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Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America

The Hungarian Girl | June 11, 2010 | 0 Comments

Born in Hungary as the daughter of UPI reporter Ilona Marton and award-winning AP reporter Endre Marton, Kati Marton‘s life is inevitably steeped in history.

A distinguished career as a highly respected author and journalist, Marton has worked for ABC News as a foreign correspondent, reported for NPR, headed the Committee to Protect Journalists and has worked with the International Rescue Committee, Human Rights Watch and the New America Foundation.

In her latest book, “Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America,” she tells an intimate memoir partly based on the Hungarian secret police files of her family.

Marton details her personal discovery of who her journalist parents really were and how they survived the Nazis in Budapest and their imprisonment by the Soviets during the Cold War. She relates her eyewitness account of her family’s struggle to continue life in one of the most intolerant and brutal times in Hungary.

After the revolution failed, and thanks to the assistance of key contacts across the Iron Curtain, the family made their way to the United States, where they eventually settled down to a quiet life in Bethesda, a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C.

Here is a feature interview with Kati Marton about her book, “Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America.”

Why did you decide to write this book?

I wrote Enemies of the People in search of my own history, largely witheld by my parents. At the outset it was a personal quest. Later, when I learned the often terrifying details of my family’s story,the personal motive was joined by a sense that such a book has a historic role to play in letting the post Cold War world know what it was really like to live under that fifty year Soviet terror regime.

It must of been very difficult to read the files about yourself and your family that were kept by the secret police in Hungary. Why was it so important for you to retrieve those files?

Yes, it has been a painful process but I am both happy and relieved to have gone through with this work. We cannot move on to a bright future without assimilating the lessons of the past – both personal and historic. We must draw the lessons that Hungary’s often bloody and violent recent history teaches us – or we are destined to repeat them.

Do you have any resentment over your parents for not enclosing more about your family history?

Now that I am in full possession of my own and my country’s history, my resentment is focused on the terrible system that hounded and murdered hundreds of thousands of its own citizens and forced them into hiding their own backgrounds and made it impossible for them to live and flourish in the country they loved. The loss of those people for Hungary is impossible to calculate.

In our conversation prior to this interview, you mentioned how your parents would have approved of this glance back into the twentieth century’s heart of darkness. Can you explain this further?

Though they would not have enjoyed their secrets revealed , I think they would like the portrait of themselves as brave and honest and enterprising people. Their place in the history of the Cold War has also been assured (especially as my book will soon be a major motion picture).

What are your thoughts about Hungary today? Do you still see the same country as you did when you were a child?

Hungary is a different country today and I enjoy my frequent visits there. Every year for the last three years, the Hungarians have published one of my books and I always spend time in Budapest promoting these books. These visits have put me in touch with the new Hungary and with younger Hungarians. I am optimistic about Hungary’s future as a European democracy – though that cannot happen without an open and clear eyed acknowledgement of its terrible past.

Has writing this book given you more closure about some of the difficult issues of your family’s history?

Yes, definitely. I feel closer than ever to my parents, and feel that through the Hungarian Secret Police’s relentless 20 year surveillance of them I have a far deeper understanding of my parents and, in a way, though the AVO was one of the worst 20th century institutions – its files have helped me to recapture my own childhood and personal history.