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By Gary Shaw
 SAN DIEGO—Put down the novel and pick up Enemies of the People. There’s just no good sense in reading fiction when recent history beckons in a book as compelling as Kati Marton’s latest.
Enemies of the People, My Family’s Escape to America, is the distressing tale of Marton’s heroic parents, Endre and Ilona Marton, Budapest correspondents for the Associated Press and United Press during Communist control and the Hungarian Revolution following World War II.
You may know Marton for her work at NPR and ABC News, where her former husband, the late Peter Jennings, reported and anchored. She’s now married to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. She’s written six books. Her first was Wallenberg, the 1982 biography of Raoul Wallenberg. Her fourth was A Death in Jerusalem – The Assassination by Extremists of the First Middle East Peacemaker”in 1994. Her latest, Enemies of the People, is just out from Simon & Schuster. Among many honors, she received the Rebekah Kohut Humanitarian Award from the National Council of Jewish Women in 2001. And she will address the 15th Annual San Diego Jewish Book Fair at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 4, at Temple Solel in Cardiff.
Elegant, sophisticated, fluent in many languages and secretly, or formerly, Jewish, Kati Marton’s parents were aficionados of the Royal Hungarian Opera and probably knew my grandfather, Jeno Sajo, the tenor and early radio singer who directed the acclaimed opera and served as cantor of the Great Dohany Street Synagogue, Europe’s largest. Nagypapa, my grandfather, was hunted, captured and jailed by the Nazis, probably in Budapest’s Fo Utca Prison before transfer to a concentration camp, from which he escaped to be hunted again. Endre Marton’s friends “were hunted like animals and shop windows… were tarred with the words ‘Jewish shop,’” writes Kati Marton.
“In the last months of the war, the local Hungarian version of the Nazis, the Arrow Cross, rounded up Jews and marched them to firing squads by the Danube, often working with Hitler’s envoy in Budapest, Adolph Eichmann. My parents survived. The secret police files reveal that they did so by moving constantly among their Christian friends’ homes and never wearing the yellow star (a crime punishable by death). They had fake IDs.”
The end of the war did not bring an end of repression in Eastern Europe, controlled by Stalin, and in Hungary, by Stalin’s puppet, Mátyás Rákosi, who spied on the Martons for more than a decade. Ten years after the end of the war, Marton’s parents were captured as spies by Rakosi’s AVO, the Hungarian secret police, and jailed in Fo Utca Prison in 1955 and 1956, having visited the American legation too often and having written too much about life behind the Iron Curtain. Rákosi knew and barely tolerated the Martons. Endre Marton’s “criminal” straw that broke AVO’s back was taking a copy of the Hungarian state budget for 1955 during Parliament’s budget deliberations. This would be akin to possessing a copy of the budget for Los Angeles County today. Hungary’s population then was less than 10 million. L.A. County’s today is 9.8 million.
Kati Marton and her sister were too young in the 1950s to understand what was happening to their parents, although they knew danger was near. During their parents’ imprisonment, the girls lived with a peasant family outside of Budapest. Imagine the anxiety of the girls’ poor hosts “when, periodically, an enormous, shiny black limousine rolled up in front of the overgrown garden and (American) Ambassador Christian Ravndal himself alighted. This elegant, dark suited tall figure from a universe that now seemed as remote to us as Atlantis, always brought gifts. The most memorable were identical, aqua Nylon party dresses with net petticoats stitched inside. My sister and I wore them for years.”
Another visitor to the Marton girls during their parents’ imprisonment “who trekked out to this sad suburb of Budapest was Hungary’s most famous opera star: Mihaly Szekely (who would have been a contemporary, if not an understudy, of my grandfather). He was not an intimate family friend, which made his visits even more remarkable. Was he just a very good man bent on defying the regime? He died… and today a street near the Budapest Opera is named for him, but I never saw him again after that year. (I see in the AVO files that they were constantly noting that he must be brought in for ‘questioning,’ but he was too big a star for the AVO to mess around with.) Mihaly had his own car, and he and his wife, Piroska, also came bearing gifts. Their best gift of all was taking us to the Opera.”
I am digressing from Marton’s central tale of her parents because I am so hungry to understand my own family’s escape from Hungary, and thrilled with Marton’s references to situations that resembled my family’s and to people who may have known my grandparents, father, uncle and aunt, Magda Sajo, a renown concert pianist before the war, whose exit, along with my father’s, was arranged by her lover, a diplomat in Havana.
Kati Marton writes: “In 1980, I was writing a biography of Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic Swede who had saved thousands of Hungarian Jews before disappearing into the Soviet Gulag. During the course of an interview in Budapest with a woman saved by Wallenberg, she said, quite casually, ‘Of course, Wallenberg arrived too late to save your grandparents from the gas chambers.’ That was not only the first I heard what had actually happened to my maternal grandparents, Anna and Adolf Neumann, it was the first time I realized that we were of Jewish background. When I called Papa from Budapest with news of my ‘discovery,’ he was cold. His secret had been revealed to his daughter, and he had lost control of his own narrative for the first time. It put a strain on our relationship for the next 25 years.
