My American Story: Kati Marton

After witnessing the arrest of her journalist parents in Soviet controlled Hungary, and tanks driving through the streets of her hometown, Kati Marton arrived in the USA on her 8th birthday.

[Kati, center,with mother Ilona and sister]

I’m a refugee. I came to America with my parents as a little kid, and had no connection or roots or history in America. No one in my family did, we were complete strangers to this land. I did not speak any English. My parents considered America to be our last, best hope. They had survived the Nazi Occupation of Hungary, which my grandparents did not survive. My grandparents perished in Auschwitz, so I have never even seen photographs of them.

[Newspaper clipping announcing the arrest of Kati’s parents in 1955]

When I was six years old, I was a witness to my parents’ arrest. They were imprisoned under false charges of being CIA agents, but their real crime was that they were good reporters covering a lot of bad news as the Soviets occupied and slowly took control of Hungary.

[One of Kati’s first English lessons was memorizing the commercial for Ipana toothpaste]

This was in the aftermath of the second World War, the 1950’s and the coldest days of the Cold War. My father was [working for the Associated Press], and my mother with [United Press International] in Budapest, which was why they had to be jailed: they were the last independent press behind the Iron Curtain. I did not see my father for two years, and my mother for a year. The worst thing was that no one talked about what happened to them, because it was a rather common occurrence for people who the government deemed to be “Enemies of the People” to disappear.

My parents were sentenced to very long prison terms. Then came the Hungarian Revolution and they were free - they went right back to work as reporters. So again they disappeared, covering the biggest story of their lives, which was the freedom fight that got rid of the Russian occupation. But that freedom lasted ten days and then the Soviet troops came back. As young a kid, I saw tanks in my hometown and strange soldiers patrolling my neighborhood.

[Kati, 10, left, with her family in Vienna, 1957]

Still, my parents did not want to leave our country until they were tipped off that they were going to be arrested again, and my mother simultaneously discovered that she was pregnant with my younger brother. They finally started making plans to escape - we had several misadventures. Over the years, my parents had spent a small fortune on guys who were going to smuggle us out of Hungary through Yugoslavia into Austria and something always happened. Finally, though, we did succeed and it was a year of such turbulence that I didn’t go to school for a whole year.

[Endre and Ilana Marton, right and center, receive the George Polk Journalism award for their work covering the Hungarian revolt shortly after arriving in the U.S. in 1957]

[After we arrived,] everybody was extraordinarily busy with acclimating ourselves. But we had nothing, I mean nothing. We came with four suitcases. My parents let my sister and I pack our own suitcase, and of course I filled mine with toys and a couple of choice and entirely impractical items of clothing. But I thought that was very sweet of my parents to let us bring something of our life and of our former homeland with us. All of which to say, we were bringing nothing to this country. We were not nuclear physicists, we were not Norweigan, we didn’t speak English, and yet we have collectively managed to live very productive lives.

My father and mother both got a bunch of journalism prizes for their work, subsequently. America really took a chance with us because we did not bring wealth, we did not bring any type of technical background. We were just very eager to Americanize. And to finally breathe easy.

[Kati, center, with her parents and sister in Hungary]

We were the modern refugee family, with the two little girls, and the pregnant mom, and the very handsome reporter dad - who soon became the Associated Press’ Senior Diplomatic Correspondent.

And my mother decided she was going to start a new career in her mid forties. She had been a reporter too, for a rival news agency, but she decided that with a little baby due and two little kids who were traumatized, which was myself and my sister, she would start a more, shall we say, conventional life as a high school French teacher.

I think [the transition] was tough for my parents, they were in their forties, middle-aged. And the toughest thing for them was the culture and the music. And we, the kids, tried to get them to listen to our music and explain why The Beatles were better than Beethoven, but they weren’t buying it. They were willing to put up with a lot, in terms of having noisey American kids, because they had a tremendous sense of gratitude about the second chance they were getting here.

[Ilana and Endre Marton in Washington D.C., 1970’s]

And these days I have to admit that as much as I miss my parents, I am kind of relived that they’re not here because this is a passage in our country that would shock them. And I can’t even imagine what they would think of the way the press is treated now and being called ‘Enemies of the People’. It’s sad to say that is a phrase that has reentered our language these days, as the press is deemed to be the enemy of the people. Only the people now are Americans. That would come as a total shock to my parents. So would the nastiness of the conversation between and among Americans, because we lived in a fairly ordinary Washington suburb where I am sure that it was roughly 50/50 Republicans and Democrats. Nobody either cared or knew who voted for Kennedy or who voted for Nixon. It was just a part of the American deal that you have your party and we were welcomed into this neighborhood.

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About the author:

Kati Marton is an acclaimed journalist and author, as well as an activist advocate for human rights and the freedom of the press. She is an award winning former NPR and ABC News Correspondent, the former chairwoman of the International Women’s Health Commission, a director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and a member of the Council on Forign Relations. Marton has published eight books, which have been translated into five languages. Her Cold War Memoir Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in 2009.