Journalists unbowed in Cold War Hungary

Kati revisits her parents` ordeal as a correspondent in their native Hungary.

London: Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, a remarkable book — part memoir, part family quest, part history — has emerged to tell a new generation of the corrupt system that was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.Kati Marton`s revisiting of her parents` ordeal as correspondents in their native Hungary in the 1950s speaks in microcosm to the nature of socialism and the cruelty, deprivation and fear it visited upon her family, among the hundreds of millions of people in the Soviet Union and east-central Europe at the height of the Cold War.

Urbane, free-spirited and evidently fearless people, Marton`s parents are caught up in the Communist state`s machinery of power and dogma, and the story recounts how repression shaped their lives and ultimately the lives of the author and her siblings. Marton, a well-known journalist and author, records events that took place more than a half-century ago, based on her childhood recollections, interviews, archival research and the dossier on her family meticulously kept by the Hungarian secret police and now available to her. (The files are so detailed that Marton found a drawing she made as a preschooler, faithfully squirreled away by the state.) Marton`s father, Endre, and mother, Ilona, became correspondents for The Associated Press and United Press respectively at the end of the 1940s. Holocaust survivors (their Jewish background unknown to Kati Marton until adulthood), the Martons had met during World War II and spent the last years of the war together dodging Nazis and the Germans` fascist allies in Hungary. Sociable, bridge-playing and eager to mingle with diplomats and other Westerners in Budapest in the early postwar years before Communism tightened its grip, they happened onto careers as journalists in part because of their language skills. Their jobs allowed them to live stylishly above the means of ordinary Hungarians and to serve as unofficial hosts for visiting correspondents who frequented their apartment and drank and smoked late into the night, sharing gossip and tips about the goings-on of the regime. The story contains contemporary echoes because many of the choices and dilemmas that confronted the Martons have little changed. Independent journalists in many countries today are subjected to much the same pressures. They are spied upon, made to feel disloyal, subjected to regular "interviews" and work under a cloud of suspicion, intimidation, or worse. To a large or small degree, they suffer at the hands of secret services, just as the Martons became playthings of their country`s feared yet often stumbling Stalinist police apparatus, the AVO. Similarly, organizations that hire local journalists today face ethical challenges in offering support and encouragement for their work, while assuming moral responsibility for their well-being as the journalists carry out difficult and dangerous duties. In the case of Endre Marton, his managers at New York headquarters come across in letters in the book as rigid, distant and insensitive. Frank J. Starzel, then general manager of The Associated Press, refuses in 1952 to authorize $3,000 for an attempt by the Martons to be smuggled out of the country because he thought it risky and unlikely to succeed. Later, he balked at Marton`s desire to work in the United States after the family had succeeded in escaping Hungary, although eventually AP did place Marton in Washington. (Starzel, AP`s chief executive from 1948-62, died in 1994.) Endre Marton wound up imprisoned from February 1955 until August 1956, accused of handing out state secrets. Ilona was arrested four months later, with cold-hearted apparatchiks leaving Kati and her older sister, Julia, abandoned and weeping on the sidewalk in one of the memoir`s most poignant scenes. A political thaw resulted in the parents` release, reunion and permission to work again in time to cover Hungary`s ill-fated October 1956 anti-communist revolution. After the inevitable clampdown, the Martons` high profile made it expedient for the regime to let them go. They reached New York in 1957, where they collected the prestigious George Polk Award for coverage of the uprising. Hailed as heroes, the Martons embraced America. Endre Marton worked for two decades in Washington as a respected diplomatic correspondent for the AP while his wife took up a career teaching. He died in 2005 at age 95, one year after her death. Through her research, Marton comes to know her father and mother anew, discovering more than she may have wished about old foibles and indiscretions, weaknesses and moments of doubt. At the same time, she gains a new appreciation of the durability of their marriage, their love for their children and their fundamental honor. She opens a window on her own feelings about her parents, strong individuals not always easy for a daughter to live with or understand. "They are vastly more interesting, shrewder, and more complicated that I ever realized," she concludes. "And much more human." How they suffered and prevailed, set forth in this affectionate and telling book, is more than a history. "Enemies of the People: My Family`s Journey to America" carries a lesson in moral courage in journalism and in life for a new epoch. Bureau Report