A Miraculous Journey

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

At the age of 14, Matilda Eagen found herself beside a barbed wire fence
that separated Hungary from Austria. When a soldier challenged her, she
said she was going to Canada to see her grandfather. The time was that
of the Hungarian Revolution in the 1950s, when many Hungarians left
their country to escape the Russians. This book is the first-person
account of how one child made it to Canada, with the help of many
strangers.

The foreword and “Questions and Answers” that surround the short
chapters of the main text speak clearly of the author’s belief in a
Spiritual Being and human spiritual guides who watch over her life. The
story itself gives us the plain facts: after losing her parents, she was
housed by a sister who hated her; taken through the border by a soldier
to a farmhouse where she was washed, dressed, and fed; passed on to a
refugee camp where she had her first shower; befriended by a childless
couple named Mary and Joseph; then sent on to a convent in Vienna and
the kindly Sister Theresa until her relatives in Canada were traced and
an uncle sponsored her flight to Canada. Everywhere people were kind,
several young men were protective, and in the New York airport a pilot
talked to her and walked her on to her plane for Toronto.

In Canada, she was resented by the aunt whose house she invaded but
eventually worked for a woman who helped her to train as a hairdresser.
“All my life,” she writes, ‘“relatives hurt me, strangers helped
me.” This short and simply told tale embraces a history we must never
forget, the plight of refugees, and a mystery that lies in our own
perception—whether we are moved by the kindness of strangers or by the
power of spiritual guidance.

The prologue gives a short description of Hungarian history. The book
also includes a few black-and-white photos, maps, and the author’s own
drawing of her home town, Mosonszolnok.