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Journalist shares tale of her secret Jewish roots
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By ELLEN SCHUR BROWN
Editor, Family Section
Madeleine Albright, U.S. secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, learned relatively late in life that she had Jewish forebears. So did Sen. George Allen from Virginia. Author and activist Kati Marton recounted her remarkable story of also learning as an adult that her parents had hidden their own Jewish identity.
Marton was in Cleveland last month to address National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), Cleveland Section’s 114th opening meeting, speaking on the power of first ladies and presidential marriages (“First ladies get no respect,” CJN, Sept. 26). She gave a more personal speech at a luncheon preceding the general meeting.
Marton’s parents were journalists for AP and UPI news bureaus in Budapest in the 1950s. Their coverage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution won the George Polk award … and time in jail for espionage. When Marton was 6, she lived in a group home with strangers, where she was taught to recite a special prayer for political prisoners.
After her parents’ release in the late 1950s, the family came to the U.S. as refugees. All their worldly possessions were packed into four suitcases.
Joining the “family business,” Marton became a journalist, working for National Public Radio and in the late 1970s as a foreign correspondent for ABC News. At age 30, she returned to her birthplace for a report on contemporary Hungary, “Budapest Revisited.”
Part of the news story included an investigation of Raoul Wallenberg, then a virtually unknown Swedish diplomat who helped more than 10,000 Jews escape from Hungary during the Holocaust. She did not realize how this would become part of her personal story until she interviewed a woman Wallenberg had saved by giving her a Swedish passport.
The woman matter-of-factly stated, “Of course, he was too late for your grandparents, Kati.”
To Marton’s great chagrin, the woman did not elaborate.
“I knew nothing of my personal history,” she explained. “My parents thought it was an act of kindness to tell us we were Catholic.” They revealed their Jewish roots to Marton when she confronted them. “I don’t think its a kindness to keep kids’ heritage from them,” she reflects.
Marton’s grandparents had converted to Catholicism, but were still considered 100% Jewish by the Nazis. Her parents were never religious and were hidden during WW II by Christians. Marton later learned that many Jews who lived in Budapest were saved, but roundups in the countryside happened too quickly for those Jews to escape.
Marton’s father justified the family fiction, telling her, “You will never understand what it was like and what we went through.” Marton adds, “They never believed it wouldn’t happen again.”
In 1982, Marton wrote the biography Wallenberg: Missing Hero.
She later wrote a novel about her personal discovery.
Several years ago, she took a “roots trip” with her grown children, who were not raised as Jews. They learned about the family patriarch, a village rabbi, and they were able to visit his synagogue and grave, documenting everything.
Marton’s most recent book of Hungarian history, The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, is a portrait of the cosmopolitan European country that produced them and the tragic war that ended that world.
These individuals included scientists who developed the atom bomb and artists who made beloved films like “Casablanca.” The book is a bestseller in Hungary, reports Marton, who believes that the country will never recover from what it did to its Jewish population.
Marton’s next book, yet untitled, will be a personal memoir of the Cold War based on the secret police file on her family.
Her parents’ imprisonment and sacrifice drives her to split her time between writing and her involvement as a human rights activist. Marton, the NCJW Rebekah Kohut Humanitarian Award winner, is director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which guarantees press freedom beyond our borders. She’s also active in the International Women’s Health Coalition and Human Rights Watch.
As a human rights activist, Marton concludes that America’s stature in the world “has never been this low.
“It’s hard as a human rights campaigner to say we expect the world to uphold our human rights standards,” she said. “They look at me and say, ‘Are you kidding? Abu Ghraib? Guantánamo? And you say our prisons aren’t up to (standards)???’”
Countries used to want to emulate us, says Marton, but now we’ve lost that mantle.
ebrown@cjn.org
Marton was in Cleveland last month to address National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), Cleveland Section’s 114th opening meeting, speaking on the power of first ladies and presidential marriages (“First ladies get no respect,” CJN, Sept. 26). She gave a more personal speech at a luncheon preceding the general meeting.
Marton’s parents were journalists for AP and UPI news bureaus in Budapest in the 1950s. Their coverage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution won the George Polk award … and time in jail for espionage. When Marton was 6, she lived in a group home with strangers, where she was taught to recite a special prayer for political prisoners.
After her parents’ release in the late 1950s, the family came to the U.S. as refugees. All their worldly possessions were packed into four suitcases.
Joining the “family business,” Marton became a journalist, working for National Public Radio and in the late 1970s as a foreign correspondent for ABC News. At age 30, she returned to her birthplace for a report on contemporary Hungary, “Budapest Revisited.”
Part of the news story included an investigation of Raoul Wallenberg, then a virtually unknown Swedish diplomat who helped more than 10,000 Jews escape from Hungary during the Holocaust. She did not realize how this would become part of her personal story until she interviewed a woman Wallenberg had saved by giving her a Swedish passport.
The woman matter-of-factly stated, “Of course, he was too late for your grandparents, Kati.”
To Marton’s great chagrin, the woman did not elaborate.
“I knew nothing of my personal history,” she explained. “My parents thought it was an act of kindness to tell us we were Catholic.” They revealed their Jewish roots to Marton when she confronted them. “I don’t think its a kindness to keep kids’ heritage from them,” she reflects.
Marton’s grandparents had converted to Catholicism, but were still considered 100% Jewish by the Nazis. Her parents were never religious and were hidden during WW II by Christians. Marton later learned that many Jews who lived in Budapest were saved, but roundups in the countryside happened too quickly for those Jews to escape.
Marton’s father justified the family fiction, telling her, “You will never understand what it was like and what we went through.” Marton adds, “They never believed it wouldn’t happen again.”
In 1982, Marton wrote the biography Wallenberg: Missing Hero.
She later wrote a novel about her personal discovery.
Several years ago, she took a “roots trip” with her grown children, who were not raised as Jews. They learned about the family patriarch, a village rabbi, and they were able to visit his synagogue and grave, documenting everything.
Marton’s most recent book of Hungarian history, The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, is a portrait of the cosmopolitan European country that produced them and the tragic war that ended that world.
These individuals included scientists who developed the atom bomb and artists who made beloved films like “Casablanca.” The book is a bestseller in Hungary, reports Marton, who believes that the country will never recover from what it did to its Jewish population.
Marton’s next book, yet untitled, will be a personal memoir of the Cold War based on the secret police file on her family.
Her parents’ imprisonment and sacrifice drives her to split her time between writing and her involvement as a human rights activist. Marton, the NCJW Rebekah Kohut Humanitarian Award winner, is director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which guarantees press freedom beyond our borders. She’s also active in the International Women’s Health Coalition and Human Rights Watch.
As a human rights activist, Marton concludes that America’s stature in the world “has never been this low.
“It’s hard as a human rights campaigner to say we expect the world to uphold our human rights standards,” she said. “They look at me and say, ‘Are you kidding? Abu Ghraib? Guantánamo? And you say our prisons aren’t up to (standards)???’”
Countries used to want to emulate us, says Marton, but now we’ve lost that mantle.
ebrown@cjn.org
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