As we mark National Foster Care Month in the USA, it is both an honor and a responsibility to spotlight voices that rise from lived experience—voices that don’t just tell stories, but are the story. One such voice belongs to award-winning Hungarian-American director Klaudia Kovács, whose life and work continue to bridge continents, cultures, and generations. In this deeply personal piece, she reflects on growing up in foster care, peeling back the layers of her childhood with rare honesty and sensitivity.
Kovács, born in the historic town of Eger, Hungary, and raised within the foster system, uses this month of awareness to offer more than statistics—she offers memory, emotion, and lived resilience. Her journey from a vulnerable child in care to a bold artistic voice in Hollywood is nothing short of extraordinary. Best known for her internationally acclaimed documentary Torn from the Flag, which explores the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Cold War, she now turns the lens inward.
This article is not just about pain, but also about triumph. It maps how one young girl, against the odds, carved a path from Hungarian theater stages to the film sets of Los Angeles. It honors the unseen labor of healing and the courage it takes to build a future when your past offers no roadmap.
As a journalist who has followed Klaudia’s career and admired her integrity both on and off screen, I am moved by the vulnerability and strength woven through this piece. Her story reminds us that foster care is not only a system—it’s a formative reality for thousands of children, and a narrative that deserves attention, respect, and change.
Klaudia Kovács does not ask for sympathy. She offers perspective. And in doing so, she brings the foster care conversation out of the shadows and into the realm of art, advocacy, and humanity.
An Essay Honoring May National Foster Care Month
by Klaudia Kovács
It was a full-of-promise spring day the night the fire killed my mother, making me an orphan at the age of six. My father had been long-gone by then—avoiding all emotional, legal, and financial responsibilities. He had left me out in the cold and in foster care.
There was one person who manned up: my sweet maternal grandmother took me in but then died a few years later. Completely alone and scared, I needed my remaining relatives to protect me, but that wish proved to be too naïve.
I turned to and desperately begged my father to let me move in with him and his new wife, but instead, they requested Child Services to transfer me from foster care to an orphanage.
All this happened back in the militarily occupied Hungary that was surrounded by barbed wires at the time. After bouncing around from one well-intended but hollow foster home to another, I tried to emancipate myself at the age of 16. But it turned out there is a reason kids need solid support.
The childhood saga of home-less-ness turned into homelessness not long after I aged out of the system. All it took was a debilitating car accident and consequential loss of income. Without a caring adult providing somewhere to go, suddenly, I had nowhere to go.
Fast forward to California, where—after deciding to leave everything behind—I immigrated as a young adult. This year, when I got caught in the midst of one of the greatest natural disasters in American history: the Los Angeles wildfires, 180,000 people were displaced, 50,000 acres burned, and 12,000 buildings were destroyed.
As dangerous flames began spreading throughout the city and the evacuation orders were extended, the concerned messages I received from friends matched the severity of the catastrophe. In just a few days, I got over 700 communiqués from all over—many even offering me their home to stay. The outpouring of love by the people I have encountered over time in the USA was far greater than I ever dared to imagine.
At the same time, I received zero inquiries from the Hungarian family members who had neglected me when I was left parentless as a child.
I didn’t hear from my father and his wife, their adult children, my father’s brother (my uncle), his wife (my aunt), or their children (my first cousins). Nor have I heard from my godfather, whose very role—as per my mother’s dying wish—was to be there for me.
Not that this silence was shocking to me. Foster kids get used to being abandoned: it’s been our inhumane and painful reality.
As I was staring at the fast-approaching, blazing fire, I did my accounting:
700 is a bigger number — yet zero feels more impactful.
700 makes me look popular — yet zero makes me feel worthless.
700 is a testament to my life — but zero makes it meaningless.
Meaningless because everybody should have somebody, but when you don’t have anybody, you feel like a nobody. And nobodies don’t matter.
While we may matter to many, we don’t matter to those very humans to whom we absolutely should need to matter. And when we don’t matter to those who would make our lives matter, our lives become lifeless. Lifeless, like burned cities with black ashes that belong to the dead.
And dead we often feel! Until, if we’re lucky, death dies in us either through newfound love, family, or healing. Then and only then, we start rising from the ashes and show the world our tiny green leaves that we had the strength and courage to grow through the hard cracks of the burned soil.
Klaudia Kovács is a multi-award-winning Film & Theatre Director, and previous Oscar contender in “Best Documentary.” She is also an immigrant from Hungary and former foster child who grew up in a military occupation surrounded by barbed wires. English is her 4th language. She resides in Hollywood, California and currently is in development for her new documentary, FABULOUS FOSTERS – THE ANATOMY OF SURVIVING.
www.KlaudiaKovacs.com
