Enemies of the People : My Family's Journey to America

Acclaimed journalist Kati Marton recounts her family's harrowing history of being targeted by Communist operatives and her own father's imprisonment as Cold War tensions ran high across Eastern Europe. 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. In this true-life thriller Kati Marton, an award-winning journalist, exposes the cruel mechanics of the Communist Terror State using the secret police files on her parents, as well as dozens of interviews that reveal how her family was spied on and betrayed by friends, colleagues, and even their children's babysitter. In this moving and brave memoir, Marton searches for and finds her parents and love. "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 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.

in This True-life Thriller, Kati Marton Draws On Her Skill As An Investigative Reporter To Discover Who Her Journalist Parents Really Were—-and How They Survived The Nazis In Budapest And Imprisonment By The Soviets During The Cold War.

the New York Times - Alan Furst

…a Powerful And Absolutely Absorbing Narrative Of [marton's] Parents' Journey—a Series Of Escapes, From Hitler, From Stalin, Eventually To America…has All The Magnetism And, Yes, The Excitement, Of The Very Best Spy Fiction…in The End, enemies Of The People Becomes A Treatise On Human Nature—at Its Best, At Its Worst—and Marton Is Enough Of A Good Journalist, And A Good Human Being, To Take That For What It Is: Applaud The Love And The Heroism, Deplore The Cowardice And The Cruelty, And Go On With Life.

Relates the author's eyewitness account of her parents' arrests in Cold War Budapest, Hungary, and the terrible separation that followed, drawing on secret police files to reveal how her family was betrayed by friends and colleagues Renowned author Kati Marton tells how her journalist parents survived the Nazis in Budapest and were imprisoned by the Soviets