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A monodrama based on the novel about the family of Kati Marton, a US journalist and author of Hungarian origin, has recently premiered at the Central European University’s Budapest building.
Morton’s book “Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America”, has been adapted for the stage with Erika Marozsán in the lead role.
The story follows the fate of Marton’s parents. Both were journalists, reporting for American news agencies from communist Hungary. While researching her parents background, it emerged that their nanny had in fact been an informant, filing reports on the family.
When her parents were imprisoned, she and her sister were first taken to their grandparents. However, the grandparents were given passports to Australia so they could emigrate to relatives there. The state took away their flat in Buda, as it did with so many others.
According to Marton, this too formed part of the psychological pressure the state devised against people it had branded “enemies”. Prison officials told her parents that the two small children had been left without adult supervision; it was with this “cruel choreography” that people were broken, she recalled.
Later, Kati and her sister Juli were placed with temporary foster parents somewhere in the outskirts of Budapest. She remembers how frightened people were; they did not dare speak even about those who had disappeared, including her own parents. Former friends of the family did not come to visit the two little girls.
Learning the truth
The drama of her parents’ lives also includes the fact that her Jewish grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz, something that was never discussed at home. She herself was brought up as a Catholic and only decades later learned the truth about her family’s origins.
“The communists branded my parents enemies of the people because they were well-off. When I began to reconstruct my family’s story, I discovered, while reading through the thousands of pages of surveillance reports, that they probably had the thickest file in the archive. I really am talking about several thousand pages,” said Marton. “Because I can read Hungarian, I was able to use this material for my book, ‘Enemies of the People’, and it is the play based on that book that has brought me to Budapest. On every single page my parents are referred to as enemies of the people. For a time I too was given that label by the Orbán regime.”
The Budapest premiere was all the more special because Kati Marton had stayed away from Hungary for years after the Orbán regime branded her “an enemy of the people”, just as her parents had been branded by the communist regime.
The play based on the novel by Peabody Award-winning journalist and bestselling author was directed by János Mohácsi and has also been staged in the United States.
Kati Marton is also known for bestsellers such as “The Great Escape – Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World” and “Merkel”, about the former German chancellor Angela Merkel (original title: “The Chancellor – The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel”).