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Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America, by Kati Marton
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ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE IS A TOUR DE FORCE, an important work of history as it was lived, a narrative of multiple betrayals on both sides of the Cold War that ends with triumph and a new beginning in America.
In this true-life thriller Kati Marton, an award-winning journalist, exposes the cruel mechanics of the Communist Terror State using the secret police files on her parents, as well as dozens of interviews that reveal how her family was spied on and betrayed by friends, colleagues, and even their children’s babysitter. In this moving and brave memoir, Marton searches for and finds her parents and love.
- Sales Rank: #237092 in Books
- Published on: 2010-10-19
- Released on: 2010-10-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review
“Powerful and absolutely absorbing. . . .Enemies of the People has all the magnetism, and, yes, the excitement, of the very best spy fiction. But would that it were fiction. . . . An honestly inspiring story.”
--Alan Furst, The New York Times Book Review
“Marton’s story is one of bravery, suffering, survival and vindication. She tells it in straightforward, lucid prose . . . carefully reported, almost clinical account of what it is like to live in a totalitarian state and how hard it is to escape from it. . . . It’s a terrific story, and Marton tells it very well.”
--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
“Wonderful. . . . A family story that reads like a novel. . . . A book that is honest, frank, and true . . . recalls the best works of Koestler and Orwell, but contained within a family story, which remains for all its horrors, touching, life-loving, even, in its own unsentimental way, inspirational.”
--Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
About the Author
Kati Marton is the author of True Believer: Stalin's American Spy; Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World; Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History; Wallenberg; The Polk Conspiracy; and A Death in Jerusalem. She is an award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent. She lives in New York City.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley The family about which Kati Marton writes is her own. A moderately well-known and exceedingly well-connected print and broadcast journalist in New York, she is a native Hungarian who lived the first eight years of her life in a country under the repressive communist rule of the dictator Matyas Rakosi. She was born in 1949, the daughter of a prominent Hungarian journalist, the Associated Press correspondent Endre Marton, and his wife, Ilona, also a journalist. They were brave people who paid for their courage by being sent to prison, leaving their two young daughters to live with a family "willing to take us in for a certain monthly sum." Marton's story, then, is one of bravery, suffering, survival and vindication. She tells it in straightforward, lucid prose -- no small accomplishment, considering that English is not her native language -- and with her emotions well under control. This is not a woe-is-me memoir of the sort so much in fashion these days, but a carefully reported, almost clinical account of what it is like to live in a totalitarian state and how hard it is to escape from it. It is much less a memoir of Marton's childhood than a joint biography of her remarkable parents. She couldn't have written it a couple of decades ago, when Hungary was still in the orbit of the Soviet Union; it was not until later that Hungarian law made it possible for her to read "my family's files, kept by the AVO -- the dreaded Hungarian Secret Police -- in its Budapest archives." Those files, "which I read and translated from Hungarian, were my primary source for the precise details of the Terror State's twenty years of near total surveillance of our family and my parents' prison torment." She had her own memories, as well as a published memoir by her father ("The Forbidden Sky," 1971) and an unpublished one by her mother, but the AVO files were the key to making this book possible. Marton made her first visit to the AVO archives several years ago. She was met by Katalin Kutrucz, head of the archives, who brought out the "hundreds of pages of our family file" and, "reading my thoughts," said: "Everybody in your circle, whether your parents trusted or did not trust them, was informing on them. That was just the way it was." It was a state that institutionalized informing as a way of life: "The main instrument of Sovietization was the AVO, which reported directly to Stalin's secret services -- the NKVD and the KGB. Set up in September 1946 (in the same elegant Renaissance palazzo where I would read my parents' files), it had seventeen divisions, each with a special function. Everybody knew that the Red Army stood squarely behind the AVO, which was in effect a Soviet party within the Hungarian Communist Party. Its chief characteristic, I would learn growing up, was a brutality against which ordinary political and diplomatic actions were useless. Division One was supposed to infiltrate and control Hungarian political life, through a vast network of informers, usually recruited through intimidation. Typically, targets would be snatched from their beds late at night, and released on condition that they would become informers. This included, as I now learn, most of my family's immediate circle." The Martons were of particular interest to the AVO because of Endre and Ilona's high positions in Budapest journalistic circles and because they were especially close to many people in the American legation there. Endre was "a fully accredited, full-time AP correspondent" while Ilona had "a similar post from the rival United Press": "My mother was a sharp observer and a witty commentator," but "she was no writer," so "unbeknownst to the wire services, my father was filing for both AP and UP." Both had "barely survived the Nazis" in World War II, yet they were not cowed by the experience: "When the Communists took over Hungary, my parents brazenly and openly aligned themselves with the new Enemy: the Americans. How could they have taken such risks? Having outwitted the [Nazis], were they swollen with a sense of immortality? Or did they just want to enjoy life again? They were still in their thirties, full of unspent vitality, and suddenly sought after by American and British diplomats and journalists, who had come to witness the Sovietization of this unfortunate corner