Eva Varga.Alice Xue/Courtesy of family
Eva Varga: Polio survivor. Social worker. Mother. Grandmother. Born Mar. 9, 1938, in Miskolc, Hungary; died Sept. 8, 2025, in Toronto, of complications following a stroke; aged 87.
Eva Launsky never let polio slow her down as a child and she would become a tough woman who attempted to escape a repressive country at 18 and who earned a master’s degree in her 40s in her third language. Yet she also delighted in the smallest details, such as a new bud on her favourite plant.
Eva lost her father, a Hungarian soldier, during the Second World War. During the war, Eva’s mother moved her and her younger sister, Christa, to an Austrian village for safety.
But when Eva contracted polio at 10 she was sent back to Hungary with her sister to recuperate in the care of their grandmother, as her mother had remarried. Eva would not see her mother again until the 1980s when they reunited in Australia, where her mother had moved with her new family.
Eva came of age in communist Hungary. Since her family was associated with minor nobility – pariahs to the governing party – Eva’s dreams of attending university were discouraged. Since polio affected one of her legs and she walked with a limp, it was suggested that she become a shoemaker.
This was the last straw. At 18, Eva, her fiancé and her sister got on a train to leave Hungary. At the time, travel was restricted so they naively concocted a story about a day visit out of the country.
They were caught, but got lucky. When Eva yelled at the guard that the regime wasn’t giving her a chance, the guard didn’t turn them in but found her a job at a publishing house in Budapest.
The publishing house is where she would meet Ivan Varga; she would never marry the man she escaped with.
Ivan said he was captivated when he saw an angelic petite woman with platinum blonde hair descending the staircase. But he quicky learned Eva had a spine of steel and the ability to swear like a sailor and drink him under the table.
The couple married in 1961 and his work led her to Tanzania, where Ivan got a teaching contract at the University of Dar es Salaam.
She joined him there with their six-month-old baby, Christina, named after her sister. In Tanzania, Eva would learn English and the family went on safaris in their Volkswagen Beetle.
But after four years, the Hungarian government expected them to return. Instead, they slipped onto a different plane and defected to Germany, where they lived for a year. Ivan was working as a sessional lecturer but heard that universities in Canada were hiring. At a conference, he met a professor from Queen’s University in Kingston, who encouraged him to apply.
In 1973, the family moved to Kingston and Ivan started his position as professor of sociology at Queen’s.
In Canada, Eva’s Hungarian literature and history graduate degree weren’t very useful. So she went back to school in her 40s and earned a master’s in social work at Carleton University in Ottawa. With Christina a preteen, Eva commuted between the two cities. By her example, she taught her daughter how to be driven, resilient and adapt to circumstances, no matter your age. She also taught her daughter how to cook a mean chicken paprikash and how to fill her backyard with lilacs, roses, raspberries and honeysuckle.
Eva’s degree led her to working with the Children’s Aid Society in Kingston and the North Kingston Community Health Centre as a counsellor.
When Eva retired in 2005, she moved to Toronto with her husband to help look after her new grandchild, Lexi. Throughout those years, the two of them got up to leaf-gathering adventures, cooking lessons and sleepovers in Grandma’s big bed. Eva lived to see her granddaughter head off to university.
Ivan died in 2012, after 51 years of marriage. Eva continued on as the heartbeat of the family. She looked after the little plot of land in front of her Toronto home that she had converted into an oasis of flowers, delighting in every bud that peeked out.
Christina Varga is Eva Varga’s daughter
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