Tom Kando
My sisters Juliette and Madeleine and I grew up poor, in Europe. We fled from Hungary after World War Two and moved from country to country, ending up in Holland when I was fourteen.
By then, my mother was divorced and struggling to feed us and raise us by herself. Despite our poverty, she was determined to provide us with vacations and to show us Europe’s beauty. She felt that we were just as entitled to travel as rich people were.
The solution? We hitchhiked wherever we went. And did we go! Every summer, we would hitchhike to places like Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy and elsewhere.
These trips placed a heavy burden of responsibility on me. I was the oldest child and the only ‘man’ of the family. I was barely fourteen and my sisters were twelve. How could I protect them? For instance, sometimes we would get picked up by truck drivers in Germany, Italy or some other place, and they would get fresh with my mother and my sisters. Then what?
In 1956, we hitchhiked from our home in Amsterdam to the South of Italy - two thousand kilometers away! A forty-two year old mother with her three children. We carried our tent, our sleeping bags and our backpacks.
One day, we were standing on the coastal roadside outside of Viareggio in Italy, only a few feet away from the beach. We had been stuck there for several hours. The sun was setting on the Mediterranean coast, appropriately named the azure coast for its deep blue, almost purplish color. It was a warm summer afternoon with a gentle breeze blowing from the South. My mother and the three of us were taking turns at standing on the roadside and sticking out our thumbs. While two of us would be doing that, the other two could sit, read, play or have a bite.
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