousand.13 As discussed in detail earlier in this book, the historiographic approach to Stalinism has been varied. For a long time it has been dominated by the so-called totalitarian paradigm, in which Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union and Stalinist dictatorships in Eastern Europe are analyzed from the perspective of high politics with a focus on oppression and the victimization of the population.14 Other topics of analysis in this paradigm are the elimination of political and class enemies in these regimes, as well as the fate of the children of the imprisoned, executed, and interned. These works have highlighted the suffering and the innocence of the victims. For example, in their volume on the children of the Gulag in the Soviet Union, the historians Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky emphasize “the enduring marks” and “the traumas” that the Soviet state left in the life histories of the survivors.15 The authors show the survivors of state repression as people who valued “recovery and family security over any desire to resist or oppose the continuation of the Communist Party’s rule.”16 Their definition of child victims is also broad, including those who suffered from state policies that “harmed public welfare,” such as the abolition of independent civic organizations.17 Like other historical works guided by the totalitarian paradigm, the volume focuses on the personal responsibilities of key political figures, such as Lenin or Alexandra Kollontai, the People’s Commissar for Welfare following the Russian Revolution, who “failed to help” suffering Russian mothers and children.18 12

There is a vast amount of literature on these topics, which also includes the history of Hungarians in Soviet labor camps. 13  Kelly, Children’s World; Corinna Kuhr, “Kinder von ‘Volksfeinden’ als Opfer des stalinistischen Terrors 1936–1938,” in Stalinismus: Neue Forschungen und Konzepte, ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1998), 391–417; Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky,, Children of the Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 14  Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History.” 15  Frierson and Vilensky, Children of the Gulag, 2. 16  Ibid., 9. 17   Ibid. 18  Ibid., 20.

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The fate of these children, however, has also been explored from a perspective that emphasizes elements in their life stories beyond state repression and victimhood. For example, asking whether there was a systematic plan behind the placing in state care of children whose parents had been arrested for political reasons in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938, historian Corinna Kuhr concluded that this was rather an unintended consequence of the imprisonment of parents and other relatives.19 Kuhr relies on a major, socalled revisionist approach in the historiography of Stalinism that questions the validity of an exclusive focus on people’s victimhood and the totalitarian character of state power.20 This approach emphasizes the role of the unintended effects and consequences of policies, and the existence of popular support among the people towards the regime. Although Kuhr recognizes the centrality of children in Soviet discourse about the future of the state as well as the image of the happy child in legitimating the political system, she nevertheless challenges the notion that placement in state care aimed at children’s assimilation and their systematic re-education.21 Kuhr does not consider these children’s institutionalization to be an integral part of the “great terror” in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Rather than assuming that severing the relationship between children and their parents was part of a master plan aimed at removing children from a family environment that was considered to be (politically) harmful for their development, she argues that neither did such preexisting re-education plan truly exist, nor did the state have the financial resources and the personnel to carry it out. The high number of parentless children who had to be placed to already crowded children’s homes was, in Kuhr’s view, one of the unintended, or at least not thought over, consequences of the otherwise targeted political purges aimed at the elimination of certain social groups in Stalin’s Soviet Union.22 Such “counterproductive” actions were typical characteristics of the 1937–38 Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union, resulting in various and to a large extent uncontrollable processes.23 It was often due to these mechanisms, rather than Kuhr, “Kinder von ‘Volksfeinden.’” For the revisionist trend, see Edele, “Soviet Society;” Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History.” 21   Kuhr, “Kinder von ‘Volksfeinden,’” 393. 22  Ibid., 400, 414. 23  Ibid., 415. 19  20 

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deliberate policies, that the wives and children of often politically rather meaningless people ended up as victims of arrests, were robbed of a chance to lead a normal life, or, in the worst scenario, died.24 While acknowledging that putting the children of arrested parents into state care did provide a chance to ensure their “proper” upbringing and education, Kuhr underlines the diversity in experience of the children of the Gulag, which depended very much on individual caseworkers and teachers in charge of children’s care and education, the conditions in the various residential homes, the extent to which children were able to adapt to their new environment, and the children’s physical and psychological condition.25 Against a schematic interpretation of these cases of state care as examples of the totalitarian nature of the terror during Stalinism speaks also the diversity of responses among institutional representatives and the room for maneuver they acted on. The education of the children of political prisoners in children’s homes was consequently not so much a pedagogical issue but depended rather on the political influence and economic interests of the institutions involved in their placement.26 While some child protection actors did indeed use their power to inflict harm on the children of the arrested or resort to oppressive measures against them, others used their available room for maneuver to mitigate the impacts of political persecution. Kuhr’s findings are supported and supplemented by the work of Katriona Kelly, who, in her detailed study of children’s lives in Russia in the twentieth century, lists a number of cases in which child protection representatives made an extra effort to place siblings together, allowed children’s placement with extended relatives (rather than in a state institution), or where residential home directors paid special attention to these children’s care.27 The arguments presented by Kuhr and Kelly are relevant for an analysis of the Hungarian cases of children who were placed in state care following their parents’ politically motivated arrest during the Rákosi regime between 1949 and 1956. In the following I first present the Lóczy infant home, where the children Ibid., 400. Ibid., 401–9, 417. 26   Ibid., 416. 27  Kelly, Children’s World, 238. 24  25

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of the arrested parents addressed in this chapter were placed. I position Lóczy and the work of Emmi Pikler within the international pedagogical context of the post-World War II years. After briefly reflecting on the historical use of “ego documents” such as personal interviews dating from the state socialist period, I discuss the cases of two children whose parents belonged to the upper echelons of the political elite in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Their story is based on recollections provided by their mothers in the 1970s and 1980s, and by one of the two children, by then an adult who was a member of the political opposition in Hungary at the time. I show that resistance against and negotiation with authorities during Stalinism was central to these narratives. They present mothers and other female family members as persons who were active in reclaiming children from state care rather than passively accepting their removal. The narrators’ criticism of the Rákosi regime, which by the 1970s and 1980s was an accepted part of public discourse, extended to a criticism of state care at Lóczy. The recollections join methodological criticism of the infant home with criticism towards the political system.

Emmi Pikler and the history of “Lóczy” The founder of the Lóczy infant home was pediatrician Emmi Pikler, who received her training in Vienna in the 1920s. Her work with newborns and infants, which she developed in the 1930s and applied after the end of World War II at Lóczy, was inspired by different reform movements that had gained influence in Europe and across the Atlantic since the late nineteenth century. These included the fields of child development and child education and the scientific study of children, such as pediatrics, progressive and reform pedagogies, as well as concepts of movement and body work. Pikler’s professors in Vienna, Clemens Freiherr von Pirquet and Hans Salzer, advocated an approach to child care and pediatrics that emphasized the importance of enabling the free movement of infants for their healthy development and recovery from illness.28 They also devoted attention to the scientific study and observation Clemens Freiherr von Pirquet (1874–1929) was an Austrian scientist and pediatrician well-known for his contributions to the fields of bacteriology and immunology. From 1911 he headed the University Children’s Clinic in Vienna, and founded the world’s first department for the clinical research and

28 

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of children in their “natural environment,” that is, while they were involved in unassisted play or movement. Unconventional at the time, Salzer believed that infants especially were not to be forced to take up positions or perform movements that were beyond the level of their physical and mental development. These ideas resonated with pedagogies developed by representatives of progressive and reform movemtens in the fields of kindergarten and school education in the first half of the twentieth century such as Maria Montessori and John Dewey. Montessori believed that by working independently, children could reach new levels of autonomy and become self-motivated to reach new levels of understanding.29 She also believed that acknowledging all children as individuals, and treating them as such, would lead to effective learning and allow each child to fulfill his or her potential. Montessori observed, for example, that given free choice of activity, children showed more interest in practical activities than in toys, and were surprisingly unmotivated by sweets and other rewards. Over time she saw a spontaneous self-discipline emerge. The influential educational theories of the American philosopher John Dewey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also included the importance of experience-based learning as well as intellectual exercises in elementary education. In the early Soviet Union, such progressive and reform ideas were embedded in kindergarten pedagogies too; the belief that when allowed to move freely and develop without restrictions, children would become independent and self-conscious adults was central to Soviet kindergarten education in the 1920s that aimed to raise new Soviet citizens.30 Pikler was also influenced by early twentieth-century advocates of movement pedagogy, such as Elfriede Hengstenberg, and by the school of body work developed by Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby in Germany.31 This time period in Germany and especially in Berlin was characterized by experimental treatment of brain damages and behavior disorders in children. He was also interested in infant nutrition. Hans Salzer (1871–1944) was an Austrian pioneer in the field of pediatric surgery. From 1903 to 1944 he headed the department for pediatric surgery at the Mauthner Markhof Children’s Hospital in Vienna. 29   Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was an Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, and her writing on scientific pedagogy. 30  Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 63–87. 31   Elsa Gindler (1885–1961), Heinrich Jacoby (1889–1964).

