The Hungarian National Museum has always considered commemorating the major events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence an important part of its work. This year, we have prepared a new exhibition entitled Children of ’56 – Drawings from a student hostel in Innsbruck to mark the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution.

The exhibition centres on drawings recalling the Revolution, made by Hungarian refugee pupils at their temporary school, the Innsbrucker Ungarisches Realgymnasium, a Hungarian secondary school in Innsbruck, the capital of the province of Tyrol in Austria. In the spring of 1958, their art teacher, Sándor Török, organised an exhibition of the pupils’ work. The drawings were subsequently given to Ruth Anderson, an enthusiastic and supportive American teacher, in the hope that she could use them to raise funds for the school in the United States. Although the campaign did not succeed, she carefully preserved the drawings for forty years before giving them to the sisters Gyöngyi and Kató Somody, who had attended the school before moving to the United States. It was they who eventually brought the drawings back to Europe and donated them to the Hungarian National Museum.

The exhibition seeks to draw visitors’ attention to the many children among the more than 200,000 people who fled Hungary in 1956. Many of them arrived in Austria without their parents or any other adult accompanying them; thus, providing accommodation and schooling for them posed a considerable challenge for the country, which had only just regained its independence under the State Treaty of 1955. Substantial assistance from the free West, particularly the United States, was needed to enable Austria, by then free of Soviet troops, to cope with this task.

We do not know how many drawings the pupils made in total, but fifteen portraying events of the Revolution and a further fourteen on other subjects have survived. The drawings were made by secondary-school pupils in Innsbruck around eighteen months after the Revolution was crushed. Therefore, the works are clearly not so much sources for the events themselves as for the memory of the Revolution. We can no longer reconstruct how far the children drew on their own experiences when making the drawings. Some locations can be clearly identified, among them Felvonulási tér [Parade Square near Városliget, the City Park] in Budapest, with the boots left behind after the statue of Stalin was toppled there on 23 October 1956, and the Bridge at Andau on the Austrian–Hungarian border, which served as a lifeline for refugees. Photographs were taken at these places in October and November 1956, allowing us to show what they actually looked like.