My presentation attempts to represent a relatively unknown aspect of Cold War history, based on unique sources, which has not been analysed deeply in the history of education. The sources are interviews with children fled from Hungary to Austria between 1950 and 1954, stored in the Radio Free Europe Archive (OSA). The specific aspects of childhood memories gain highlight here, through considering possible official US goals. The result is a «(re)-ideologized childhood»: both Hungarian and US administration could only see the children through the lenses of their own political intentions. The research aims to exceed the simplifying dichotomy of resisting society vs. repressive power with these examples, showing a more complex and dynamic environment. In this situation, I am going to utilize a double, inside/outside perspective, as we can see childhood experiences from a retrospective and transformed view.

When researching everyday educational history in a totalitarian-authoritarian political system, it is difficult to find sources and narratives because of a definite state/party control over public opinion and discourses. If we see for instance the Soviet system in its «’totalizing’ environment (…) everything necessarily became political» (Johnson, 1996, 290) and even self-expression, identity making appeared in a ritualized, Party-like language using, clearly showing the overall influence of the ideology (Halfin, 2000). It is a great challenge to find sources free from the official political implications of the communist period, including personal dimension, with honest feelings and thoughts: private diaries or memories can be good options to do this (Hellbeck, 2006; Paperno, 2009). In this analysis, I am going to portray a kind of counter-ideology of Marxism-Leninism in Hungary in the 1950s, through interviews conducted with emigrant children in Austria and Germany. They fled with their families from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Their situation meant that US officials might have got insider information about the East Bloc. Usually older students were the ones delivering relevant reports on living in a communist country (Sheridan, 2016); children under 14 rarely come into a historian’s sight. I am going to focus on the memories of this age, based on the reports – two sources were over 14 at the time of interviewing, but they spoke about their previous experiences, which allowed featuring them in the study.

My main concept defined in the term of re-ideologized childhood, a typical feature of these interviews. This approach shaped by an English abstract of a Polish doctoral dissertation utilizing the Soviet idea about making a new Man (Kadikało, 2012; to the complex nature of this educating process: Kestere & González, 2021). In his summary Kadikało depicted an ideal development, which started from the early childhood, targeting children through different forms of popular culture: tales, intended values, propaganda campaigns, and content of learning, etc. An equivalent meaning to Kadikało’s ideologized childhood was the leading slogan of «struggle for hearts and minds» in the «Free World» in the bipolar 1950s (Borhi, 2016, 94-103). The reports went through different, usually unknown transformations during the interactions of the interviewer(s) and respondent(s). We cannot be sure, but we can presume that the anonymous western officials controlled these interviews. This a priori aspect and determination is a clear limitation of such analyses: after making, selecting and transcribing these narratives, an explicit counter-ideology (a re-ideologized childhood), and an anti-communist viewpoint developed by the US officials in the 1950s, on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

«Any research that involves the participation of human subjects requires considerations of the potential impact of that research on those involved» (Elliott, 2005, 134). This statement is valid to this research for multiple reasons. The US officials interrogated the children to achieve their goals (collecting every useful information, detecting the vulnerable points of the political system), and this affected both the interviewing situation and children’s narratives. From one ideology they jumped into another one, a counter-ideology. The questioners talked with the children in Hungarian: all of the transcriptions were in the original language, and only the evaluation and head-line were translated into English. In one interview, it appeared that a Hungarian newsman refugee was the interviewee, perhaps in other cases the situation was similar: a Hungarian adult might seem reliable to the emigrated people. This is a critical point, as it touches the nature of trust. Families and children had not got exact knowledge about what the consequences of the interviews would be, where the information would be utilized. Furthermore, for a historian, re-using such self-expressions raise important questions about the authenticity and origin of the documents. Many aspects have changed since the 1950s: the contexts and their interpretations, legal background, construction of the data and the accessibility. In the light of our contemporary ethical requirements, the openness of such databases does not eliminate the importance to point out these issues. The RFE Information Items in the OSA meant a convenience sampling method in my research process, as I choose the nearest available sources to answer questions (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2017, 113). The analysis followed a three-step research design: 1. Using the keyword «education», and adding two criteria to refine the results (period from 1951 to 1954, and location «Hungary»), the first database was made from the OSA. 2. In the second phase, the screening process started, with the criteria of the topic: the reports about elementary and pre-school institutions remained, the others were excluded. 3. Thirdly, a final corpus made, consisting only of ego-documents, memories of the children about their life-period under the age of 14. The inclusion criteria were the composition of the text (first-person singular) and the genre (interview). Through a chosen thematic focus point we can go deeper, contextualizing the corpus based on the research, and by showing repeatedly appearing, functional propositions and absences in the discourses, various meanings of the past emerge (Landwehr, 2008).

The main foci for the interviewers were ideological elements in schooling, the degree of incorporating them into the personality. All other topics were subsidiary, and the one-sided view restricts the complex phenomena of an individual to a politically infiltrated or free person, even in childhood. This logic was close to the communist thinking, evaluating everything from the Cold War context. Education became the space of sovietization in every bloc country (Król & Wojcik, 2017), any other issue beyond this was not considered interesting at all – either to communist officials or anti-communist US broadcasters. The different elements of narratives and interpretations were consistent and coherent in these reports and interviews, due to the mostly hidden interactions between questioners and respondents. Owing to the presuppositions on both sides, two opposite categorical systems were built, by which the world became easily understandable. From the US viewpoint, the captive nations, i.e., the communist world behind the Iron Curtain was one scheme to perceive, whilst western countries (the land of the Freedom) constituted the other side. In the Hungarian propaganda of the 1950s, the value directions naturally reversed: the Soviet Union and its allies were real friends of peace and sovereignty, and at the same time, Western Europe was imprisoned by the United States. There were different goals to collect information from the satellite countries by the Radio Free Europe: first of all, it was a special kind of monitoring, a tool to get to know the target audience in special circumstances. Refugees were their listeners, who could give first-hand experiences from a communist land. That was a second type of benefit, which was recycled in broadcasting anti-communist propaganda (Kind-Kovács, 2019). Thirdly, the US government bodies utilized these data as well: words of children under 14 became sources in the political fight of adults.

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