Kati Marton

KATI MARTON, fifty-seven, speaks perfect English but doesn’t sound exactly American. The lilt in her voice, the precise intonation—even her manner of delivery—hint at her old-school European origins.

But even more classically European, she tells me, was her parents’ reaction twenty years ago when she confronted them with the secret they’d kept from her for thirty years: that they were born Jewish, and that her maternal grandparents had perished in Auschwitz.

“I called my father in Washington,” the Hungarian-born journalist and author recalls (the family had emigrated there in 1957), “and I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And his voice was quite cool. He said, ‘We came to this country determined to start new and to give you (there are three of us) a new start. We didn’t see any reason to burden you with our past. Besides, Kati, you wouldn’t understand.’”

Her mother, a French teacher and former United Press reporter, was even less forthcoming. “The subject made her well up and retreat from the room,” Marton says. “It was not possible to have a conversation on this subject. I could never say, ‘Mom, we need to talk.’ That was not our language. I said, ‘Can’t you tell me something about them?’ More imploring than demanding. And she would just tear up.”

The story begins in 1978, when Marton stumbled on her staggering discovery in the course of reporting a story. She was thirty, a rising foreign correspondent for ABC News, and living in London with her then-husband, anchorman Peter Jennings, and their two small children, Elizabeth and Christopher. She returned to her home country on assignment. “I went to do a five-part series called ‘Budapest Revisited,’” says Marton as we sip tea. “That began my reclamation of my personal history, because in the two decades prior to that time, I had hardly ever looked back. I was so busy becoming the all-American girl and fulfilling my parents’ highest expectations. I’d been very forward-looking and focused.”

Marton’s family barely escaped Hungary’s Communist crackdown in 1957, when she was eight years old. She had previously lived through two harrowing years while her parents, Endre and Ilona Nyilas Marton, were imprisoned by their government for alleged Communist activity. When they were taken away, she and her sister were sent to live with a guardian they’d never met. Once the family started anew in America, there was little talk of the past.

“It was during that trip to Budapest for ABC that I picked up the story of Wallenberg,” Marton continues. She’s speaking of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who, despite incalculable risk, saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from Adolph Eichmann’s scourge in 1944. “I passed a street named Wallenberg Street and I just had this vague recollection of hearing something about Wallenberg, so I called my father in Washington and said, ‘Tell me everything you know about him.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know too much—your mother and I were underground during the war— but here are three names of people who would.’”

Marton began to track down Wallenberg intimates all over Europe and Russia. “One day, I was doing this interview with this woman in Budapest—a friend of my father’s—who had been saved by Wallenberg, and she just very matter-of-factly said, ‘Of course, Wallenberg arrived too late for your grandparents.’” Marton knew at once that this woman was talking about her maternal grandparents, about whom she’d been told very little. “I had never seen a picture of my maternal grandparents and knew nothing about them, except that they were killed during the siege of Budapest in 1945—the last stand between the advancing Soviets and the retreating Nazis. The city was reduced to rubble by these two forces and a lot of people died, so the story that was told to me of my mother’s parents’ deaths was entirely plausible; I never had reason to question it. So when this woman said, ‘Wallenberg arrived too late for your grandparents,’ I was dumbstruck. But I thought if I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I would be disloyal to my parents; because clearly they had not seen fit to share this with me. So I didn’t ask.”

Marton had been raised Roman Catholic and pious. “I never missed Mass on Sundays as a little girl, and in fact, I had a very special relationship with the Virgin Mary after my parents’ arrest because my godmother taught me a prayer for political prisoners that I used to mutter during class and between classes. When they were released—my father after two years, my mother after one—I was sure it was because of my fervent intervention.” I tell her I read somewhere that a Madonna hung in her childhood home. “Oh yes,” she affirms. “It’s on my parents’ wall to this day.”

