WHEN WE WERE HAPPY HIPPIES

By Tom Kando

This past summer, my mother turned 100. She lives in Holland, where she is a famous photographer (see her work at www.atakando.com)

A huge celebration was held at the Kranenburgh Museum in Bergen. That museum devoted several floors to her work. The reception was attended by over 650 people, including mayors, ambassadors, celebrities, the media and our far-flung family from all over the world.

In addition, one of my mother’s photo books - Dream in the Forest (Google it) was re-published for the occasion. This book, and another one titled Calypso and Nausicaa, were created half a century ago. My twin sisters and I are the “stars” who posed for those pictures.

Back then, we lived like hippies. My single mother took the three of us on wild hitch-hiking trips across Europe in order to take those magnificent photos, in which we act out mythical tales such Homer’s Odyssey. I was 15 and my sisters were 13.

Today, many people know our family story. The Kando saga has been described in many articles and television interviews. We were refugees from war-torn Hungary, living first in Paris and then in Amsterdam. We were very poor. We hitch-hiked and led a gypsy-like life.

At my mother’s 100th birthday celebration, I delivered a speech. My main point was this: Let no one think that the Kando saga is a sob story. Yes, we were outsiders, we were bohemians, we experienced rejection and humiliation. But all in all, when my mother took us on those wild trips across the Alps, to Mediterranean beaches and to Greek temples, boy did we have FUN!

Here is part of my speech:

Each year, I give a birthday speech for my mother. Typically, I praise her for her heroic life. I mention World War Two, the Holocaust, our poverty, the struggle for survival. I remind people that Ata raised her children largely by herself, and that she overcame adversity. I remind everyone of her wonderful exotic Hungarianness and her great photos.

All these things are true and important. But today I don’t want to bore you with a rehash of the same sob story. I want to try something different.

In conjunction with Ata’s 100th birthday celebration and this great exhibition of her work, her book Dream in the Forest has just been re-published. Within her rich and diverse work, the focus this year is on that early, fairy-tale like, child-oriented work which she created in the mid-1950s.

Today, we have experts and aficionados interpreting Ata’s work. We read reviews of Dream in the Forest and Calypso and Nausicaa. We read that the photos are about the elusive boundary between childhood and an emerging adulthood, including adolescence, sexuality, etc.

  However, (to paraphrase Rose Dawson in the movie Titanic), “the reality of the experience was somewhat different.” Let me tell you how things felt to us, the children.

Let me tell you how I remember MY experience, during that chapter of Ata’s life, when these photos and these books came to fruition.

In my recollection, we were a team. A team consisting of a single mom and three children growing up in foreign lands, in great poverty.
Ata was determined that just because we were poor, her children would not be denied what many other children enjoyed. She insisted on her children’s right to go to the sea, to the beaches, to the mountains, to the exotic places usually reserved for the rich - or at least for those richer than us, which was practically everyone. By hook or by crook, she would show her children some of the world’s beautiful places. If we couldn’t afford the train, then we would just hitch-hike.

After we arrived in Paris as a bunch of Hungarian refugees aged 8 to 10, we hitch-hiked to the Atlantic beaches of the Vendée, to the Cote d’Azur in Cannes, to the Lac d’Annecy in the Alps, and elsewhere. We did this year after year.
Then, when we were in our early teens, mother undertook these photographic projects. We hitch-hiked to Austria, Switzerland, the South of Italy and other distant sites. This was the “Kando way of life.”
We camped out, we slept on beaches and on public benches in city parks and at railroad stations. We were kicked out of cafés and stopped by the police. We slept in underground bunker hotels and in beet fields. Sometimes we woke up next to piles of discarded tomatoes. Sometimes a farmer took us to his home and let us sleep in his barn.
We hitched rides with truck drivers who put us up in the open back of their trucks, where we were pelted by rain and hail, or drenched in our sweat under the blazing sun. Sometimes the truck drivers became fresh with my 13-year old sisters and with my mother. I was the 15-year old man of the family, supposed to protect the women. When Ata and my sisters resisted, we were kicked out of the truck and left stranded in the middle of nowhere.

This is not a sob story. To the contrary. We had a fantastic childhood. We had sooooo much fun. We met kids in France, in Austria, in Italy. Oh those Italian girls! Can you imagine how much I loved meeting those girls on the beaches, dancing with them at cabana clubs? Can you imagine the fun, the adventures and the freedom we enjoyed, compared to other kids?

Here was a 40-year old mother and her three children. A family trying to survive and to have some fun at the same time. For Ata, much of this may have been work. For us it was largely play. We enacted fairy tale stories, the sleeping beauty, a flute-playing shepherd, Ulysses, Calypso, Nausicaa. Sometimes we fought a little, we cried a little, we got angry at mean people. Sometimes we were too cold, or too hot, or tired, or hungry. But we were also happy, we saw beautiful things, we met beautiful people, we did exciting things. We saw mountains, glaciers, we saw how the ancient Greeks and Romans had lived, we swam in the surf, we sang and danced on Mediterranean beaches, and in Alpine chalets.
When we moved to Amsterdam, the Dutch welcomed us and helped us. And in the end, it all turned out for the best. But we were never Dutch. We were NOMADS!

These trips resulted in several beautiful books. They were the crowning achievement.. But at the time, what mattered most to us, was the experience behind these photos. And this was a wonderful and exciting experience. Ata was the director. She asked us to pose and to enact mythical characters. And in order to do this, we visited some of the world’s most beautiful spots. We hiked up and down mountain tops, we saw the Jungfrau glaciers, the Vesuvius, Pompeii, Paestum, the Amalfi coast, and more. Did we - the children - know what we were doing and where we were going? Was there a plan, as far as we could tell? Absolutely not. We were just having the time of our life. leave comment here