Vortrag
“From Transylvania to Budapest’s Workrooms: Recollections of post-imperial Child Migration”

PD Dr. habil. Friederike Kind-Kovács hält auf der Jahrestagung der Social Science History Association (SSHA) in Chicago den virtuellen Vortrag “From Transylvania to Budapest’s Workrooms: Recollections of post-imperial Child Migration”.

Abstract:

In the proposed talk I will examine a child relief initiative in post-WWI Budapest, which was particularly aiming to relieve the capital cities’ displaced children. I tell the story of Budapest’s workrooms or “work schools”—training workshops that were set up with the financial help of the Save the Children Fund in the capital’s impoverished neighbourhoods and urban slums. The initiative aimed at empowering the city’s most disadvantaged children, especially those who had been displaced, orphaned, or neglected and were of an age that no longer allowed them to attend schools. Because school attendance in the years after the First World War was compulsory only to age twelve, children above that age missed out on proper education until they could begin to learn a trade at fourteen. In the interim, some slipped into criminality. Many of the children, aged 12-14, that attended the “work-schools” in Budapest had come from the territories that Hungary had lost due to the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, including Transylvania. In the work-schools the refugee children were provided with an elementary education and training in a handicraft. This initiative fundamentally altered the approach to “saving” Budapest’s displaced and destitute children. When, by the mid-1920s, it became clear that the situation in Hungary’s capital city, and especially of the hundreds of thousand refugees was not going to improve quickly, child relief shifted from “gratuitous feeding” to education. Mere “donations” were judged to have an undesirable effect on the children’s morale. Hence, the “work-rooms” were intended to promote children’s active participation in their own relief and long-term recovery.

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