Book Launch

A public lecture by the author, journalist, and scholar KATI MARTON

on insights from her new book ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

"You are opening a Pandora's box," Marton was warned when she filed for her family's secret police files 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 affairs, 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 communist state terror, 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 the 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. This work by the acclaimed author of The Great Escape 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.

Introduction: JOHN SHATTUCK President and Rector, CEU
Chair and Moderator: ISTVÁN RÉV Director, OSA ARCHIVUM AT CEU
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - 6:00 p.m.
Budapest, V. Arany János u. 32.