of Central Europe. Their English was good and their manners and bridge game even better. Having such 'powerful' friends may have given my parents a sense of invulnerability. After the stigma of being Jews in an anti-Semitic society, what a balm that must have been." They were very good at what they did. "Your mother and father were indispensable," an American journalist told Marton. "They gave us leads that we didn't have. They were models of what journalists should be under difficult circumstances. They were bright, and had such charm and such professional integrity. We had this intimate bond. We really cared about them. We knew they were on thin ice. But they just kept on reporting." The ice grew thinner as Rakosi's government gradually expelled all Western journalists, leaving the Martons, in effect, the outside world's only reliable source of information about what was going on in Hungary. Not surprisingly, Rakosi and his apparatchiks didn't like this one bit. They persuaded themselves that the Martons were involved in "espionage activities pursued by the American embassy," the next step being to arrest Endre in early 1955 and to interrogate him mercilessly for months on end. To be sure, he had been reckless in some of his dealings with the Americans, but he had done nothing to betray Hungary -- he was in fact a passionately patriotic Hungarian -- and was guilty of nothing. Yet eventually he began to feel himself guilty of something: "This is the ultimate triumph of totalitarianism: the victim who seeks blame for himself." Next to go to prison was Ilona. In due time Endre was charged with being a "permanent advisor" to the Americans, and Ilona faced the "laughable" charge of "discussing the price of eggs (and meat) with the Americans," which was "a treasonable offense in Rakosi's Hungary." Endre was sentenced to six years in prison, Ilona to three. Then, with no warning, she was released and he was pardoned, probably because of intense diplomatic pressure from the West. They rejoined the girls, reclaimed their old apartment and went to work, which in November 1956 meant covering the heartbreakingly abortive Hungarian Revolution. Endre's coverage was bold and brilliant, and when the family escaped to the United States the next year he was given "a special George Polk Memorial Award for 'distinguished achievements in journalism.' " That was the beginning of a long and successful American career with the AP, working out of Washington and living with his family in Bethesda -- all the while spied upon by the AVO and its agents. It's a terrific story, and Marton tells it very well. She deeply admires her parents but doesn't romanticize them or try to explain away their penchant for dangerous risk-taking. She isn't sure that either of them would like the book, as they didn't like their secrets told, but the reader surely will feel, as I do, that it is a powerful tribute to them. yardleyj@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
82 of 87 people found the following review helpful.
An Absorbing, Thrilling True Story Played on a Worldwide Stage
By Stephanie De Pue
"Enemies of the People" is the seventh book by Kati Marton, distinguished, award-winning former news correspondent for the ABC, and NPR, networks. She has previously penned New York Times best sellers Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History; and The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. She is also author of Wallenberg: Missing Hero; The Polk Conspiracy; and A Death in Jerusalem. Marton, it turns out, is the daughter of Hungarian journalists of Jewish descent. For this book, she has delved into the files of that small country's former Communist government's once awesome secret police - apparently, with 21,000 employees, that organization dominated its society as brutally as the previous East German Communist government's famous, feared Secret Police, the Stasi; and discovered the truth about a black period in her childhood, when both her parents were arrested, and in jail, charged with spying for the United States. The author also conducted dozens of interviews among her parents' former friends, co-workers, and lovers, behind the former Iron Curtain, that kept East Europe in isolation from the world.
The author was warned: "You are opening Pandora's box," when she filed to see the voluminous secret police files kept on her parents, still kept in Budapest. But she did. She discovered a lot she never knew about the pair; their anti-Nazi activities during the German occupation of World War II; their love affairs; their struggles with the Communist apparatchiks; their lives, surrounded by Communist informers, even down to her childhood French nanny.
For, make no mistake about it: the Communist apparatchiks hated her parents: they were of high bourgeois background, well-educated and -cultivated, owners of beautiful furniture and pictures, and excellent bridge players that kept them popular at the British and American embassies. They were attractive people, who knew how to dress with style and taste, were fluent in French, English and German, drove a white Studebaker convertible, the only car even remotely like it in Hungary (the authorities would seize it, paint it black, and use it as a state car after their arrest). Furthermore, they were prominent; they had good jobs, he working for Associated Press (AP); she for United Press International (UPI), its chief competitor. The Hungarians were also anti-Semitic, whether they admitted it or not, and the Martons were Jews: the writer's maternal grandparents died at Auschwitz. Finally, unfortunately, the author's parents were also arrogant; they considered themselves untouchable, due to their wealth, charm and connections; he, at least, got a little reckless.
The apparatchiks had been watching the pair a long time; finally Endre (Andrew) Marton gave them the excuse they'd been hoping for, and the Secret Police pounced, charged the pair with spying, leaving their two little girls crying alone in the street. The girls were eventually fostered out (the government had been intending to seize and institutionalize them, at one of their propaganda mills/orphanages). However, family connections were able to find and pay a foster family; these same connections were finally able to effect the freeing of the pair, and the family's departure from Hungary, to the greener, safer shores of suburban Washington, D.C. There Andrew Marton achieved the exalted status of AP's Chief State Department Correspondent. And the Hungarian Communist government continued to pursue the pair, hoping, unrealistically enough, to turn them into pro-Hungarian spies.
