Milk Sauce and Paprika: Migration, Childhood and Memories of the Interwar Belgian-Hungarian Child Relief Project by Vera Hajtó (review)

In East Central Europe, the clamor of World War I could be felt long after the war itself was over. It left the region in ruins, with entire populations on the move—migrating, fleeing, or returning home—through the ravaged landscapes of the new nation states. This fate not only struck adults; hundreds of thousands of children were left orphaned, homeless, sick or ill-nourished as a consequence of the war. Especially in former Axis nations, aid was hard to come by. In Hungary, it took some years before international aid organizations took notice of the humanitarian crisis tearing up the country. In Milk Sauce and Paprika: Migration, Childhood and Memories of the Interwar Belgian-Hungarian Child Relief Project, Vera Hajtó zooms in on one of these projects initiated in the early 1920s: the aid project between Hungary and Belgium set up to care for suffering Hungarian children and thus, also, to unburden their already overstretched families in Hungary. What started out as a temporary sojourn abroad for poor and undernourished children from Budapest and the provinces soon became a migratory project that continued long after its official end date (1923–1927). In many cases, the Hungarian children remained in Belgium for years; sometimes, they stayed forever. Hajtó's book unearths the dynamics of this project and traces the deep-rooted imprints of the children's holiday program on the children who took part in it, some of whom are still alive today.

That this children's aid project touched many levels of society is apparent in the selection of source materials, which mirrors the structure of the book: part 1, on the state, builds on official records of the involved organizations, including the Catholic Church; part 2, on families, deals with letters and photographs; and part 3, on children, relies mainly on oral history interviews Hajtó conducted with the surviving child participants. These corresponding levels follow the stream from official to private, political to personal, impersonal to subjective. In the middle, at the heart of the book, is the family, reflecting Hajtó's argument that it was the family that created communities through time and space and that lifted Hungary, albeit temporarily and on a very small scale, out of its postwar isolation. Hajtó approaches the family as a non-essential, highly complex, and flexible structure, and this yields valuable insights into the way private actors negotiated the political and social realities of postwar life. Pictures of host families with "their" Hungarian children show people who actively decided that they belonged together. As Hajtó observes, "The contemporary, seemingly rigid gender, class or religious identities were often renegotiated in order to expand family structures and facilitate the children's integration and 'best interests' in the foreign environment" (21). This approach to the concept of migratory agency is one of the strengths of Hajtó's book.

It is true that the migratory perspective is rather weak in Hungarian historiography. By way of the international aid perspective, Hajtó finds a route into the somewhat clouded realm of post–World War I Hungarian history (previously explored by Friederike Kind-Kovács). The brief moments of communication that occurred between families, aid organizations, workers, and children reveal that this project was not just a humanitarian endeavor, but that Hungary hoped to better its reputation and sway international opinion to undo the harm of the Paris Peace Conference—through the bodies of its children, who, as little messengers of the amputated state, carried propagandistic leaflets across the border into new social environments. Moreover, by focusing on children, Hajtó complicates the category of "migrant," because agency and decision-making processes usually apply to the adult migratory experience. How do children experience migration? Can temporary stays also be considered migration, and do "returned children" have migratory memories? It turns out that despite the political motivations behind the project, "religious identity often dominated...