Katalin Marton Lecture on “Enemies of the People, My Family's Journey to America”

On 2 March, the Open Society Archives at CEU hosted Katalin Marton, author, journalist and scholar for a public lecture based on insights from her new book "Enemies of the People, My Family's Journey to America." At the event, which took place it the central hall of the Archives, John Shattuck, President and Rector, CEU, gave opening remarks; while Istvan Rev, Director, OSA at CEU, acted as the chair and moderator.

In a movingly personal account about her background which led to the writing of the book, Katalin Marton shared her initial fears about starting to write about a topic so personal, a fear also reinforced by her friends. “You are opening a Pandora's box!”—she was warned when she filed for her family's secret police files in Budapest. As the author explained, the secret police files revealed terrifying truths: secret love affairs, betrayals inside the family circle, torture and brutalities alongside acts of stunning courage, and, above all, deep family love. In this moving memoir, 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 she and her family were pawns in a much larger game. Yet, in a strange and ironic way, Katalin Marton also admitted that the large volume of secret service documents about her parents which she read through while researching for the book, gave her an insight into the lives of her parents she would have never known, being only a child at the time.

This seventh book of the author has received acclaim from The New York Times and The Washington Post. “This book is deeply meaningful to me, as I now feel my parents have their rightful place in the Cold War scenario,—she said—and [it] is particularly good for young Hungarians who did not know those terrible years and the inhuman costs of that period. I believe that when trying to understand a historical time period, both the human elements need to be captured, history as it was lived, and the academic historian researches.”

In a lively question and answer session with the full house audience following her speech, the author gave yet more insight into her family’s true-life thriller, and exposed the cruel mechanics of communist state terror, revealing how her family was spied on and betrayed by friends and colleagues. Among the many questions from the floor, such issues were raised as how she dealt with her emotions when encountering the moving revelations in the secret police documents, how she saw the so-called “survival strategy” through the example of her parents in the New World and whether it was inconvenient for any of her family members to share their family’s history with the world.

Katalin Marton’s career has included reporting for ABC News as a foreign correspondent and National Public Radio as well as print journalism and writing a number of books. She was born in Hungary, the daughter of UPI reporter Ilona Marton and award-winning AP reporter Endre Marton. Her parents survived the Holocaust of World War II but never spoke about it. Her parents served nearly two years in prison on false charges of espionage for the U.S. and Katalin and her older sister were placed in the care of strangers. Among the many honors for their reporting on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was the George Polk Award. The family ultimately fled Hungary following the revolution and settled in the United States.