It was a day that would change her life forever. Ten years ago, in a ceremony in New York City, Kati Marton, an American journalist and author, accepted Hungary’s highest civilian award on her father’s behalf. Later that evening, the Hungarian foreign minister gave her a large manila envelope for her father containing material on him compiled by Hungary’s Communist-era secret police, AVO.
Endre Marton, Kati’s urbane and cosmopolitan dad, was one of the last independent journalists reporting from Hungary when it was under the sway of Stalinist-style communism.
Working for the Associated Press, he filed stories about political suppression that irked the authorities. His wife, Ilona, was a pest, too, being a reporter for United Press International. Their body of work would earn them the George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honours.
In 1955, he and Ilona were separately imprisoned on trumped-up charges of espionage. Being pro-western democrats whose friends included British and American journalists and diplomats, they had been under surveillance for years. The hard-line communist regime considered them “sworn enemies.”
Kati Marton, who was six years old when she witnessed their respective arrests, was placed in the care of strangers, traumatized by these events. In 1957, after the Soviet army crushed the grassroots Hungarian revolution, she and her family immigrated to the United States.
In their new homeland, Endre Marton was AP’s chief correspondent in the U.S. State Department. His wife worked as a French teacher.
Her parents, having survived the Holocaust with fake identity papers, rarely spoke about their experiences. Nor did they ever tell their two daughters, who had been baptized as Catholics, that they were in fact Jewish.
Endre Marton, stigmatized as a Jew in prewar Hungary despite his ardent assimilationist beliefs, regarded his past as a heavy burden. As a result, he left that envelope untouched on his desk.
After his death in 2005, his younger daughter, Kati Marton, opened the envelope, hoping to alleviate her trauma.
The emotionally wrenching contents documented her parents’ ordeal and the betrayals inside their family circle, whetting Marton’s curiosity. It led her to AVO’s archives in Budapest and prompted her to write Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, which was published by Simon and Schuster in a hardback edition in 2009 and republished in paperback earlier this year.
Marton, who was in Toronto last month on a brief publicity tour, said there was a disconnect between her parents’ studied silence about their ordeal under Nazism and communism and her need to know about their pain and humiliation.
“My parents were burdened by too much history,” explained Marton, whose second husband, Peter Jennings, was a prominent TV broadcaster and whose current spouse, Richard Holbrooke, is U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. “I had the opposite reaction. I did not have enough history.These forces collided.”
Marton, a former ABC television foreign correspondent who has written seven books, found out she was of Jewish descent in 1980 while writing a biography of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Someone told her that her maternal grandparents, Adolf and Anna Neumann, had been murdered in Auschwitz.
The disclosure came as a relief to Marton. “A void was filled,” she writes. “I was happy to be in possession of the truth.” By now a lapsed Catholic, Marton was proud of her Jewish heritage.
But when she called her father from Budapest with the news, he was cold, his secret having been revealed and his control of his “narrative” having been usurped. “We were not Jewish,” he declared. “We were Hungarian. Absolutely and totally assimilated.”
The revelation, she noted, strained their relationship for the next 25 years.
Jennings, the father of her two grown children, reacted quite differently. While on assignment in Israel, he bought her a ring with a Jewish motif.
Endre Marton had “complicated feelings” about being Jewish, his life choices having been shaped by anti-Semitism.
“Like so many middle-class Jews in Hungary, he was utterly secular and believed that religion was a thing of the 19th century,” explained Marton, a non-practising Jew today. “He and my mother were caught flat-footed by anti-Semitism. It was a shock to their system. As patriotic Hungarians, they thought they would be exempt from anti-Semitism.”
They were, of course, incredibly naive. Hungary, after all, was the first western nation in the 20th century to impose an official numerus clausus on its Jewish citizens.
Marton, whose book has been translated into three languages and has been bought by film producers, is of two minds about her late parents.
During her childhood, she adored and looked up to them. But after the rift drew them apart, she no longer considered them demigods.
“They would have hated my book,” she said. “All their secrets were revealed. They were not paragons of perfection, and neither am I. But they were remarkable people.”
In retrospect, she said, Enemies of the People has had a therapeutic effect on her. For years after her parents were arrested, she carried the weight of emotional scars. “I can hardly imagine a more traumatic event,” she said. “But this book has gone a long way to ease the trauma and has helped me assimilate the pain.”