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reform movements focused on the body, which had Hungarian followers too. Hengstenberg, who also taught at the Montessori school in Berlin in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, emphasized the need to give children room to experiment and learn through trial and failure and to overcome difficulties independently, much as Pikler later believed concerning infants. Like Montessori, Hengstenberg designed exercises and equipment to invite children into experimenting. Body work emphasized self-observation and a growing understanding of one’s individual physical condition. Developed and taught by Gindler and Jacoby for adults, it focused on the inner principles and regularities of the body, explorations in movement, and feeling. Gindler and Jacoby gave their adult students small exercises whereby they could experience how their bodies had a natural intelligence, like an organism, that revealed itself once they learned to release control over it. Gindler wanted her students to become aware of what happened when they moved and sense themselves consciously from inside, and to find out how they could move with less effort.32 Pikler was interested in Gindler and Jacoby’s approach to the body, so she invited Hengstenberg, their student, to Budapest to give courses for adults in 1935 and 1936. Hengstenberg was by then an experienced teacher of movement pedagogy and she supported Pikler’s work with newborns and infants. As Pikler would later, she provided rich photographic documentation of the development of children’s physical movement.33 In 1935, Emmi Pikler opened her own private pediatric practice in Budapest, which she ran until the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. Her patients were primarily intellectual, middle-class, left-leaning, and communist families whose newborn and infant children she visited on a weekly basis.34 Many of these families suffered from persecution because of their “Jewish” origins, and Pikler, though Jewish herself, was able not only to look after Lydia Ehrenfried “Körperliche Erziehung zum seelischen Gleichgewicht,” in Erinnerungen an Elsa Gindler: Berichte, Briefe, Gespräche mit Schülern, ed. Peggy Zeitler (Munich: Zeitler Verlag, 1991), 34–37. 33  Anna Claire Czimmek, “Leben und Werk der ungarischen Kinderärztin Emmi Pikler (1902–1984): Pionierin auf dem Gebiet der Säuglings- und Kleinkinderentwicklung” (PhD diss., RWTH Aachen University, 1999), 36. 34 Anna Czimmek, Emmi Pikler: Mehr als eine Kinderärztin (Munich: P. Zeitler Verlag, 2015), 35, 39, 41.

32 

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their infants but also help them survive the war by using her extensive social network to secure falsified identity papers and medical certificates.35 Working together with a rabbi, she also ran a kindergarten teacher-training seminar between 1940 and 1944 for young Jewish women who, due to the numerus clausus act, had no access to secondary education. Between June 1944 and February 1945, she survived German occupation in Budapest herself with falsified papers, living under cover as a babysitter in the house of a former upper-class client. By the time she published her first book on her pedagogic principles of newborn and infant care, Pikler had an established circle of private clients in the Hungarian capital. The so-called “Pikler-children” were raised along her principles of free and independent development of infants. One of these principles was that parents or those caring for the infant should follow the child’s own pace of development without interference. Like other representatives of free education, she stressed the importance of letting children reach stages of development in their movement and action according to their own rhythm without forcing them into positions, such as making them sit or stand, that they were not ready to perform. She believed that infants had great interest in the world and needed no entertainment. Allowing them to play and pursue actions unassisted would ensure that they would grow into individuals capable of concentration and independent problem solving. Another point of importance for Pikler were the daily activities and gestures of caregiving when adults came in direct contact with the baby. These moments of intimacy allowed parents to provide for the needs of their children and to spend time in relaxed conversation with them. Babies looked after this way, she argued, were happy, satisfied, and ready to take initiatives and explore the world around them. Pikler’s first book, published in 1940, summarized these principles and contained detailed advice for parents on various aspects of infant care.36 Her convictions, especially her emphasis on infants’ ability to pursue activities and reach stages of development independently, were unusual and met resistance in Hungary. She claimed, for example, that babies did not cry unless they were ill or hungry, and that parents turned their infants into helpless objects by Czimmek, Emmi Pikler, 44–45, 67; Czimmek, “Leben und Werk,” 42. Emmy Pikler, Mit tud már a baba? (Budapest: Cserépfalvi Könyvkiadó, 1940).

35  36 

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Figure 22. Children in the garden of the Lóczy Street Infant Home in Budapest in 1948 (MTI Fotó/Magyar Képszolgálat, MTVA Sajtó- és Fotóarchívum, photograph by Valner, Photo ID: MTI-FOTO-FRATH19483110009). Free movement was central to the methodology of infant care developed from the 1930s onwards by Emmi Pikler. Infants were given ample space in the garden of the infant home to learn by experimentation and reach successive developmental stages, such as learning to stand and walk at their own pace, without interference from the nurses.

not allowing them the freedom to learn and experiment. The title of her book, What Does the Baby Know Already? challenged widely accepted practices and beliefs concerning infant care at the time, since parents typically asked each other how their infants fared in comparison with others’. The cover photo of the book countered this position by showing a sleeping and satisfied infant,

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expressing Pikler’s conviction that babies were satisfied when they were allowed to develop at their own pace. In her numerous later publications, which were translated into German, French and English, she provided advice for parents on infant care based on a detailed study and observation of infants in their free movement.37 As mentioned in the previous chapter, following the end of World War II there was a revival of reform and progressive pedagogical traditions in the field of (public) education in Europe and North America. International commitment to the democratization of society and the values of equality prompted by the disastrous results of the war gave new momentum to the idea of raising children to become creative and self-directed citizens. The same was true in the state socialist contexts of postwar Eastern Europe, where socialist and communist ideology also motivated the democratization of pedagogy and teaching. In the postwar Hungarian context, interwar Hungarian socialist pedagogical traditions were also revived. The home for infants on Lóczy Lajos street in Budapest, opened in 1946 under Pikler’s direction reflected these continuities in pedagogical ideas. Pikler’s first book guided the methodological concept of the home, and she was determined to provide an environment to raise infants in state care that fulfilled the principles of free education. For many Hungarian communists, including Emmi Pikler, the Communist Party’s rise to power in 1948–1949 held the promise of a state in which their ideas about a better society would be translated into practice. In existing scholarship on her work, there is only marginal reference to her being a communist; just like her Jewish family background, this information has so far not been used to understand her professional endeavors.38 Nevertheless, one of her first publications in communist Hungary, about the work at Lóczy, is clearly suggestive of her ideological commitments. The title of the publication, In Socialism there is no Orphaned Child, conveys a belief in a 37

Among others: Imre Hirschler, Magda László, and Emmi Pikler, Anyák könyve (Budapest: Medicina, 1954); Magda László and Emmi Pikler, Csecsemőgondozók és gyermekápolónők könyve (Budapest: Egészségügyi Kiadó, 1953); Magda László and Emmi Pikler, Az egészséges gyermek fejlődése és gondozása 3 éves koráig (Budapest: Medicina, 1961); Emmi Pikler, Adatok a csecsemő mozgásfejlődéséről (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1968). 38  Czimmek, Emmi Pikler; Czimmek, “Leben und Werk.”

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new form of state-society relationship where even abandoned or endangered children receive adequate care.39 It also testifies to Pikler’s efforts to create an environment for infants at Lóczy where “they could develop into physically and psychologically sound children, who showed no signs of disadvantages related to their upbringing in an institution.”40 Illustrated by numerous close-up photos of the children at Lóczy, the publication gave a summary of the principles of Pikler’s approach to free education in infant care. The photos, however, said little about who these children actually were and how they had ended up in an infant home. In the previous chapters, I have I argued that the majority of children were placed in state care because of the death or illness of parents or the difficulties they were facing in early state socialist Hungary. These included unemployment and poverty as well as an insufficient number of child care services to look after children while parents were at work. At the same time, however, a minority of children in the late 1940s and early 1950s were in state care for very different reasons. Ironically, when Pikler’s book was published, there were already several children at the Lóczy infant home whose parents were in prison or had died as a result of the political purges during the Rákosi regime.41 I now turn to two of these children, whose stories were published during the Kádár regime: László Rajk Jr. and Mátyás Donáth. There were several waves of political trials in Hungary in the 1949–1956 period, the best known being the show trial and execution of the then-minister of foreign affairs, László Rajk, and “his accomplices” in 1949. Among the numerous leading functionaries of the Hungarian Workers’ Party who were arrested in the following years was a leading functionary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Ferenc Donáth, who actively contributed to the Rákosi regime’s agricultural policy of forced collectivization. Shortly after the imprisonment of both Rajk and Donáth on May 30, 1949, and in early February 1951, respectively, followed the imprisonment of their wives, Júlia Rajk on June 6, 1949, and Éva Bozóky, Emmy Pikler, A szocializmusban nincsen árva gyerek: a Lóczy utcai csecsemőotthon (Budapest: Egészségügyi Könyvkiadó, 1950). 40  Pikler, A szocializmusban nincsen árva gyerek, 6. 41  László Rajk Jr. identified two other children besides himself and Mátyás Donáth. He claimed that Emmi Pikler’s daughter, who worked as a psychologist at Lóczy, returned their former case files to these individuals in the 1990s. László Rajk Jr., interview by Eszter Varsa, March 13, 2009, Budapest. 39 

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along with her parents, in late February 1951. The two small children in the Rajk and Donáth families, four-month-old László Rajk Jr. and five-month-old Mátyás Donáth, were placed at the Lóczy infant home.

The cases of László Rajk Jr. and Mátyás Donáth Based on the archival documents of Prime Minister Imre Nagy’s office from the early 1950s and the recollections of Júlia Rajk, Éva Bozóky, and László Rajk Jr., the story of the two children placed at the Lóczy infant home can be reconstructed as follows. László Rajk Jr. was taken to the infant home following his mother’s arrest in the summer of 1949. Their apartment was confiscated, and Júlia Rajk’s mother, who lived with them at the time, moved to the home of her sister, who was married to Lajos Györk and lived with her two children in Budapest. The two women addressed a variety of authorities demanding information about the whereabouts of László Rajk Jr. without success, and for years they did not know where he or Júlia were. The boy spent four years at Lóczy, from the summer of 1949 to the spring of 1953, where he was given a new name, one of the most common Hungarian male names, István Kovács. Little is known about the time he spent there. One of the few remaining records of these years are the pictures of István Kovács selected for publication in In Socialism there is no Orphaned Child in 1950. The diary of development, in which care workers at Lóczy recorded daily changes in children’s behavior and physique, suggests that they knew nothing about his family background; on the last day of his stay, the care worker recorded only that he was taken away in a car, and that “the child cried very much as he was being taken away.”42 This happened in 1953, during the Thaw and the ensuing political changes. As László Rajk Jr. later recalled, Mrs. Lajos Györk received a telephone call requesting her to be “on the following morning at eight o’clock at the corner of Lehel and Bulcsu street [in Budapest]. A black Pobeda with closed curtains stopped there and a child was taken out of the car.