When she confronted her father in 1978, Marton was angry. “I was young and very judgmental,” she says. “And rather harsh in expecting them to just put everything on the table for me, which they really couldn’t do. I now understand why it was very difficult for them to talk about this, because I’ve since experienced this reluctance so many times with other people who also lived through this almost unprecedented hell: the last six months of the war in Budapest. Budapest had gotten off pretty lightly until then; everybody knew the war was over and thought they had survived the worst, but then Eichmann came in. It happened with such breathtaking speed that it left those people really in permanent posttraumatic shock. They lost their identity, they lost their status in a country where they had all of those things heretofore, particularly in Budapest.

“The middle class of Budapest was Jewish but entirely assimilated. My parents were already Christians; I don’t think my father had ever been inside a synagogue. They were already the second generation of non-observant Jews. They really thought of Judaism as a religion, not as a race. And for a while, so did the Hungarian nation and government. No question there had always been elements of anti-Semitism, but it was contained. But now suddenly it was unleashed.”

Marton stresses what an upheaval it was, for her father especially, to be suddenly stripped of his prestige, let alone his humanity. “My father was very much part of the Budapest upper-middle-class establishment. He was a fencer, graduate of the University of Budapest, Ph.D. in economics. And suddenly he was nobody: couldn’t sit on a bench or date a non-Jewish woman. And he was in his twenties and thirties when all this happened. Of course, to this day, he does not consider himself Jewish.”

These revelations left Marton feeling unmoored—and bitter that such essential information had been kept from her. “So what did I do? I wrote a novel using large chunks of my own childhood and fragments from theirs. Because this is how a writer resolves this kind of identity crisis.”

The novel, An American Woman, published in 1987, centered on a foreign news correspondent named Anna who, in the course of reporting a story, stumbles upon her Jewish past. At one point the character says, “This must be like finding out at age thirty-six that your parents aren’t your real parents.” And about her father: “He had lived a lie for her . . . He had sculpted himself into the embodiment of everything Anna thought Jews were not: aloof and indiferent to the past and to any God.”

Marton says that one of Anna’s fictional conversations with her father was taken almost verbatim from one she had with her own. The father asks, “‘Aren’t you being a little bit of a voyeur? All this vicarious dramatizing? Claiming your right to this . . . this history,’ he hissed the word at her, ‘without ever having paid a price for any of it.’”

“That was a conversation that I had with him,” she says with a nod, “and he had a point. But on the other hand, I also have a right to grandparents. I think my parents made a mistake and I think they know that.”

How did her parents react to the book? “Oh, not well at all,” Marton replies. “Not well.” I ask her to explain that feeling of being “duped,” as she described it in the novel—denied something she was entitled to. “But now I understand why,” she replies, “which I didn’t then. As incredible as it is to think that a person like me could be persecuted or that my children could be marked, that’s the world my parents wanted to shield us from and that’s the world that formed them. And they will never get over that. They’re in their nineties now—this was fifty years ago; but these people are scarred for life. No matter how successful they were here in America. What they went through in those six months . . .” She doesn’t finish.

I ask if she’s ever seen her mother mourn her parents. “No. I only saw her trauma, and her inability to talk about any of this and her resentment at my need to talk about it—as if this were not my business. This was hers. And this was hers to carry with her and grieve. I think she has guilt at having survived in Budapest, though clearly there was nothing she could have done for her parents because by this time she was in danger too. But I know for a fact that she has not slept a single night without a sleeping pill.”

Despite Marton’s distress at learning her true biography so late in life, she regrets putting it in writing. “I think if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have done the novel,” she confesses. “I didn’t expect the novel to upset them so much . . . But at the time, I was so full of the story, so full of my past. I felt that there was a discrepancy between the person I was conveying to the world and the person inside me. There was just a big, yawning gap between this successful network correspondent married to ‘The Anchor Monster’ and the mother of beautiful children, and this person who was me, who wasn’t quite sure who she was. Everyone else seemed more defined than I was, and I wanted some of that definition.”

