With this old photograph, taken sometime in 1959, I wanted to pay tribute to my father, Dezső Trombitás, and the heroes of ’56, and also to honor the memory of those young children who became orphans or half-orphans as a result of the events of ’56. Those whose fathers fell in battle, or who, like my father, Dezső Trombitás—who during the revolution escorted several Red Cross aid convoys by truck from Vienna to Hungary—were forced to leave their families behind to emigrate to the West. In front of the entrance to the Reformed parish in Komárom, as a small child left without a father, I stand proudly with the bicycle bought with dollars sent by my father—who had fled to the West—through IKKA*, wearing the little white dress sent from America, in front of the inscription left over from ’56: “Honest workers to the workers’ council.” The poem titled “Your Father Is Gone” was written by Péter Hargitai, an American-Hungarian poet and literary translator whom I met while I was serving as a cultural attaché in Washington.
Zsófia Trombitás
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*IKKA was the abbreviation for IBUSZ Foreign Trade Campaign (originally IBUSZ Foreign Trade Consumer Goods Campaign). It functioned as a unique system for distributing gifts and aid in socialist Hungary from the late 1940s until the fall of communism.
