"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 naďve 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.