Part of finding it was to write Wallenberg: Missing Hero—her first nonfiction book—which was the culmination of those years of following Wallenberg’s trail from Sweden to Hungary to Russia, where the man considered the quintessential savior of Jews was ultimately incarcerated, never to be heard from again. The book was well reviewed and even her parents kvelled. “They were very proud of Wallenberg,” she says, “but there was a drama associated with that book too: I had dedicated it to my grandparents. I wrote, ‘To the memory of my grandparents, for whom Raoul Wallenberg arrived too late.’ And my parents said, ‘Kati, we’ve never asked you to do anything for us, but we’re going to ask you to change that dedication because it is an infringement of our privacy.’ And so I changed it: ‘To the memory of those Hungarians for whom Raoul Wallenberg arrived too late,’ meaning my grandparents. I hated to give that up because it was going to be my very modest memorial to my grandparents.”

She said at one point that excavating her past became an obsession. “Yeah, I was pretty riled up,” she says. “I wanted details; I wanted to fill in. I had, by then, given up my childhood Catholicism, and I loved the historic aspects of Judaism and the association with so many people I admired. Although I was married to a high WASP, I always had Jewish friends. They seemed so familiar to me because Hungarian humor, culture, cuisine is all very close to me.”

She said she could celebrate her newfound heritage because she had the luxury of being safe. “I felt entirely secure in my new country, my new identity, my position here, and therefore I embraced all this. I think that for older immigrants—let’s say Madeleine Albright—it’s more threatening, because it’s not so secure here. They have to pass for something other than what they are. I remember having this conversation with Madeleine, who is, I guess, almost a generation older than me and she didn’t want to talk about it. But I couldn’t get enough of it.”

Marton’s siblings felt she was going too far. “My brother and sister were worried that I was upsetting my parents too much. ‘Why can’t we just let them be?’ You know, ‘They’ve earned their peace.’ But I’ve always been the family truth-teller. It’s not always a fun role to play,” she says with a smile, “nor is it fun for the family to have such a person.”

I ask if the rift with her parents had lasted. “Yes,” she replies. “I don’t think things were ever the same, because things can’t be. You love and need each other too much not to resume relations, but once you’ve gone through something like this, it’s the end of innocence in a way. I know that they’re not exactly what I thought they were and they realize that I wasn’t quite the ever-compliant, eager-to-please daughter who was just almost entirely invested in making them happy and proud. This was my first real act of rebellion. I was claiming my own right to something which was not in their interest. And that was a first. They were not used to me being particularly feisty.”

She says she’s been calmed by time passing and by her continuing probe into events that in many ways defined her parents’ experience. “I have since spent so much time reading and studying and talking about this whole issue, that I am infinitely more understanding and tolerant of them. Because the Hungarian Holocaust was unique, and it was uniquely terrible.”

Her relationship with her parents has shifted in the last few years because of their age and infirmity. “It’s fine now. Because I’m looking after them. I’m the caretaker. They depend on me for many things now.” (Ilona Marton died six months after we spoke—at age ninety-two.)

I find myself asking her if her parents ever said they erred in withholding the truth. “Yes,” she replies. “My mother has. She said, ‘We were wrong. Our motives were good. But we were wrong.’ You see, when my family came here in the late fifties, people couldn’t imagine that decades later, you’d go to Budapest for the weekend. The world was really divided then and we got out by the skin of our teeth. And they never wanted to look back.”

But she learned lessons from their choices that she vows not to repeat with her own children. Just the same way that her novel’s Anna doesn’t want her daughter “to fall between cultures, the way she had,” Marton has made sure her children understand theirs. They were raised as Christians— “When the kids were little and Peter cared more than I did, we used to go to the Episcopal Church”—but they know every corner of her past. “I didn’t want there to be any mysteries,” she says. “Because it’s very damaging to children to learn things late. I have taken both my children to Budapest and shown them all the sort of stations of my cross: where I lived, where my sister and I lived when my parents were arrested, where we hid during the revolution, which was the American Embassy.” (It’s where she and her husband, Richard Holbrooke, were later wed.)

