Enemies of the people - Kati Marton

"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.

Kati Marton is the author of six books, including the New York Times Bestseller Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History and The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World as well as Wallenberg, The Polk Conspiracy and A Death in Jerusalem. A former NPR and ABC News correspondent and bureau chief, she is the recipient of a Peabody Award. Marton is also active in human rights, journalism, and education advocacy. In addition, she is a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, P.E.N. International, and the Authors Guild.

"A true story that is deeply moving and altogether amazing. It is a mystery story, a love story, and a walk through history." -- BARBARA WALTERS

"Kati Marton's Enemies of the People is a riveting moral tale of Communist terror and human courage that will help the reader better understand a period in European history that must be remembered." -- ELIE WIESEL

"Kati Marton's powerful and unsparing memoir is one of the great new testimonies from the Cold War era, candidly relating a version of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon as lived by one of the daughters of the resisters. I will never forget this book and neither will you." -- SEAN WILENTZ, AUTHOR OF THE RISE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

"This is an honest, bracing, unforgettable story that will change the way readers think about the middle of the 20th century in Europe. For all of what we know of places like Hungary in the Stalinist period, we know nothing until we feel it, and here we do, finally and profoundly." -- STEVE COLL, AUTHOR OF GHOST WARS AND THE BIN LADENS

"It is the rare page-turner and thriller that comes in the form of a family memoir. By sharing her family's improbable journey, Kati Marton has left her readers moved and changed, with a renewed appreciation for the freedoms -- and the family -- we cherish." -- SAMANTHA POWER, AUTHOR OF A PROBLEM FROM HELL AND CHASING THE FLAME

"Kati Marton has written a candid and courageous book about a chapter in her parents' lives that most daughters would have preferred to leave unexamined." -- LOUIS BEGLEY, AUTHOR OF MATTERS OF HONOR AND WARTIME LIES