Citation from István Kovács’ diary of development from Lóczy. László Rajk Jr., interview by Eszter Varsa, March 13, 2009.

42 

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The child was me.”43 Rajk Jr. was the only child of those imprisoned in the early 1950s on political grounds to be returned to his family before the release of his mother. By the time Júlia Rajk emerged from prison on June 14, 1954, her son had been adopted by her sister’s family and bore the name István Györk. It took another month before his mother and his mother’s sister thought it was time to tell him that “aunt Júlia” was his mother. Thus during the first five years of his life, László Rajk Jr. was called István, a name that he, as an adult, still paid attention to “when called out loud in the street.”44 Éva Bozóky and Ferenc Donáth’s son Mátyás Donáth was five months old when, following the imprisonment of his parents and maternal grandparents in February 1951, he was placed at the Lóczy infant home. Like the family of László Rajk Jr., Ferenc Donáth’s mother knew nothing about the whereabouts of Mátyás when her daughter-in-law was released from prison in September 1953. Bozóky spent several months trying to find out where Mátyás was and requested his return in vain. The child’s new name at Lóczy, Péter Tóth, another very common Hungarian male name, was not known to his mother and made his retrieval more difficult. A document from the Hungarian Supreme Office of the Prosecutor General in February 1954 reported about the unsuccessful efforts of parents and relatives to reclaim these children. “The inspection services of the Ministry of Interior placed the small children of arrested parents in the past illegally under feigned names in different children’s asylums without informing their families. Requests by parents and relatives for the return of their children were ignored. . . . In December 1953 we requested the return of these children from the Ministry of Interior but as yet no measures have been undertaken.”45 In the end, as a result of the political changes effected by the Thaw, Mátyás Donáth was also returned to his mother in 1953. László Rajk Jr., interview by Eszter Varsa, March 13, 2009; Hans-Henning Paetzke, “‘Ich kann die Lügen der Älteren nicht mehr ertragen’: Interview mit László Rajk jun.,” in Andersdenkende in Ungarn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 62–78, 64. Other references mention that Mrs. Györk was taken to the Hungarian state security services (ÁVH) by a person who came to their home, where she was told she was to go to the corner of the street in front of their house the following day to get the child back. Duncan Shiels, Die Brüder Rajk: Ein europäisches Familiendrama (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2008), 226–27. 44  László Rajk Jr., interview by Eszter Varsa, March 13, 2009. 45   The documents of Prime Minister Imre Nagy, MNL OL, XIX-a-2-v, 71d., M366/1954.II., cited in: Varga, Kádár János bírái előtt, 106.

43 

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The reconstruction of these two children’s stories is predominantly based on memoirs and interviews that were produced in the 1970s and the 1980s. As noted above concerning the use of interviews, one of the most important issues raised by oral history sources is the difference between the context of the events recollected and the context of the narration. Personal recollections need to be analyzed, like other historical documents, as representations of the past that are influenced by the historical context and the perspective of the story teller, including the collective frameworks of official memory, the common narrative culture, and specific visions of events deemed historically important that were available at the time of the narration. In the 1970s and 1980s, both Júlia Rajk and Éva Bozóky addressed the placement of their children in the Lóczy infant home in recollections about their and their husbands’ imprisonment.46 These were recorded during the Kádár regime, which allowed criticism of Stalinism and the politics of Rákosi. Importantly, while Éva Bozóky was not actively involved in politics, Júlia Rajk had become one of the leading figures or “institutions” of the political opposition between the late 1950s and the late 1970s.47 Her son, László, who also talked about his childhood at Lóczy in the 1980s, was involved in the so-called democratic political opposition to the Kádár regime from the 1970s onwards.48 Júlia Rajk joined the illegal communist party as Júlia Földi, before getting to know her future husband László Rajk in 1937. She was first arrested, together with László Rajk in 1944, and was interned to a work camp until the end of the war. They were both deported to Mauthausen, from where they returned in 1945 to Hungary. Following her marriage to László Rajk in 1946, she became secretary general and in 1947 president of the Hungarian Women’s Democratic Federation. In January 1949 her son László Rajk Jr. was born. 46

Júlia Rajk, interview by László Rapcsányi, 1970, played on the Hungarian Radio on December 11, 1988, “Hungarian Monitoring December 11, 1988.” HU OSA 300-40-8-61-1, Hungarian Unit, Monitoring, Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest; Júlia Rajk, interview by László Rajk, 1980, no. 142.A, 1956 Institute OHA, and Júlia Rajk, interview by László Bokor, no. 142.B, ibid; Éva Bozóky, interview by Pál Tóth, 1987, 80. sz., ibid; Gabriella Lőcsei, “Tegnapi adventek I-II: Asszonysors az ötvenes években” Magyar Nemzet, December 23 and 24, 1988, 8, 17. 47  Andrea Pető, Geschlecht, Politik und Stalinismus in Ungarn: Eine Biographie von Júlia Rajk (Herne: Gabriele Schäfer Verlag, 2007), 148–61. 48  Paetzke, “Ich kann die Lügen der Älteren nicht mehr ertragen.”

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Five months later she was imprisoned in consequence of the show trial against her husband. Among the politicians involved in the trial of her husband were Rajk’s former comrades, including János Kádár, a family friend and godfather to László Rajk Jr. Júlia Rajk spent five years in prison between June 1949 and July 1954. Following her release, she became actively engaged in rehabilitating her husband. Central to her fight was reclaiming her and her son’s original names.49 A significant moment of the rehabilitation process was the reburial of László Rajk in early October 1956, which is considered one of the political events that led to the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Júlia Rajk was part of the political circle supporting Imre Nagy, who, later in the same month headed

Figure 23. László Rajk, Jr. with his mother at the reburial ceremony of his father László Rajk, and three other political victims of the Rákosi regime—György Pálffy, Tibor Szőnyi, and András Szalai—on October 6, 1956 at the Fiumei Street Cemetery in Budapest (Fortepan/ Donated by Pál Berkó). Only three years before this photograph had been taken did László Rajk, Jr. get to know his biological mother.

Pető, Geschlecht, Politik und Stalinismus, 148–61.

49 

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the revolutionary events. Following the Soviet invasion in November 1956, she and her son were among the group of politicians who were taken to Romania as political prisoners. After the execution of Nagy and the return of the family members of the political prisoners in Romania to Hungary in 1958, Júlia Rajk was among the first who openly voiced criticism of the politics of Kádár.50 Júlia Rajk and László Rajk Jr. need to be positioned in the history of state socialist Hungary in order to contextualize their recollections from the 1970s and the 1980s related to László Rajk Jr.’s childhood at Lóczy. László Rajk Jr. became involved in the political opposition movement to the Kádár regime in Budapest and worked in the production and distribution of underground (Samizdat) literature in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s, he was one of the bestknown figures of the movement in Hungary, and frequently appeared in the Western European and North American press reports focusing on Eastern European political opposition. For example, the opening hours of the so-called “Rajk-boutique,” which he established as an underground sales point for Samizdat literature, were announced in Western European émigré newspapers and on Radio Free Europe.51 Unlike Júlia Rajk, Éva Bozóky did not take active part in political life. Nevertheless, due to her husband Ferenc Donáth’s position in the Hungarian Communist Party and as political under-secretary of the minister of agriculture, she was well-connected with the leading political elite in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Following her husband’s arrest in early February 1951, Bozóky spent two and a half years in prison between February 1951 and September 1953. After her release, she got a job as a librarian and tried to intervene on behalf of her husband, who was set free from prison in the summer of 1954. In consequence of her husband’s involvement in the reform politics led by Imre Nagy, she and their by then two children were also taken as prisoners to Romania after the defeat of the revolution, together with the Rajk family and numerous others. Upon their return to Hungary, Ferenc Donáth was imprisoned again between 1958 and 1960. Between the 1960s and 1980s Bozóky worked as a journalist. Besides the time and context of their narration, another important factor to be considered when using memoirs and recollections as historical sources is Ibid. Paetzke, “Ich kann die Lügen der Älteren nicht mehr ertragen,” 74–75.

50  51 

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the relationship between the narrator and the audience, and how the narrator’s assumed expectations towards his or her audience might affect the story told. In her monograph on Júlia Rajk, historian Andrea Pető draws attention to the particularities of researching autobiographical texts produced during the state socialist period, and specifically those produced by members of the communist movement.52 The persecution of the members of underground communist movements and experiences of imprisonment during Stalinism deeply affected the character of these recollections and memoirs. The intention to save the life of fellow communists or family members and the imagined expectations of investigators while imprisoned resulted in “careful and strategic selectivity” and self-censorship during the recollection and recording of memories.53 Additionally, what was remembered could also be influenced by self-legitimization to “former and present comrades.”54 The reconstruction of László Rajk Jr. and Mátyás Donáth’s removal from their mothers’ care and placement at the Lóczy infant home in the interviews given by Júlia Rajk, Éva Bozóky, and László Rajk Jr. in the 1970s and 1980s was part of their criticism of the political regimes before and after 1956. Their experience and perception of political that occurred under Rákosi and Kádár clearly influenced their stories. In the following I describe how they narrated the treatment of their children at the Lóczy infant home. I show that in their recollections state care functioned as a manifestation of the failures of the state socialist regime and especially the Rákosi dictatorship.

