UC Davis sculptor Gyöngy Laky trims a tree for materials to create her art in this photo taken about 15 years ago. (Gyöngy Laky/courtesy photo)
I was born in war
Born in 1944, I remember stories told to me in my childhood about wartime in Hungary. At my family's vineyard outside Budapest, I was once left in my bassinette on the terrace when bombs were going off nearby. Everyone ran to the wine cellar to hide, forgetting I was sleeping outside. When they returned, they found me covered in black dust.
I do have some of my own memories of difficult times after the war ended. We escaped from Hungary in the fall of 1948, essentially walking across the border into Austria. My memories are all visual, but they include some bombed buildings in Vienna.
I am very fortunate. We came as refugees to the U.S. — my nuclear family intact. We had a place to run to for refuge and a place that gave us a new life. Born during that terrible war that eventually displaced us from our home and country, I am not surprised that I am so adamantly opposed to war.
‘The war piece I created … was a free-standing sculpture of the three letters spelling 'W-A-R.' Constructed of twigs, one side was light and the other was dark.’
Gyöngy Laky
Eventually I got to California and I studied at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s. Because the United States was involved in a conflict in Vietnam, war was a big topic and a fearful part of our lives as young students at the university. In our design studios on campus, I engaged in anti-war activity that mainly took the form of designing and printing posters opposing and criticizing the war.
On March 29, 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about the Iraq war at one week. It was illustrated with a photo of a man running from the fighting with his three small children about the ages of my brothers and me when we escaped from Hungary.
I found the image very poignant and kept the whole page, revulsed by what my country was doing under what seemed to me trumped-up reasons. None of the terrorists of the terrible 9/11/01 attacks on New York and Washington was from Iraq, nor did al-Qaeda have any presence in Iraq. I could not understand why we were attacking that small country. It has a population of about 20 million to 25 million people, I believe, and I knew many innocents would suffer and die.
In 2003, I was invited to participate in the Lodz Triennial in Poland, the most prestigious exhibition in my field. Though I tried, I could not turn away from my anguish about what was happening in Iraq and found myself making a piece about war. I am deeply troubled by another aspect of this war. The wars in which the U.S. has engaged since I came to America have been waged against people of color— Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Nicaragua, Panama, Afghanistan…
The war piece I created for the Lodz Triennial exhibition, now in the permanent collection of Poland's Central Museum of Textiles there, was a free-standing sculpture of the three letters spelling "W-A-R." Constructed of twigs, one side was light and the other was dark.