"You are opening a Pandora's box," Marton was warned when she filed for her family's secret police fi les in Budapest. But her family history -- during both the Nazi and the Communist periods -- was too full of shadows. The files revealed terrifying truths: secret love aff airs, betrayals inside the family circle, torture and brutalities alongside acts of stunning courage -- and, above all, deep family love.
In this true-life thriller, Kati Marton, an accomplished journalist, exposes the cruel mechanics of the Communist Terror State, using the secret police files on her journalist parents as well as dozens of interviews that reveal how her family was spied on and betrayed by friends and colleagues, and even their children's babysitter. In this moving and brave memoir, Marton searches for and finds her parents, and love.
Marton relates her eyewitness account of her mother's and father's arrests in Cold War Budapest and the terrible separation that followed. She describes the pain her parents endured in prison -- isolated from each other and their children. She reveals the secret war between Washington and Moscow, in which Marton and her family were pawns in a much larger game.
By the acclaimed author of The Great Escape, 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.
Today on a site called The Daily Beast, I read a review of "Enemies of the People," as submitted by Marie Brenner. The review was so powerful, I wanted to immediately start reading this book. (It also made me wish I owned a Kindle for times such as this!). Biographies are among my favorite reads. I especially appreciate those which include a historical context. This account draws from newly known Hungarian secret police documents, and that definitely intrigues me. I'm also drawn by the complex family dynamics which led to the children's removal from their parents, and I want to know how author Kati Marton has since come to understand her parents and their actions. In addition, I look forward to learning from Ms. Marton about how she coped with that painful separation.
Because I saw no reviews posted for this book (just yet), I'm supplying what Marie Brenner offered which got me excited about reading "Enemies of the People." Here is her review:
"Kati Marton's Enemies of the People is a revelation. It is a tender yet unsparing portrait of her glamorous and complicated parents locked in the hell of a totalitarian state, and their escape from Hungary to America. Marton draws on hundreds of pages of newly-discovered documents from AVO, Hungary's vicious secret police, a Pandora's Box revealing little-known facts of her life.
Her parents, Endre and Ilona Marton, struggled as the last independent reporters behind the Iron Curtain. In Hungary's most repressive era, the Martons drove through Budapest in a white Studebaker convertible, honed their contacts in the American embassy and at times seemed willfully naïve to the possible dangers for their daughters. As journalists filing for the AP and UPI, the Martons' pursuit of the truth would result in their ultimate arrest and isolation from Kati and her sister Juli, farmed out to a foster family.
More than 50 years later, Marton masterfully details the betrayals of those closest to her family and the uncommon courage it took her parents to survive. "Children cannot fully know their parents," Marton writes. Enemies of the People suggests otherwise.