Two mothers’ (re)construction of their children’s institutionalization A common characteristic of Júlia Rajk and Éva Bozóky’s recollections was that both mothers discuss the hardships caused by the removal of their son to Lóczy as a direct reflection of the extent of political terror during the Rákosi regime. In 1970 Júlia Rajk granted a rare interview to a journalist from the Pető, Geschlecht, Politik und Stalinismus.   Andrea Pető, “A Missing Piece? How Hungarian Women in the Communist Nomenklatura are not Remembering,” East European Politics and Societies 16, no. 3 (2002): 949. 54  Pető, “A Missing Piece?,” 951. 52  53

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Hungarian Radio in which she framed her difficulties in reestablishing contact with her son as part of her fight to rehabilitate of her husband. In the first half of the interview, she contrasted the communist commitment and early career of László Rajk with his arrest and execution, presenting him as a victim of the Rákosi era whose ideological commitment to communism was misused by Rákosi and the political group around him “in order to justify their extreme terror and for the purposes of their international maneuvers.”55 Following this highly critical discussion of the political terror during the Rákosi regime, Júlia Rajk emphasized her “very difficult situation” after being released from prison as the mother of a child who did not know she was his mother: “I went to my elder sister’s, where my son was too. The child felt as if my mother was his ‘grandmother,’ my elder sister his ‘mother,’ her husband his ‘father’ and their two children his brothers. . . . For a month, the child called me ‘aunt Júlia.’”56 She connected the events of political terror with her son’s deprivation of maternal care. In several instances Júlia Rajk also referred to the amount of attention she and her husband had devoted to their infant during the time between his birth and their arrest. In the interview from 1970 and in two further oral history recordings from 1980, she underlined László Rajk’s commitment to both his work and his family, noting that he came home from his office at the ministry as many times he could just to bathe or weigh the child. She recalled that he carried out these activities with utmost care and skill.57 Her description of her husband’s attention to the baby also suggests that László Rajk Jr. was a Pikler child: Each morning at six a.m. he was at his bedside and talked to his son, said good morning to him and observed how he followed his figure with his eyes as he was walking around his bed. He noted everything down that his son did, how he had slept, when he laughed for the first time, as young fathers do. Whenever he could, even during the day, he ran home between two meetings to check upon the child, to weigh him before he was breast-fed and after breast-feeding, and then ran back to work.58

55

Júlia Rajk, interview by László Rapcsányi. Ibid. 57  Júlia Rajk, interview by László Rajk, 1980, no. 142. A, 62; and Júlia Rajk, interview by László Bokor, no. 142. B, 1956 Institute OHA. 58   Júlia Rajk, interview by László Rapcsányi. 56 

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László Rajk Jr. has mentioned that his mother was in touch with Emmi Pikler before she and her husband were arrested.59 The details Júlia Rajk provides about the care of their infant also match the information Emmi Pikler required from parents. 60 Pikler put special emphasis on recording such details so that she could follow the children’s development between her weekly visits. In the interviews, Júlia Rajk connects the dramatic events of her husband’s arrest to a detailed description of his attention to the infant. She builds up a stark contrast between the brutality of the arrest at their infant son’s bedside and the intimacy of László Rajk’s devotion to the child: It was around a quarter to twelve at night. Our guests had just left and my husband and I went into the room of our child. My husband was about to measure the weight of the child when the bell rang. My mother opened the door and came to the room and said “László, they are asking for you.” László gave me the child and said, “I am going to measure him when I am back.” I never saw him alive again.61

The minute details of the last contact between Júlia and László Rajk, where husband and wife were focusing their attention on their infant son, accentuate the inhumanity of their arrest, the execution of László Rajk, and the terror during the Rákosi regime. The interview from 1970 with Júlia Rajk was first played on Hungarian radio in 1988, almost twenty years after it had been recorded, in a popular program on politics and public life.62 The same year, a widely read Hungarian daily newspaper published an interview with Éva Bozóky, who also discussed the removal of her infant son from her care upon her arrest in 1951.63 She characterized the extent of political terror through the victimhood of her infant child. In the interview she states that, just like his parents, Mátyás Donáth too was “arrested by the Hungarian State Security Services (ÁVH). He was taken to the Lóczy infant home and his name was changed to Péter Tóth, so that we would László Rajk Jr., interview by Eszter Varsa, March 13, 2009. Czimmek, Emmi Pikler, 39–41. 61  Júlia Rajk, interview by László Rapcsányi. László Rajk Jr. has related this moment as having happened when his father was giving him a bath. László Rajk Jr., interview by Eszter Varsa, March 13, 2009. 62  The program was called Vasárnapi Újság [Sunday News] and started in 1987. It was one of the first programs to offer a diversified view on political events, such as the Rajk trial. 63  Lőcsei, “Tegnapi adventek I–II.” 59  60 

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never be able to trace him down.”64 The journalist conducting the interview with Bozóky enhanced the image of the suffering mother by comparing her to the biblical figure of the Virgin Mary, who had to flee persecution. The interviewer’s expectation that Bozóky would be critical towards Emmi Pikler is unmistakable. At one point she asked about the role of Lóczy in the fate of Mátyás Donáth, wondering if the Emmi Pikler, “in whose institution such evil renaming could take place as happened to Matyi was identical to the Emmi Pikler who was an influential figure in the field of infant care until the beginning of the 1970s.”65 In response, Bozóky stated that “Emmi Pikler was a good professional but not a good person.”66 She described Pikler as a professionally well-trained and competent person with bad character traits, while admitting that her handbook for mothers was one of the most useful pieces of advice literature and that Mátyás Donáth was a Pikler child.

Figure 24. Éva Bozóky with her family (Fortepan/Donated by Sándor Bojár). This photograph was taken around April 1956 when Ferenc Donáth was released from prison. Their eldest son Mátyás, who was institutionalized at the Lóczy Street Infant Home following his parents’ imprisonment when he was five months old, stands in the middle of the picture. Lőcsei, “Tegnapi adventek I,” 8.   Ibid. 66   Ibid. 64  65

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Bozóky provided numerous details about the problems state care caused in her son’s further development and the difficulties she and her husband had in reestablishing a relationship with him after 1953, and she identified the quality of child care at Lóczy as the main source of these problems. She described Lóczy as a facility where care workers, through their negligent treatment, caused almost irreparable damage to her son’s mental development, and listed a number of professional mistakes there. She blamed Lóczy, for example, for having kept her son closed off from the world, as a result of which the child was “afraid of all kinds of vehicles” and “so scared of men that they had to cross sides when a man walked along the street.”67 The most serious issue Bozóky raised in the interview was the ramifications of her son’s institutionalization at Lóczy: “He was three years old but could not speak and had no emotional attachment to anybody. He could not have had it anyway since the care workers and children around him changed continuously at the home. He was seriously harmed. Half a year later his condition improved, but with the ensuing traumas [of the return of his father to the family and the birth of two younger brothers], despite extra attention and lessons at home, it took him until his eighteenth birthday and his graduation [from secondary school] before he could overcome the lag that was caused by the Lóczy infant home.”68 These issues raised by Bozóky were similar to the central points of criticism that child protection professionals had already discussed by that time concerning children’s homes and especially the harm caused by long-term institutional care. Besides these failures in her son’s treatment at Lóczy, Bozóky also accused Emmi Pikler of a serious lack of professionalism at the end of the period of care. She described how Pikler had not allowed her to see Mátyás, although she had begged and pleaded. Even after she had discovered that her son was at Lóczy, Pikler had still kept them apart because “she was afraid to act without authorization from the State Security Services.”69 As a result, Bozóky could not establish contact with the child before he was released from the infant home. Instead, one day she received a call to come pick him up right away. “Since I was not allowed to meet him before, he cried as if seeing a scary stranger as I Ibid.   Ibid. 69  Ibid. 67  68

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was taking him home.”70 In a life-history interview from 1987, Éva Bozóky provided more details on the child’s condition: “He was in a very bad nervous state, a scared child full of fears. He should not have been released from the home like this. . . . This was a psychological attack of terror.”71 In this interview, she underlined Pikler’s lack of professionalism: “I was most angry with Emmi about this. Because I would have liked to visit him daily for two weeks before taking him, but she had not given me the permission to do it. I felt it was very cruel to take the child like this, an act of execution to take him by force.”72 The strong vocabulary Bozóky used to describe her son’s condition, including phrases such as “terror” and “execution,” reinforced the linkage—at least in her mind—between these experiences and Stalinist political terror during the Rákosi regime. While Júlia Rajk and Éva Bozóky have only described the institutionalization of their children in a few ego-documents, there are several interviews with László Rajk Jr. in which he was asked to talk about his childhood. In these various (re-)narrations he gave slightly different interpretations of certain elements of his life story, showing that stored experiences are “subject to lifelong modifications, transformations and reinterpretations.”73 A case in point was his characterization of child care at Lóczy. Journalist Duncan Shiels, in his book on the “family drama” of the Rajk brothers, cites László Rajk Jr.’s acknowledgment of the professional character of child care at Lóczy.74 Shiels conducted numerous interviews with Rajk Jr. between 1992 and 2006, and records Rajk Jr. saying that at Lóczy special attention was given to the close relationship between children and a mother figure: “As opposed to the revolutionary experiments with communal child care in the 1930s, where Ibid.   Éva Bozóky, interview by Pál Tóth, 1987, no. 80, 210–11, 1956 Institute OHA. 72  Ibid. 73  Julia Obertreis and Anke Stephan, “Memory, Identity and ‘Facts’: The Methodology of Oral History and Researching (Post-) Socialist Societies (Introduction),” in Erinnerungen nach der Wende: Oral History und (post)sozialistische Gesellschaften/Remembering after the Fall of Communism: Oral History and (Post-) Socialist Societies, ed. Julia Obertreis and Anke Stephan (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2008), 39. 74   Shiels, Die Brüder Rajk, 226. Shiels’ book focuses on the relationship between László Rajk and one of his brothers, who was a national socialist and became minister in the Hungarian wartime extreme right-wing government. 70  71

