The Count of Transylvania

Lajos and Nina Kolozhvari

There are two people on this picture thanks to whom I bear my remarkable surname: my grandfather, Lajos Kolozsvari, and my mother, Nina. When I first arrived in Budapest, I was stunned in front of a small church built in memory of those who were lost in the First World War. The bas-relief depicted a hussar falling from his horse, with God catching him like a son. I saw my grandfather in that hussar. His parents and sister never found out what had happened to him. And there is a photo where he is standing together with his beloved daughter, after spending his life abroad, behind the Iron Curtain.

On this photo this is the last time my mum and granddad were together, a year before his death. He is 73 years old in this photograph, but everyone thinks he is younger. Captured during the First World War, the 30-year-old Hungarian officer named himself in Austrian version Ludwig and claimed to be 20 years old, pretending to be a young soldier. It was only thanks to the Austrian military archives that I was able to uncover this secret, when not only he but also my mother, Nina Ludvigovna Kolozhvari, were no longer alive. In 1916, this deception saved his life, but it did not save him from Siberia and eternal longing for his homeland, where neither he nor his beloved daughter were able to go. My mother died shortly before Hungarian repatriation law came into force, which would have given her and me the right to Hungarian citizenship by direct descent from a person born in Hungary in the 19th century.

My grandfather's surname is very old; historically, it belongs to all people born in the town of Kolozsvár, now Cluj-Napoca in Romania, sometimes referred to as the capital of Transylvania.

There are famous sculptors, writers and artists in Hungary with this surname. If it is spelled with an ‘i’ at the end, it is a common surname. If it is spelled with a ‘y’, it is aristocratic. My grandfather boasted to his children that his surname was exactly that.

My grandfather was an officer, a hussar, a well-educated man who ended up in Siberia as a prisoner of war. But he didn't give up. After surviving the Gulag, he tried to build a Soviet version of a career, and for the last twenty years of his life he worked as a shoemaker — a trade he had learned in the prisoner-of-war camp. He remained convinced that people should be generous and patient, and that what is called wine in Russia is not wine at all.

Thanks to my grandfather my mum saved her understanding of herself as a European feminist woman, true dissident and free spirit, who cooked Hungarian food and raised me in the context of European culture, which, in turn, made my immigration experience much easier.

My desire is to tell the story of people who preserved their identity under the intense pressure of the Soviet state and retained their roots. This is a major problem of our time: how to preserve oneself while successfully adapting and remaining open-minded. These two familiar smiling faces remind me that we can always just be ourselves — and without that, it is impossible to be free.