I’ll start with the doll, which in and of itself was absolutely nothing special. I had received it as a birthday present in May of 1956, I’m not sure from whom, maybe from everyone in the family. I had immediately grown very attached to it, despite its generic doll qualities, which were quite dull. I must have given it a name, but I can’t recall it. Made of celluloid, manufactured in Russia on an assembly line, it consisted of separate arms, legs, body and head, held together on the inside by coarse, knotted elastic bands and metal hooks. Sex indeterminate. I think the eyes could close, which would have made it somewhat special. But maybe they were painted on, always open, I’m not sure. No artificial hair, instead something moulded that was supposed to resemble hair, but without much colour. It wore clothing made of cotton that someone had found somewhere: underwear, dress, no shoes. Yes, it was very plain, but it was inconceivable that I would not have it with me where I lived, where I slept.

But somehow, inexplicably, in the chaos and anxiety of the night my mother and I left for Austria, the doll had been forgotten. I guess it was my mother who had packed our belongings, and since no-one was supposed to suspect that we were leaving for good, what we took with us had to be reduced to the bare minimum. Concerned with the essentials, she must have somehow left the doll behind. That evening, as my mother, my grandfather and I walked the two blocks to the train station at the end of our street, I had no idea that it had been forgotten.

But then, from behind us, I could hear Nana calling me by one of my nicknames: “Veruka, Veruka!” There she was, running after us. I can see her, a large woman approaching her late fifties (an ancient woman, in my seven-year-old eyes), wearing the long skirts that she always wore, and the ubiquitous lace-up leather boots that women of her age favoured, her long single braid waving from side to side as she charged down the street. She was carrying something in her hand that I knew had to be very important. As she got closer, I saw what it was.

I can’t remember what was said. I imagine there was some crying on everyone’s part. You have to understand that we had said our goodbyes before we left the house. I didn’t know when or if I would ever see her again. No-one outside the family was to know that we were leaving. I had been told not to cry or to show that I was scared as we walked down the street, to control myself, so that we didn’t look suspicious in any way. I suppose I was holding my mother’s hand, scared and numb. And then there was my Nana, running down the street with my doll. She had found it and knew that I could not leave without it. It was so wrenching to see her again, to have her physically close to me, and then to have to part from her once more.

Now, looking back, I don’t know whether I loved that doll because it was a special present, or because my grandmother thought it was so precious to me that I had to have it. From that moment, that doll was imbued with my presence in my grandmother’s heart and hers in mine.

I held that doll in my arms as we left my home in Budapest, it was tucked in our small suitcase when we walked across the border to Austria and left Hungary for good, then through the emergency housing in Vienna and the refugee camps in the foothills of the Alps, across the Atlantic by boat, landing in Quebec City and continuing on to our new home in Montreal. Eventually the doll’s clothes were lost, one of the legs cracked, and after some years the elastics inside broke and the whole doll fell apart. I wrapped all the parts in a towel and put them in a box, meaning to have the doll repaired, but when I looked for it a few years ago I couldn’t find it. Too many moves to too many different homes, I guess.

As I was writing this, I spent some hours searching for a doll like that on eBay and on Etsy but could find one that was only somewhat similar. Yet even had I found one that was exactly the same, it would not have been my original doll.

In June 2025, as luck would have it, looking through my photo albums, I found a photo of the actual doll! I am holding it in my hands, below. My cousin Péter Hidvégi, sitting next to me, is holding his doll, quite similar. It looks like the eyes of my doll were not painted on but could actually open and close.

About the Author:

Veronika (aka Vera) Kisfalvi

In the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Vera left her first home in Budapest (a little cocoon shared with her divorced mother and extended family of maternal grandparents, aunt and uncle) at the age of seven. She and her mother arrived in Montreal in late 1957, after being sponsored by her aunt. They moved in with her aunt’s extended family by marriage, sharing their two-bedroom flat on rue St-Urbain for a few months, which already housed an intergenerational group of a grandmother, her two sons and their wives, and their two newborns. They soon moved on to different quarters shared with other new arrivals, finally settling into their own apartment after her mother remarried. The doll described in this story was a constant in her life through all the moves.

Uncomfortable with the curiosity she first aroused at her school upon arriving, she was determined to assimilate as quickly as possible and learned English at breakneck speed. At home, her mother would speak to her in Hungarian, but Vera would always respond in English, typical of many immigrant families at the time. These days, she is grateful for all the memories, even if they’re sometimes a bit inexact…

Her grandparents eventually emigrated to the US in 1958 and settled in the Bronx; she could now see them relatively regularly and even went to live with them for two more years, between the ages of eleven to thirteen, when she returned to Montreal, where she has been living ever since.