Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revelations
about the conduct and control behind the Iron Curtain are still coming up in
shocking detail. Author Kati Marton details life in Communist Hungary in her new book Enemies of the People.
Compiled using secret polices files from the Communist era, Morton
chronicled the trials and tribulations of her mother and father, two
journalists risking their lives to work for the Western press in Budapest in the period following World War
II.
Her eyewitness account includes harrowing details of her
parents' arrests, imprisonment, and torture, as well as her family's period of
separation before they were able to relocate to the United States.
"I knew it was a risky business opening up the Pandora's Box
which is the vault of the Hungarian secret police archives," she said. "I
needed to do this because whereas my parents have passed away, they had too
much history. I didn't have enough."
This is Marton's seventh book. She is best known for The Great Escape, a look into nine
scientists who fled Nazi Germany. Previously, she was also an award winning
correspondent for NPR and ABC news, among others.
Marton spoke about the book, which will be released
Thursday, at a reception at the New America Foundation, hosted by NAF President Steve Coll. Other significant attendees
including New America foreign-policy chief and editor of The
Washington Note Steve Clemons,
the new Hungarian Ambassador to Washington Bela Szombati, and her husband Special Representative for Afghanistan
and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke.
In one anecdote, Marton relayed that her childhood French
nanny was actually an informant on the family. "She was using my sister and me
to get information ... I never liked her and it turns out I was right!"
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