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children were not to have an individual reference person, the [Pikler-method] emphasized its opposite: their starting point was that a child needed a close relationship with a mother figure.”75 It was, Shiels writes, “as if the children were to be compensated [at Lóczy] for the atrocities committed against their parents.”76 Shiels does not provide transcripts of the interviews so it is not possible to verify if this was Rajk Jr.’s intended message; in 2009, however, he was strongly critical towards Emmi Pikler’s behavior: I do not think of Emmi Pikler as representative of a special, modern and progressive method of child care. My motivation is slightly different. . . . It is hardly imaginable that [Pikler] did not know who these children [at Lóczy] were. It cannot be affirmed that she knew what was going on, but neither can it be affirmed that she had no idea at all. This was a special home. Not an orphanage. This was a well-equipped home guided by progressive theories of care. But there is this small freckle on it. For me, at least.77

In László Rajk Jr.’s narratives, Lóczy formed part of the politics of Stalinism in the early 1950s. He identified the events of his early childhood, and especially the fact that he was given a new name at Lóczy, as an effort to erase his family from Hungarian history: “I was taken away. Nobody knew where. I simply disappeared from the face of the earth.” The name he received at Lóczy, István Kovács, changed to László Kovács when he was around one and a half, then to István Györk when he was returned to his family, then finally back to its original form as a result of his mother’s efforts to rehabilitate her husband.78 “István Kovács and László Kovács were the names I received at the infant home where I spent the first years of my life. This children’s home was one of the most modern of its kind in Hungary. I do not believe any of the abandoned children could have been treated there badly. It was, however, filled with children whose parents were in prison.”79

75

Ibid. Ibid. 77   László Rajk Jr., interview by Eszter Varsa, March 13, 2009. 78  Pető, Geschlecht, Politik und Stalinismus, 88–92. 79  Paetzke, “Ich kann die Lügen der Älteren nicht mehr ertragen,” 63–64. 76 

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The recollections that were recorded between 1970 and the mid- to late1980s, as well as those made after 1989, formulated clear criticism towards the political terror of the Rákosi regime. The memories of the two children’s removal from their mother’s care were embedded in this criticism and as such linked Lóczy with the failures of the regime. The negative evaluation of Lóczy and Emmi Pikler’s role in state care of the children of the politically imprisoned contrasts sharply with the recognition of the highly progressive methods of care applied in the infant home that appears in some of the same interviews. It is one of the paradoxes of Stalinism in Hungary that those communists who were at the upper echelons of political power in the late 1940s and their relatives turned into the strongest critics of Lóczy and Emmi Pikler, an infant home and a pediatrician whose work embraced communist values. Like the work of child protection professionals who applied education for work as a method in the care of abandoned/endangered children following the end of World War II and the state socialist period, Emmi Pikler’s principles of infant education were also directly related to a variety of progressive pedagogies developed in the earlier half of the twentieth century in Europe and across the Atlantic. The history of Lóczy therefore also demonstrates a continuity in theories and methodologies applied in the residential care of children in postwar Hungary. By the time Piker died in 1984, her philosophy of early child development had acquired international fame. Her methods have not only survived the end of state socialism but are being followed in institutes across Europe and the United States. Even though Lóczy as a residential home for infants in state care was closed in 2011, its legacy is continued by the Pikler House, hosted in the same building, that still runs as a nursery and as a national and international research and training center for parents and professionals. Although Pikler did indeed collaborate with the Stalinist regime and acted dishonorably with parents affected by the purges, it is important to distinguish between her philosophy of infant care and her politics as a director of a children’s home during the late 1940s and the 1950s. In order to understand the latter, not only need the sources critical of her behavior be contextualized, but one also has to further scrutinize Pikler’s personal relationship with the communist movement as such.

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CONCLUSION

This book has examined policies and practices of care in the field of child protection with specific focus on children’s placement in state care and their education in residential institutions between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s in Hungary. By addressing an until-now largely marginalized area in the social historiography of East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe it has discussed issues key to the historical understanding of state socialism and in particular the period of Stalinism in the region. These include some of the major changes connected to the onset of the new political regime, such as catchup industrialization, women’s rising employment rate and an accompanying restructuring of the relationship between paid work and care work, and an assimilationist policy towards those identified as “Gypsy.”

Stalinism in light of social rather than political problems The historiography of Stalinism has long been dominated by accounts of political repression. This scholarship has discussed the rise into power of communist parties in Eastern Europe as a political break in the democratization processes that started after the end of World War II. The cases of children placed in state care between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s in Hungary examined in this book provide a different perspective on this period. Instead of problems related to political repression, the sources reveal diverse social and economic conditions that led to children being identified as abandoned or endangered. In the majority of cases, families were experiencing employment, housing, or other financially-defined difficulties, or were struggling with health problems or the consequences of war-related loss and death. A few children ended up in state care due to their parents’ politically motivated arrest, but they were a minority. While institutionalized state care, as the case of Lóczy illustrates,

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did affect children whose parents were caught up in the political purges, child protection of the Stalinist period cannot be reduced to these cases alone. Change and continuity The history of child protection examined here allows us to see early state socialism and the years of Stalinism in Hungary as connected to, rather than disconnected from, earlier political periods. Mark Edele was among the first to argue persuasively for addressing “the complexity of socio-cultural transformations” in writing the social history of socialist societies.1 Concerning transformations in Soviet society, Edele claims that “the internal dynamic of existing patterns, spontaneous developments not induced by the state and interaction with the outside world” were just as important factors behind processes of change as deliberate attempts at “social engineering.”2 Child protection history in Stalinist Hungary challenges some of the commonly accepted divides in the periodization of twentieth-century European history. The content of children’s education in residential care examined in this book shows that the 1950s did not bring about a radical break with earlier periods in the fields of progressive and reform pedagogy and reformatory education. To the contrary, some child protection professionals who were in leading positions at the onset of state socialism in Hungary built on earlier pedagogical models and theories, including those practiced in the West as well as in the Soviet Union, to run their institutions in the 1950s. They relied on pedagogical models that had been developed internationally throughout the earlier decades of the twentieth century, such as collective education and free education. In this sense, the education of children in state care represented continuity rather than discontinuity with earlier models of reform and reformatory education. And committed professionals, while certainly not the majority of teachers and personnel working in residential homes at the time, envisioned progressive development and reform in the education of children in state care. The rise into power of the communist party actually meant that it might be possible to realize these pedagogical ideals. Edele, “Soviet Society,” 372. Ibid.

1  2 

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Another area of continuity and change in state socialist Hungary this book has addressed was in the field of the so-called “Gypsy question.” Authorities in state socialist Hungary aimed to improve the “situation of the Gypsy population” through a number of policies addressing education, employment, and housing. While nationwide policy-making did not begin until the early 1960s, the example of northeastern Hungary shows that local-level programs were already being implemented in the early 1950s. Following the systemic changes of 1989, many of the social and economic problems among Roma have been blamed on failures in policy goals and ensuing practices during state socialism. The history of child protection, however, demonstrates that state socialist politics concerning the “Gypsy question” cannot be understood without a long-term twentieth-century perspective. Preconceptions about the work-shyness of persons considered to be Roma, for example, which became manifest in policy recommendations and local level practices in the early 1950s, did not date from the onset of state socialism. Nor was the placement of Romani children into state care, which increased following the introduction of the first party resolution on the “Gypsy population” in 1961, a state socialist invention. A major finding of this book is that child protection and efforts to solve the “Gypsy question” in Hungary had a centuries-long common history. Providing “proper” care and a “civilized” upbringing to Romani children by removing them from the care of their parents had been on the agenda of local authorities since the emergence of state child protection at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The extension of the residential home system from the late 1940s onwards enabled the translation of this “solution” into practice. As a result, Romani children were overrepresented in institutional care by the 1980s. The system of child protection institutions and children’s homes that authorities inherited from the first half of the twentieth century affected the course of change in the field of child protection in state socialist Hungary. The existence of a statewide system of child protection institutions (the former state asylums) was unique in comparison to other state socialist countries of East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. In Poland, for example, the system of care for abandoned children was much less developed by the end of World War II than in Hungary. Hungarian authorities could rely

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on a network of child protection institutions and, in the capital city, also on children’s homes formerly run by private welfare organizations. This facilitated the building of an institution-based system of care during the state socialist period. Nevertheless, as I pointed out in chapter 1, this development was uneven in the country due to a lack of children’s homes outside the capital, which in some regions resulted in the preservation and further professionalization of the foster care system.

Socialist child protection In light of these continuities, one might wonder whether there was anything specifically socialist about child protection in Hungary following 1949. In many respects, changes introduced with the onset of state socialism gave already existing practices new meaning. This was clearly the case with education for work. Efforts to introduce this objective into primary and secondary school education were based on the Soviet example and followed the Marxian principles of bringing education in closer touch with productive work. While this was largely unsuccessful in regular school education, in the field of child protection these efforts made more headway because they resonated with earlier practices of corrective work education. There were also a number of policy changes in the early 1950s that demonstrated a redefinition of the meaning of child abandonment/endangerment in accordance with communist ideology. One of the important legal shifts introduced the concept of “work (in)ability” into the definition of child abandonment/endangerment on material grounds in 1954. This regulation presupposed that the socialist state secured employment opportunities for all active citizens in Hungary, an idea that rested on the communist understanding of work and the goal of a working-class society. The novelty, of course, was that the expectation that all parents would participate in productive wage work extended to women too. Thus caseworkers held mothers, not only fathers, as financially responsible for the maintenance of their children.