It's an absorbing, thrilling true story, played on a world-wide stage, among people it's easy to like; yet it's an important first-person historical document, written by an eyewitness: the Marton family continues its record of high achievement. Well, I am told that, years ago, a sign hung in the commissary of that Hollywood dream factory, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): "It isn't enough to be Hungarian. You must also work." The Martons, it appears, like many others of those legions of talented Hungarian Jews who came over here, nine of which Marton wrote about in her previous book, did, and do.
Funny, willy-nilly, I am what's known around New York and environs as a red diaper baby, the daughter of Reds with more naïve aspirations than sense, and, if nothing else, was raised in a politically-aware household. Even as a small child, I was aware of World War II, and the post-war Russian invasion and occupation of the East European countries. The 1953 death of that feared, crazed Russian tyrant, Josef Stalin, and his 1956 secret denunciation by Khrushchev, to the Russian Politburo. The 1956 Hungarian uprising and its crushing by Russian tanks. Reading Marton's account of these familiar events of our childhoods is like seeing them turned inside out, viewed from the opposite way they were viewed in the house where I grew up: I must say Marton's point of view makes more sense to me than my parents' ever did. Though my father, who was, after all, no fool, used always to tell me the Hungarians were remarkable people among East Europeans, the smartest, the best cooks; the women the most beautiful, the best-dressed, and the cleverest at utilizing some herb they'd found in the woods to beautify their skins (see Helena Rubinstein!). Seems to me that Marton's outstanding book goes to prove virtually every word.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
A Journey Full of Courage
By KATHI
Part memoir, part historical narrative, Kati Marton spins a fantastic tale of her family's courageous journey to America.
Her parents were international journalists in Budapest behind the Iron Curtain after WWII. Their reporting eventually led to them being imprisoned when Marton was a young girl. The author doesn't just relate her memories of the time, which are sometimes flawed because she was so young, she digs deeper. After her parents died several years ago, Marton began searching, obsessively as she states,for what really happened during those years. What she discovers is beyond anything imaginable. The result is a narrative filled in with historical documents, redacted goverment security files, FBI files, secret papers from Budapest and eye witness accounts of the nightmare the Martons endured. It gives readers an up close and personal glimpse of what those behind the Iron Curtain faced.
The author does a remarkable job of mixing personal observations, emotions and history. We know what she is going through as she is uncovering the hidden truths, and we know what she felt as a child when her parents just "disappeared" from her life for months. It is well balanced, thoughtful, and informative, but most of all, it is a story of a family's strength of heart that helped them survive and led them to freedom.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating Piece of Cold War History Brought to Life
By Alicia Van Hecke
This is the fascinating story of a famous Hungarian couple who were caught up in the politics of terror and paranoia that were the reality of Communist Hungary from just after World War II until the family was finally able to leave the country in 1957.
Endre and Ilona Marton (who were already survivors of World War II, especially remarkable because of their Jewish ancestry - one set of parents perished in Auschwitz) worked as journalists for the Associated Press and United Press (respectively) during the early critical days of the Cold War and were often the only line of information for "the West" present in the country. They lived in open defiance of the Soviet system and this is a detailed account of their story - based on the massive files collected by the Hungarian secret police and made available to their daughter, now a journalist herself and the author of this book. They were renowned for their excellent and honest journalism during very tough times and had much interaction with Western journalists and embassy staff - both of which brought them under intense scrutiny from the Hungarian secret police and eventually led to their arrest - leaving their children in the care of strangers for a considerable length of time.
It's really interesting to have this story told by this couple's daughter, whose own memories enhance the narrative. I'm amazed at her objectivity during the bulk of the story - the story of her family's life in Hungary. Learning the story of her parents and their journalistic integrity helps make sense of her amazing ability to not let her own feelings and biases get in the way of this important story. She skillfully weaves together a narrative based on the secret police files, her parents' own memoirs, extensive interviews with others wrapped up in the story and, of course, her own memories. The story is gripping and moving and culminates in her parents' eyewitness view of the tragic Hungarian revolution of 1956. This is a significant piece of history and a great read in its own right.
The end chapters, telling of her family's life after moving to America and her own work in putting together the story, are interesting, but don't match the quality of the rest of her book. These chapters are less objective and at times quite frustratingly emotional - both in trying to justify her parents' behavior (their humanness needs no excuse - her writing on them is perhaps better than she realizes!) and in making judgments about those, especially during their time in America, who were suspicious of them (the simpler descriptions of their thoughts and actions are more powerful when the readers are free to draw their own conclusions).
On the whole, a very powerful and worthwhile read!
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