Book description
"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.
“Wonderful. . . . A family story that reads like a
novel. . . . A book that is honest, frank, and true . . . recalls the
best works of Koestler and Orwell, but contained within a family
story, which remains for all its horrors, touching, life-loving, even,
in its own unsentimental way, inspirational.”
--Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
Kati Marton is the author of Enemies of the
People: My Family's Journey to America, a National Book Critics
Circle Award finalist. Her other books include The Great Escape:
Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, Hidden
Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History,
Wallenberg, The Polk Conspiracy, and A Death in
Jerusalem. She is an award-winning former NPR and ABC News
correspondent. She lives in New York City.