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Regulation beyond repression Considering the goals and functions of child protection in early state socialist Hungary beyond the proposition that state care was simply a measure of political repression must not exclude an acknowledgment of the regulatory functions of this institution. Regulation had been an element of child protection since its beginnings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and since the establishment of state-provided services in the early twentieth century. Like other social and welfare measures in different political systems, including liberal democracies, child protection measures entailed a contradiction. The widening of care services at the same time contributed to the strengthening of the system and the organizations that provided care.3 Child protection in state socialist Hungary offered protection to children whom caseworkers defined as abandoned/endangered but it also exercised regulatory power over them and their families. Due to the fact that child protection included the possibility of the termination of parental rights, its regulatory potentials towards parents were in fact significant. Children’s files show that lone mothers in particular were exposed to caseworkers’ critical judgment concerning their perceived willingness to work as well as their sexual practices. Placement in state care also served the purpose of ensuring that young girls coming from family contexts considered dangerous for their further development would be exposed to a disciplinary education in work and sexual morality. Gendered and ethnic differentiation Despite the increasing inclusion of women in the labor force and policies and propaganda aiming at equalizing women with men in Hungarian society from the early 1950s onwards, children’s education in residential care institutions between 1949 and 1956 was largely gender-differentiated. Children’s homes were gender-segregated, and teachers and care providers, many of whom were educated in the interwar period, did not question the gender division of daily work tasks assigned to children. In the homes for boys examined in Hering and Waaldijk, Guardians of the Poor, 33.

3 

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the framework of the present study, it was the absence of girls and female staff that brought about a break with the traditional division of work tasks, not ideological concerns about the need to restructure of the relationship between men and women in society. The evaluation of good and bad parenting was gender-differentiated and also affected Romani and non-Romani parents differently. The intersectional analysis of child protection practices applied in this book points to the existence of prejudices concerning the “work-shyness” of parents whom caseworkers identified as “Gypsies.” This meant that when mothers were accused of bad parenting because of not having a job, Romani mothers were likely to be accused of work-shyness as well. Similarly, while caseworkers pressured on lone mothers to get married, Romani women who married “in the Gypsy way” were likely to face child protection authorities’ negative evaluation concerning their lifestyle and sexual morality. Romani mothers were held responsible for raising productive members of state socialist society. Caseworkers and other representatives of the child protection system regarded the proper shaping of Romani mothers’ parenting habits as a significant step towards the disappearance of work-shyness among Roma and thus their successful assimilation into Hungarian society.

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APPENDIX

Table 1. Children in state care, 1949–1956 Year

Total number of children in state care

With foster or biological parents

In residential care

1949

25,940

17,406

6,323

1950

24,356

16,132

8,267

1951

n.d.

n.d.

n.d.

1952

n.d.

n.d.

n.d.

1953

25,050

13,750

11,300

1954

23,310

11,670

11,640

1955

19,330

7,580

11,750

Source: Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Szociális intézmények, 1950. évi adatok: A KSH jelentése (Budapest: KSH, 1951), 12; Gyermekvédelem 1955: A KSH jelentése (Budapest: KSH, 1956), 2.

Table 2. Children (older than three years) in state care in Budapest, November 1951 Type of placement

Number of children

Foster care

1,735

Free foster care (for adoption)

93

Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County

93

Donáti Street Temporary Home

36

Residential homes

2,002

Vocational school homes

1,530

Total

5,489

Based on calculations by Mrs. Dési-Huber, director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County, in Dési-Huber Istvánné hagyatéka, FGYK-Tegyesz.

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Table 3. The yearly inflow of children to the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County, 1949–1956 Year

Boys

Girls

Total

1949

1,934

1,510

3,444

1950

3,023

2,220

5,223

1951

2,081

1,433

3,514

1952

2,557

1,863

4,420

1953

2,087

1,446

3,533

1954

1,645

1,161

2,806

1955

1,938

1,435

3,373

1956

1,710

1,264

2,974

Data from the Archives of the Budapest Special Service for Child Protection, the present-day successor institution of the former Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County.1

Table 4. Residential homes of the Municipal Council of Budapest, 1952 Name

Location

Type

School grade

Number of children

Outside Budapest Residential Home of the Municipal Council of Budapest

Bicske

female

1–4

190

Zamárdi 1.

female

2–4

100

Zamárdi 2.

female

5–8

120

Fonyód

female

3–4

70

Pilis

female

5–8

90

Bélatelep

male

1–3

100

Bakonyoszlop

male

1–3

100

Szőlősgyörök

male

2–4

100

Szob

male

5–8

140

In Budapest

1

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Mayer Ferenc

XII. Városmajor u. 31.

male

4–8

136

Vasvári Pál

XII. Budakeszi u. 48.

male

5–8

102

  Special thanks to the director of the archives, Balázs Temesi, for providing me with this data.

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Makarenkó

XII. Cinege u. 10.

male

5–8

50

Fővárosi

XII. Hegyhát u. 35.

male

4–8

110

József Attila

XXI. Sallay Imre u. 13.

male

5–8

45

Kaffka Margit

XII. Bánffy u. 3.

female

6–8

90

Koltói Anna

XII. Szarvas G. u. 50.

female

5–8

100

Hóvirág

II. Tapolcsányi u. 4.

mixed

kindergarten

100

Greek

VIII. Róbert K. krt.

mixed

1–8

Hűvösvölgyi

II. Vöröshadsereg u. 167.

female

1–8

160

Ady Endre

III. Szél u. 11.

male

1–4

180

Ságvári Endre

VI. Bajza u. 53.

male

5–8

114

Szabadság

XVIII. Ságvári u. 59.

mixed

kindergarten

50

Móra Ferenc

III. Kavics u. 9.

mixed

kindergarten

80

Szabadlevegős

XII. Diana u. 4.

mixed

Erdei iskola

XII. Diósárok u. 40.

mixed

1–8

200

Fővárosi

XII. Szilassy u. 3.

male

3–4

48

Hárshegyi

II. Hárshegy u. 9.

female

5–8

180

Mátyás kir. úti

XII. Mátyás kir. u. 8.

male

5–8

160

Total

2

80

3,224

Report about the Residential Homes of the Municipal Council of Budapest, Budapest City Archives, HU BFL XXIII. 102. a. 53.k., January 11, 1952.

Accommodating children of (communist) political refugees after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949.

2 

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Table 5. Active wage earners, 1949–1956

Year

Total number Number of Percentage of active industrial of industrial wage earners wage earners wage (1000) (1000) earners

Number of agricultural wage earners (1000)

Percentage of agricultural wage earners

1949

3,910

1,188

30%

2,138

54%

1950

4,077

1,298

31.8%

2,105

51.6%

1951

4,225

1,424

33.7%

2,082

49.2%

1952

4,306

1,581

36.7%

2,053

47.6%

1953

4,349

1,685

38.8%

1,934

44.4%

1954

4,400

1,803

40.9%

1,910

43.4%

1955

4,470

1,825

40.8%

1,952

43.6%

1956

4,503

1,861

41.3%

1,991

44.2%

Based on Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Statisztikai Évköny 1949–1955 (Budapest: Statisztikai Nyomtatvány- és Folyóiratkiadó, 1957), 57.

Table 6. Children entering state care in Budapest and Szabolcs-Szatmár County by category of complaints, 1949–1956

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Category of complaint

Budapest

Nyíregyháza

Together

no information

14 (4,17%)

1 (0,47%)

15 (4,4%)

mother imprisoned

18 (5,37%)

15 (7,14%)

33 (12,51%)

lone mother at work

37 (11,04%)

15 (7,14%)

52 (18,18%)

lone mother without a job or small income

45 (13,43%)

55 (26,19%)

100 (39,62%)

battery

17 (5,07%)

5 (2,38%)

22 (7,45%)

ill parent

24 (7,16%)

22 (10,47%)

46 (17,63%)

death of parent(s)

16 (4,77%)

31 (14,76%)

47 (19,53%)

parental request

7 (2,08%)

7 (3,33%)

14 (5,41%)

alcoholic parent(s)

21 (6,26%)

1 (0,47%)

22 (6,73%)

sexual assault by (step)father

6 (1,79%)

0

6 (1,79%)

mother’s immorality

9 (2,68%)

3 (1,42%)

12 (4,1%)

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APPENDIX

mother’s place of residence unknown

22 (6,56%)

10 (4,76%)

32 (11,32%)

mother does not look after/mother pregnant

18 (5,37%)

8 (3,8%)

26 (9,17%)

minor’s request

1 (0,29%)

0

1 (0,29%)

two parents who cannot provide/ poverty

33 (9,85%)

12 (5,71%)

45 (15,56%)

vagrancy, runaway, minor’s behavior

37 (11,04%)

10 (4,76%)

47 (15,8)

other

10 (2,98%)

15 (7,14%)

25 (10,12)

Total

335 (100%)

210 (100%)

545 (100%)

Table 7. Children entering state care for moral reasons in Szolnok County by category of complaints, 1949–1956 Category of complaint no information

Szolnok 0

mother imprisoned

9 (3,57%)

lone mother at work

30 (11,90%)

lone mother without a job or small income

40 (15,87%)

battery

30 (11,90%)

ill parent

7 (2,77%)

death of parent(s)

1 (0,39%)

parental request

16 (6,34%)

alcoholic parent(s)

6 (2,38%)

sexual assault by (step)father

6 (2,38%)

mother’s immorality

8 (3,17%)

mother’s place of residence unknown

9 (3,57%)

mother does not look after/mother pregnant

10 (3,96%)

minor’s request

1 (0,39%)

two parents who cannot provide/poverty

33 (13,09%)

vagrancy, runaway, minor’s behavior

42 (16,66%)

other

4 (1,58%)

Total

252 (100%)

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION on the guardianship and child protection caseworkers, teachers, and care workers of child protection institutions and children’s homes featured in this book