“For my mother, too, these topics were off limits. If I raised them, her eyes would fill with tears which would silence me. Perhaps her own guilt at having survived, and for not being able to save her own parents, partly explains her lifelong dependence on sleeping pills. Did the absence of a death certificate or any record of her parents’ actual murder in Aushwitz help her erase their memory? She never returned to Mskolc, her dingy, industrial birthplace in east Hungary, where my grandparents lived until they were sent to the death camp. I did make the trek to that unpleasant city in 2003, with my husband, and found a large synagogue, now in disrepair but intact, where my grandparents had worshipped – and from which they had begun their journey to Auschwitz. On a wall plaque, in the courtyard, among a list of Eichmann’s victims, were inscribed their names, Neumann, Anna and Adolf.
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“My discovery of our Jewish roots when I was already 30 opened a sad rift between my parents and me. I pressed for details of our history, but they considered such exploration ‘an American luxury…
“’You will never understand what it was like for us,’ he repeated. ‘It is simply beyond your comprehension. We were not Jewish. We were Hungarian. Absolutely and totally assimilated.’ I refrained from saying the obvious: Hitler and Hungarian allies did not share that feeling. But the topic was closed as far as my parents were concerned.” She never learned from her parents what they endured under Nazi or Communist rule.
After Marton’s parents died in 2004 and 2005, Marton returned to Budapest to see what she could learn. Hungarian law now allows researchers to see the AVO secret police files compiled under Communist rule. Marton was stunned by thousands of pages of secret files wheeled into the reading room in shopping carts. “It turns out that yours is one of our bigger files,” the archivist advises Marton, her heart pounding.
“All my life, my parents’ defiance of the Communists, their stubborn courage as the last independent journalists behind the Iron Curtain until their arrest, trial and conviction as CIA spies, has been at the core of our family identity. On February 25, 1955, at two in the morning, following a game of bridge at the home of the United States Military Attache, my father was abducted by six agents of the secret police. His arrest was front-page news in The New York Times. Four months later, they came for my mother. The following January, almost a year later, The New York Times, in another front-page story, reported that, ‘Entre Marton, a correspondent for the Associated Press in communist ruled Hungary, has been sentenced to 13 year sin prison for charges of espionage. His wife Ilona who worked for United Press was sentenced to 6 years. The Martons have two young daughters, Juli and Kati…’ Accompanying the article was a photograph of a handsome, elegant couple and their smiling little girls, a happy family, self contained and seemingly indestructible, on our last Christmas together in Hungary, before everything changed. Thus did I make my debut in the press, although I did not see the story until decades later.
“My parents were forward looking people. They looked back only selectively. When toward the end of his life, my father was given Hungary’s highest civilian award from the Foreign Minister of a free and democratic Hungary, he did not come to New York to receive it in person, leaving it to me to accept for him. That evening, the foreign Minister surprised me with a large manila envelope containing AVO material on Papa. My father never opened that file; he was done with all that. To him, history – at least his history – was a burden. For me, it was the beginning of my search.”
Marton’s book unfolds like a spy thriller, its pace, or maybe the reader’s excitement, picking up as the tale approaches the Martons' arrest and works through their incarceration, the phony trial, the pressure brought to bear by the American government, their release, their reunion, the Hungarian Revolution, their escape to Vienna, an exhausting flight from Munich to arrive in the United States at Camp Kilmer, N.J., followed immediately by inexplicable “New York City police escorts, with siren blaring (speeding) us up the New Jersey Turnpike to the great city across the river… It seemed as if the whole city was rushing to the Hotel Roosevelt. We made it just in time to the George Polk Award luncheon. Loud applause greeted our little family when our arrival was announced from the podium. Cameras popped in our faces, flashes blinded our sleepy eyes. Welcome to America!
“On April 4, 1957, The New York Times trumpeted our arrival: ‘Two Hungarians Get Polk News Prize – Husband and Wife Team of Reporters Honored Here for Revolt Coverage.’”
That’s not where the story ends. Amazingly, the Hungarian government continued to spy on the Martons, now living outside Washington, D.C., and tried to recruit them as spies. Suspicious, the FBI built its own file on the Martons. Hungary finally closed its file on the Martons in 1967.
Years later, Kati Marton returned to Budapest for her final research and to confront an old journalist/spy who had apparently ratted on her parents to the secret police.
“’They never asked my permission to use this information against your parents!’ he protests. ‘I would have alerted your father, had I known there was real danger. They used me. I did not think of myself as an agent,’ he says, finally, no longer able to deny the obvious fact, but clinging to his own version of it.
“I’ve had enough. I have no interest in exposing him in his own country—full of others who made similar calculations. Blame the system, I was told early on. Not the people it turned into cogs. That would have been my parents’ view of (him): insignificant. Why bother?”
She meets with her mother’s secret lover and she visits the cell in Fo Utca Prison where her father spent two years. She visits her family home, and sees that the hole in the fence she and her sister used to escape is no longer there. She is emotionally drained.
“Our final glimpses of Hungary come on the way to the airport. Our taxi passes a long motorcycle gang. They are wearing black leather and Wehrmacht style helmets. The cyclist at the front of the long line brandishes a huge banner, a version of the old Arrow Cross tricolor. Though modified in the details, the flag’s message is clear… Their faces grim, their heads under the helmets shaved, these are sullen, angry people…”
They are neo-Nazis.
And then she muses, “What if they drew up next to our taxi, asked to see our papers? How long would I remain this cool and composed? But we are at the airport. Heading home to America.”
The end? No. Chapter 20, Another Surprise: “I am back in New York after my final research trip to Budapest. A package is waiting for me on the front hall table. The return address snaps me out of jet lag: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C….”
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