Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, a remarkable book — part memoir, part family quest, part history — has emerged to tell a new generation of the corrupt system that was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.
Kati Marton’s “Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America” revisits her parents’ ordeal as correspondents in their native Hungary in the 1950s.
Holocaust survivors (their Jewish background unknown to Kati Marton until adulthood), Marton’s father, Endre, and mother, Ilona, met during World War II and spent the last years of the war together dodging Nazis and the Germans’ fascist allies in Hungary.
The book speaks in microcosm to the nature of socialism and the cruelty, deprivation and fear it visited upon her family, among the hundreds of millions of people in the Soviet Union and east-central Europe at the height of the Cold War.
Marton, a well-known journalist and author, records events that took place more than a half-century ago, based on her childhood recollections, interviews, archival research and the dossier on her family meticulously kept by the Hungarian secret police — and now available to her. (The files are so detailed that Marton found a drawing she made as a preschooler, faithfully squirreled away by the state.)
Sociable, bridge-playing and eager to mingle with diplomats and other Westerners in Budapest in the early postwar years before Communism tightened its grip, Marton’s parents happened onto careers as journalists in part because of their language skills.
Their jobs — each was a correspondent, Endre for the Associated Press and Ilona for United Press — allowed them to live stylishly above the means of ordinary Hungarians at the end of the 1940s. They served as unofficial hosts for visiting correspondents who frequented their apartment and drank and smoked late into the night, sharing gossip and tips about the goings-on of the regime.
Endre Marton ended up imprisoned from February 1955 until August 1956, accused of handing out state secrets. Ilona was arrested four months later, with cold-hearted apparatchiks leaving Kati and her older sister, Julia, abandoned and weeping on the sidewalk in one of the memoir’s most poignant scenes.
As an antecedent to that, Frank J. Starzel, then general manager of the Associated Press, refused in 1952 to authorize $3,000 for an attempt by the Martons to be smuggled out of the country because he thought it risky and unlikely to succeed. Starzel and his other AP managers at the New York headquarters come across as rigid, distant and insensitive, according to letters in the book.
A political thaw resulted in the parents’ release, reunion and permission to work again in time to cover Hungary’s ill-fated October 1956 anti-communist revolution. After the inevitable clampdown, the Martons’ high profile made it expedient for the regime to let them go. They reached New York in 1957, where they collected the prestigious George Polk Award for coverage of the uprising.
Hailed as heroes, the Martons embraced America. Endre Marton worked for two decades in Washington as a respected diplomatic correspondent for the Associated Press while his wife took up a career teaching. He died in 2005 at age 95, one year after her death.
Through her research, Marton comes to know her father and mother anew, discovering more than she may have wished about old foibles and indiscretions, weaknesses and moments of doubt. At the same time, she gains a new appreciation of the durability of their marriage, their love for their children and their fundamental honor.
How they suffered and prevailed, set forth in this affectionate and telling book, is more than a history. It carries a lesson in moral courage in journalism and in life for a new epoch.
“Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America” by Kati Marton (257 pages, Simon & Schuster, $26)