Zsigmond Ádám (1906–1962) was born in Egyek in Eastern Hungary as one of five children in a poor Jewish family. He received teaching qualifications at the Teachers’ Training College of Szeged in southern Hungary in 1931 but due to anti-Semitic legislation in interwar Hungary he was not able to obtain a degree in pedagogy until 1947. He was a member of the Hungarian underground communist movement starting in 1930. He married in 1939 and had one daughter. Between 1931 and 1946 he worked at the Teachers’ Training Colleges of Csurgó, Miskolc, and Budapest. Between 1942 and 1943 he was taken to a forced labor camp in Ukraine. He lost a brother and a sister in the Holocaust. Following the end of World War II he was active in organizing children’s homes in empty villas and castles in Hungary. Between 1946 and 1949 he was the director of the first children’s town organized for war orphans and abandoned children in Hajdúhadház in Eastern Hungary. After being removed from this position he served as a consultant for child protection and education at the Ministry of Welfare in 1949 and the National Planning Office between 1952 and 1954. Between 1959 and 1961 he was appointed director of the newly opened Children’s Town of Soponya. When his position was discontinued, he committed suicide in 1962. In the 1930s he published in the Hungarian child protection journal Gyermekvédelem. He advocated education for work as a method to work with abandoned children in A problematikus gyermek (The Problematic Child) published in Budapest in 1942. Mrs. István Dési-Huber, Stefánia Sugár (1897–1987) was born in Budapest to a working class Jewish family. She graduated from secondary school in 1914 and worked as a bookkeeper and secretary. In 1953 she received teaching qualifications from ELTE University in Budapest. She spoke three foreign

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languages. In 1923 she married the painter, graphic artist, and communist activist István Dési-Huber, with whom she lived in Italy between 1924 and 1927. She worked for the underground Hungarian Communist Party starting in 1932. In 1944 her husband died from illness, her brother was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, and her mother was killed by members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party. After the end of World War II she worked for the Hungarian Women’s Democratic Association and the Hungarian Workers’ Party. She was director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County from September 1949 until 1957, when she was removed from her position. Lajos Barna (1921–1993) was born in the town of Hajdúböszörmény in Eastern Hungary. He received teaching qualifications from the Teachers’ Training College of the Reformed Church in Debrecen in 1940 and a degree in pedagogy at ELTE University in Budapest. In the 1940s he worked as a school and residential home teacher. After the end of World War II and in the early 1950s he organized and directed several residential homes for abandoned/ endangered boys in Eastern Hungary. Following the death of his wife in 1945, he remarried in 1950. They raised four children. In 1957 he organized and was appointed director of the Children’s Town of Fót, one of the largest children’s homes in state socialist Hungary, where he worked until his retirement in 1983. Among his colleagues he was known as “the Hungarian Makarenko” for his devotion to the principles of education for work and collective education. He participated in the child protection work of the United Nations and UNICEF, among others, in Cambodia and Iran. Mátyás Dickmann (1924–2009) was born to a middle-class family in the town of Szentes in northern Hungary. Following the death of his mother in 1927 and his father’s second marriage the family moved to Szeged in southern Hungary, where he obtained his secondary school diploma in 1942. In 1942 he entered military school and was trained in Germany. Following six months in an American camp for prisoners of war he returned to Hungary. He graduated from the department of law at the University of Szeged in 1951. Between 1951 and his retirement in 1986 he worked as a jurist at the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County. From 1974 onwards, he was also vicedirector of the institution.

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László Dobszay (1914–1983) was born in the small town of Cserdi in southern Hungary. He graduated from the Medical Faculty of the University of Pécs in southern Hungary in 1928. Between 1928 and 1931 and 1931 and 1937 he worked at the Department of Pediatrics at the Universities of Pécs and Szeged, respectively. He was director of the State Children’s Asylum of Gyula between 1937 and 1946 and the State Children’s Asylum/Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County between 1946 and 1952. He was also head of the Mother and Child Protection Department of the Ministry of Welfare between 1946 and 1948. In this function he promoted the reform and professionalization of the Hungarian foster care system. Following his removal from the Child Protection Institution he was head physician and director of the Pediatric Polyclinic of District 20 in Budapest between 1954 and 1956. Between 1956 and his retirement in 1976 he led pediatric consultancy at the Pál Heim Pediatric Hospital in Budapest. Béla Kövecs (1925– ) was born in the city of Pécs in southern Hungary, where he obtained his teaching qualifications at the Teacher’s Training College in 1946. From 1946 to his retirement in 1992 he worked as a teacher and care worker in different children’s homes, mostly homes for boys, of the Municipal Council of Budapest. In 1946, he started working at the József Home for Boys (or Josefium) where he remained until the home was closed in 1949. After a year at the Mihály Károlyi Children’s Home at Fót, he was transferred to the Children’s Home of Szob. He married in 1950. He transferred again to Budapest in 1953 to the Ferenc Mayer Home for Boys, where his wife worked as a nurse. From its opening in 1955 until its closure in 1973, he worked in the successor institution of Mayer, the Mihály Táncsics Children’s Home. He recalled his eighteen years of engagement there most fondly. Finally, he was transferred to the Makarenko Street Children’s Home. Mrs. Béla Nemeshegyi, Ilona Sass (1910–2009) was born to a middle-class family in Budapest. She attended a Catholic elementary school for girls and graduated from the secondary school for fine arts in Budapest. She obtained a secondary school diploma in 1928. Between 1924 and 1943 she was member of the girls’ scout movement in Budapest, where she gathered her first experiences

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in working with children of diverse social backgrounds. She was accepted to both the University of Fine Arts and the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest. She graduated with a degree in Latin language and Hungarian philology from the latter in 1933 and completed a school for typing. She married in 1938 but later divorced and raised her four children as a lone mother. Between 1955 and 1960 she was a child protection caseworker at the Education Department of the District 9 Local Council of Budapest. With her contribution three positions for child protection supervisors were opened at the department in 1956, as well as a work-school for endangered young women in 1957. She was director of the Child Protection Institution of Budapest/Pest County between 1960 and her retirement in 1965. She was an active member of the Hungarian Women’s Democratic Association from 1945 on, and between 1953 and 1954 participated in different parent-teacher associations in primary and secondary schools. Gyula Patkós (1925–2008) was born in the town of Mezőtúr, Szolnok County, in Central Hungary as the ninth child of a poor peasant family. He graduated from the Teachers’ Training College of the Reformed Church in Mezőtúr in 1944. In 1946 and 1947 he was the social secretary responsible for the region around Mezőtúr and the towns of Kenderes and Kunhegyes in Szolnok County. Among his main tasks was the reorganization of pre-World War II poorhouses into homes for old people. He married in 1948 and had three children. Between 1949 and 1951 he worked as social inspector in western Hungary and participated in the organization of the Child Protection Institution of Vas County as well as the opening of kindergartens and primary school day-care centers in the county. Between 1952 and his retirement in 1986 he was the director of the Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County. He took active part in the organization and the further development of the institution. In the 1970s he was child protection supervisor for the Ministry of Education and participated in the training of child protection institution directors and child protection supervisors working with foster parents. He placed great emphasis on the maintenance and professionalization of the foster care system in Szolnok County. He was a coauthor of Rules and Regulations for Residential Homes, published by the Ministry of Education in 1959.

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Ede Peterdi (1923–2014) was born in Budapest, where he received teaching qualifications at the Teachers’ Training College in 1943. From 1943 to 1944 he worked as a village school teacher in northern Hungary. In 1944 he was taken to Germany as a soldier of the Hungarian Army, where he was captured as a prisoner of war. Following his return to Hungary he worked in a textile factory and from 1948 to 1949 as a school teacher in a working-class neighborhood of Budapest. In 1949 he was appointed director of the newly opened residential home for girls at Bicske in the vicinity of Budapest, where he worked until his retirement in 1988. In 1957 he became one of the first educational supervisors of residential homes in the newly introduced supervisory system in Hungary and worked as trainer of residential home teachers across the country. He published on the pedagogy of teaching in residential homes as well as on the history of the Zsuzsa Kossuth Residential Home of Bicske, and participated in the work of the International Federation of Educative Communities founded under the auspices of UNESCO in 1948. Emmi Pikler (1902–1984) was born to a Jewish family in Vienna. In 1908 her parents moved to Budapest, where she completed her primary and secondary education. Following the breakup of the Habsburg Empire she returned to Vienna where she received a degree in pediatrics at the Pirquet Clinic at the University of Vienna in 1930. The same year she married György Pikler and in 1931 her first child was born. In 1932 she returned with her family to Budapest and gave birth to a second child who died at a very young age. She was unemployed due to anti-Semitic legislation in interwar Hungary and worked for affluent socialist and communist families as a private family pediatrician. She published her first book, Mit tud már a baba? (What does the baby know already?), based on these experiences in 1940. Between 1936 and 1944 her husband was imprisoned as a member of the underground communist movement. In the 1940s she taught kindergarten education to young Jewish women excluded from educational institutions. She and her child survived the German occupation in 1944 with fake papers in hiding. Between 1945 and 1960 she worked in a child protection institution for the children of communist party members. She gave birth to another child in 1946 and the couple adopted a child in 1953. She was director of the infant home “Lóczy” between 1946 and her death in 1984.

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József Tar (1928– ) was born to a peasant family in the town of Balmazújváros in eastern Hungary but spent most of his childhood at his parents’ farm and attended a primary school for children living on scattered farms in the vicinity of the city of Debrecen. He received teaching qualifications from the Teachers’ Training College of the Reformed Church in Debrecen in 1948. Between 1948 and 1950 he worked as a teacher in elementary schools for children living on farms. Between 1950 and 1953 he completed his compulsory military service in the city of Pécs in southern Hungary and returned to elementary school teaching. Between 1954 and 1957 he was a care worker at the newly opened Children’s Home for Boys of Hajdúnánás. He served as the director of the institution between 1957 and 1974. Between 1963 and 1972 he worked as an educational supervisor of residential homes, and between 1979 and his retirement in 1989 as child- and youth-protection referent for the Council of Hajdú-Bihar County.

