Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America

Kati Marton

Oct 2009 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this eBook

Acclaimed journalist Kati Marton recounts her family’s harrowing history of being targeted by Communist operatives and her own father’s imprisonment as Cold War tensions ran high across Eastern Europe.

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.

In this true-life thriller Kati Marton, an award-winning journalist, exposes the cruel mechanics of the Communist Terror State using the secret police files on her parents, as well as dozens of interviews that reveal how her family was spied on and betrayed by friends, colleagues, and even their children’s babysitter. In this moving and brave memoir, Marton searches for and finds her parents and love.

Ratings and reviews

There was some sort of brittleness, some fear that she and her story wouldn't be taken as seriously as she needed it to be taken, when she was a guest on the show, which I find understandable after having read the book. Her parents were heroic in their arrogance, seeming rather American in their certainty that, because they weren't doing anything illegal, they would be safe from persecution, though it was that attitude that assured their arrests. Horrifying system of internal repression, with everyone informing on everyone else - the Hungarian enemy was within, as opposed to the North Korean enemy - so destructive to a society. Happily, the Americans in this story acted well, both in their official capacities and as generous and good-hearted people, offering the best kind of alternative to communism.

An excellent book by Kati Marton, another must read about the Holocaust and WWII. Marton has an even possessing way of writing, making this a book one doesn't want to put down.

About the author

Kati Marton is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An award-winning former NPR correspondent and ABC News bureau chief in Germany, she was born in Hungary and lives in New York City.