I assume that when Marton hears or reads about Auschwitz, there’s a special resonance now. “It feels personal,” she affirms. “I tried watching The Pianist the other night and I just couldn’t. It’s beautiful, but it’s very, very painful in a very personal way because I’m always thinking, ‘At what point did they know what was happening to them?’ And my grandparents did push one of those postcards out from the train, which my mother got.” She’s describing one of the desperate acts Jews made in the attempt to contact family as they were deported in cattle cars. “My mother’s younger sister still lives in Budapest and she told me that they got this postcard saying, ‘We’re on our way, and the important thing is that you are safe.’”

I wonder if, when she first learned of her true bloodlines, she suddenly looked at her then-small children and thought—Marton finishes my question: “‘They’re half-Jewish’? Yes. And you know, Peter was really great about that. He thought it was wonderful and exotic. He’d not only married this Hungarian refugee, but he’d married a child of the Holocaust. I remember he went to the Middle East shortly thereafter and brought me back a ring, which I still have. It’s a coin that was minted by the first Jewish state.”

Marton did not focus her career entirely on subjects surrounding her heritage. She went on to write The Polk Conspiracy—Murder and Cover-up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk, A Death in Jerusalem: The Assassination by Jewish Extremists of the First Arab/Israeli Peacemaker, and Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History. She hosted a weekly broadcast on international affairs on National Public Radio and became chairperson of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

But the fixation still lingers. As recently as the summer of 2002, she went to visit her grandparents’ hometown of Miskolc, and wrote a forceful op-ed piece in the New York Times. “I have come to this place in search of the grandparents I never knew—or some memory of their world,” she wrote, going on to describe her frustration at not meeting any townspeople who could direct her to the old synagogue—even those who worked across the street. Finally she manages to find it.

The interior wall of the courtyard is crowded with marble plaques honoring “the innocent people” who were “deported in the most brutal and dehumanizing manner.” The language is strong, even moving. But who sees these plaques behind locked gates? Not the people in the pub across the street, not those at the McDonald’s a few blocks away, certainly not young Hungarians.

As I walk the bleak streets of Miskolc, I scan the faces of passersby. Where were you, where were your parents, what did you do before, during or after the disappearance of one quarter of your town’s population? Were your parents my grandparents’ neighbors? I feel slightly ashamed for thinking that these people share a collective guilt. But I cannot help it. The town of Miskolc has buried its past and so cannot expect redemption.

“I’m wondering if my parents wouldn’t sleep better if we would have dealt with it early,” says Marton. “But they are sort of pre-Freudian, pre-analysis; their way of dealing with pain is not to touch it. And of course we always have to remind ourselves that being who they were was life-threatening. And therefore I am much less pious and judgmental today than I was twenty years ago.”

Part of the credit for that, she says, goes to her husband, Holbrooke, whom she married in 1994. “Richard was very calming when he came into my life,” says Marton. “I was still somewhat distanced from my parents and he was then—and is now—extraordinarily respectful of them and what they stand for, and always appeals to my most generous nature in forming judgments about them. Because he thinks they’re such remarkable people who lived through the worst nightmares of the twentieth century and who emerged with grace and dignity and started new lives here. He just thought I was being too tough on them. In some ways, he’s a much less judgmental person than I am.”

I remark that it’s ironic, in a way, that she and Holbrooke are actually technically a Jewish couple. “Yes,” she says, as if the thought had never occurred to her. “Yes. If there’s such a thing as Jewish genes, we have them.”

Does she feel Jewish now? “I certainly feel that who I am has definitely been shaped by these historic experiences; I’m only one generation from that. I see things in myself: my drive, my need to keep doing good works, the fact that I can never relax. I’m very happy, I love my life, but I can never say, ‘Okay, I’ll take a year off now and have lunch with my friends and go skiing.’ I’ll never be able to do that. I think that was born of these genes. And the need to eternally prove myself worthy of my good fortune. I’m so damn lucky, and I want to—without sounding pious—I think I have a need to earn that good fortune. And whenever something really great happens to me—a good book review, or getting on the New York Times best-seller list with the last book—there’s always a little voice in me that says”—she whispers—“‘That’s for you, Grandma.’”