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INDEX

abandonment. See endangerment abortion, 37, 39–40, 84 Ádám, Zsigmond, 146–47, 215 Barna, Lajos, 155–56, 216 Bozóky, Éva, 190–200 Budapest Special Service for Child Protection, 14n, 16, 210 case files, 2, 14–16 caseworkers, 42–43, 68 and (gendered) sexual morality, 115–119, 121, 124–25, 130–34, 137 and guardianship decisions, 36, 85–87, 91n, 92, 102, 169 and paternity tests, 38 attitudes toward Roma, 12, 16, 80, 83, 94–98, 126–129, 169, 171, 208 regulatory role of, 2, 12, 13, 80, 83, 98, 108, 112, 115, 122–24, 137 role in enforcing employment, 80–93 care work/child care work and the lack of child care services, 12, 79–80, 84, 86, 98, 104 (See also child care facilities/services) and gender, 102, 108, 110 and Roma, 171 care worker/child protection worker, 215 and gender, 68–69 and the number of children supervised, 51–52, 57 means to help children, 47, 54

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child care facilities/services, 7, 41, 183, 199 and Roma, 88–89, 97 and gender, 103 childhood history of, 9–10, 17 remembering, 17–18, 141, 160, 192, 200–201 social construction of, 33, 36, 194 child protection history Australia, 75, 169–70 Hungary, late 19th to mid-20th century, 30–33 Russia/Soviet Union, 7, 42, 145, 181–82 United States, 6–7, 75, 99–100, 122, 125, 169–70 Child Protection Act of 1997, 5 child protection institutions/state children’s asylums history of, 30–32, 38 (see also child protection history) life in, 56–62 rules and regulation in, 150 system of, 41, 44–45, 50, 205–6 See also individual child protection institutions Child Protection Institution (State Children’s Asylum) of Budapest/Pest County, 14, 17, 32, 45, 48, 56–59, 68, 121, 209–10, 216–18 Child Protection Institution of SzabolcsSzatmár County, 14, 61–62, 212

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Child Protection Institution of Szolnok County, 14, 58–61, 134, 213, 218 children born out of wedlock, 1, 37–38, 70, 91, 112–118, 122 of imprisoned parents, 126, 178, 180–183, 191, 193, 195–201 wandering/vagrant, 46–47, 57, 86, 120, 130–133, 166, 213 children’s colonies, 30–32, 48, 58–62, 146 supervisors of, 69–70 children’s homes criticism against, 4–6, 8, 13, 177, 198–202 and gender segregation, 166–67, 208 and “home-building,” 156–58 life in, 62–64, 85, 104, 140–41, 145, 160–64 and overcrowding, 51–54 system of, 30, 33, 41, 44–50, 55, 57–59, 70, 78, 80, 84, 99–102, 206 Children’s Home of Bicske, 65–66, 152, 157, 162–63, 165–66, 210, 219 Children’s Home/Town of Tiszadob, 61–62, 65, 67, 139, 147, 157, 160–61, 166–69 children’s towns, 5, 49, 65, 146–47. See also Children’s Town of Hajdúhadház; Children’s Home/Town of Tiszadob Children’s Town of Hajdúhadház, 18, 146–47, 215 data sheets, 15, 115–17 delinquency/deviancy, 33–35, 84, 92, 171 and gender (see sexual morality/regulation) moral (see under endangerment) Dési-Huber, Istvánné (Mrs. István DésiHuber), 45, 57, 68, 135–36, 158, 165, 209, 215–16 Dickmann, Mátyás, 57, 216 Dobszay, László, 48, 217 Donáth, Mátyás, 189–91, 197–99

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Donáth, Ferenc, 189–90, 194, 198 education of child protection personnel, 68–69 and child protection regulations, 33–34, 38n, 41–42, 44 moral, 113–14, 137, 207 primary school, 72, 112, 139–40, 149, 206 reform school (see reform pedagogy) reformatory school (see reformatory pedagogy) and Roma, 28, 71, 73, 77, 94 education for work, 94, 139–42, 147–64, 206, 215–16 and gender, 75, 143, 160, 164–69, 207–8 and Roma, 140–41, 169–75 See also Children’s Town of Hajdúhadház; reform pedagogy; reformatory pedagogy employment, 2, 12 and women/mothers, 12, 79–80, 83, 85–86, 89–93, 96–98, 100–4, 108, 110, 136, 203 and Roma, 26–27, 29 and Romani women/mothers, 83, 96–98, 112 endangerment, 4, 6, 15, 33, 48, 146, 203 material, 33–38, 70, 89–91, 95, 206–7 moral, 33–38, 70, 86, 89–91, 93, 102, 108, 112, 116–18, 120–22, 206–7 and Roma, 94–98, 126–29 See also under police Family Act of 1952, 37–38, 70, 115–16 foster care and the child protection system, 30–32, 43, 209 history of, 5–7, 10, 178, 206, 217–18 and the residential-home-based system of care, 40, 47–50

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and Roma, 73–74 See also child protection institutions foster parents, 69–70, 126, 131 guardianship authorities (gyámhatóság) decisions made by, 94, 96 responsibilities of, 37, 41–43, 55–56, 62, 122 Guardianship Act of 1877, 33–34 Gyermekvédelmi Arcképcsarnok (Portrait gallery of child protection), 16 “Gypsy question,” the, 10, 14, 16, 18, 27–28, 71–78, 94–96, 169, 205 Hungarian Constitution of 1949, 38, 107, 115 “Hungarian Gulag,” 179–80 institutional care. See child protection institutions; children’s homes institutionalization grounds for, 33–34, 36–37, 80, 83, 85–87, 89–90, 98, 123, 130–31, 203 (see also abandonment; sexual morality/regulation) political reasons behind, 181, 195, 200 percentages of, 49, 116, 210–13 process of, 62, 68 and Roma, 3–4, 71–72, 75–78, 94– 97, 105, 169–75, 205 upon parental request, 13, 84, 99–104 See also child protection institutions/ state children’s asylums; child protection history Kádár, János, 23, 193 Kádár regime, 192 opposition to, 194 Kövecs, Béla, 55, 64–65, 161–64, 167, 172, 217 kulak (kulák), 22, 49 “Lóczy” (Lóczy Street Infant Home), 177–79, 183, 187–95, 197–202, 219

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Makarenko, Anton Semyonovich, 49, 145–46 marriage, 87n communist morality and, 110–11 status of, 117, 124, 126–27 See also Family Act of 1952 Ministry of Education, 14, 36, 40, 42, 44, 49–50, 69, 89, 113, 148–52, 218 Ministry of Health, 14, 39, 42–44, 57, 101 Ministry of Interior, 14, 22, 28–29, 33– 34, 40–41, 43, 76, 191 Ministry of Welfare, 14, 34, 41–42, 48, 65, 150, 152, 215, 217 mothers lone, 86 and employment, 12, 79, 88, 90, 92, 102, 207 (see also under employment) percentages of, 212–13 Romani, 12, 80, 83, 94, 96–98, 112, 126–29, 138, 171, 208 sexual regulation/immorality of (see sexual morality) and unemployment, 12, 80, 86, 89– 93, 96–98, 105, 118–19 Nemeshegyi, Béláné (Mrs. Béla Nemeshegyi), 68, 127–29, 171, 217–18 paid work. See employment parenting, 2, 101, 127, 170, 208 parents. See also mothers data gathered about, 116 as political prisoners, 179, 181–83, 189–91, 197–201, 203 Romani, 16, 73–76, 78, 95–97, 127– 28, 171, 173, 205, 208 requesting institutionalization (see under institutionalization) situation of, 1 working/work ability of, 7, 36, 47, 84–88, 91–93, 206 Patkós, Gyula, 60, 170, 218 pediatrics, 40, 44–45, 183

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Peterdi, Ede, 152, 155, 157, 162–63, 166, 170, 219 placement in state care. See institutionalization Pikler, Emmi, 177, 219 child pedagogy of, 183–89, 196–97 criticism of, 198–99, 201–2 police and children’s case files, 15, 93 and endangerment, 46–47, 117, 124, 131–33 foster parents’ and institution directors’ relationship to, 53, 70 and institutionalization, 55, 57 population policy, 84 pronatalism, 39 prostitution, 34, 47, 121, 125, 129–34, 136 Ratkó act, 39 Rajk, László, 22, 189, 192–93, 196–97 Rajk, László, jr., 189–97, 200–1 Rajk, Júlia, 190–97, 200 Rákosi, Mátyás, 22, 124 Rákosi regime, 22, 178–79, 189, 196, 200 criticism of, 183, 192, 202 reform pedagogy, 140 history of in Europe, 15, 140, 143–44, 183–85 history of in Hungary, 146–47, 183, 204–5 (see also under Pikler, Emmi) history of in Soviet Russia, 144–45, 184 history of in United States, 100, 188 reformatory pedagogy, 140, 153, 204 history of in Europe, 140, 142, history of in Hungary, 143 history of in the United States, 142 residential homes. See children’s homes; child protection institutions

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Roma assimilation, 13, 71–73, 78, 138, 140, 169–75 in Hungary, 3–4, 20, 25–29, 61 (see also “Gypsy question”) and “work-shyness,” 12, 74, 80, 83, 94, 96–98, 103, 105, 169, 205 See also under education; caseworkers; employment; parents Romani children, 87–88, 94–97, 169–74 ethnic identity of, 174–75 removal from parents, 75–78, 205 institutionalization of (see under institutionalization) See also under education for work Romani women, 88, 96, 104–5 and sexuality (see under sexual morality/regulation) See also under mothers sexual abuse, 119–20 sexual morality/regulation, 13, 108–14 of lone mothers, 108, 112, 115–26 of Romani women, 13, 108, 111–12, 126–29, 208 of single women, 112, 130–37 social policy committees, 42, 93, 96, 122–23 Stalinism, 9–10, 20, 22–23, 28, 110, 141, 179, 183, 192, 195, 202, 204 historiography of, 81–82, 180–82, 203–4 state children’s asylums. See child protection institutions Tar, József, 161, 166, 220 temporary care, 1, 34, 75 , 84, 130, 150, 209

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