Stars of David (16 page)

I ask if, when he visited Auschwitz, he felt connected personally at all. “Well, two of Kati's grandparents perished in the first transports out of Hungary and she only discovered that relatively recently. Did you read her article in the
New York Times
?” I did; Marton wrote stirringly in 2002 about her journey to her ancestral village, which she said hadn't confronted its Nazi history. “I was there with her on that trip.”

So has Kati's exploration of her lineage caused him to look back at his own? “Yeah, I think it has. It's something we talk about a lot. She is kind of the anti-Madeleine in a sense,” he refers to Clinton's second secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who learned about her Jewish roots when she was in her sixties. “Some people confronted with a midlife discovery of their origins push it away,” Holbrooke says. “Others want to know more and more and more. And Kati is in the latter group; Madeleine was in the former group.”

Holbrooke's parents chose Quakerism instead of Judaism and I ask if he knows why his mother decided not to raise him as a Jew. (His father, a physician, died of colon cancer when Holbrooke was fifteen.) “You have to ask her that. But remember that she was assimilated; she wasn't raised Jewish. Hungarian and German Jews were very assimilated, much more than Eastern European Jews. And so, as I understand the story, when Hitler came to power, my grandfather called his four children in and said, ‘We're Jewish; time to go. We've got to get out of here.' He was very smart and he'd read
Mein Kampf
as a literal document, not as some kind of fantasy. And he had enough money to get the family out immediately. But when he said to them, ‘We're Jewish,' they said, ‘But Poppy, we're not Jewish; we're Catholic!'—or Lutheran, or whatever they thought they were. He said, ‘No, you're Jewish.'”

So where does that leave Holbrooke and his identity? Would he call himself Jewish? Holbrooke says with a laugh, “I don't call myself anything.”

But if someone asked him what he was?

“It depends what they ask. I'm very literal-minded. If they say, ‘What religion are you?' I say, ‘I don't go to church much—to put it mildly.' If they say, ‘What's your background?' I say, ‘Jewish.' It's no big deal. I read an article or two a long time ago that said I was trying to deny it or suppress it; that wasn't true. I never had any doubt about my background, my parents never disguised it. But I didn't go to synagogue or shul, I didn't have a bar mitzvah. My parents didn't believe in organized religion; that's why they chose Quakerism. They loved the values of Quakerism. They were humanists in the best sense of the word, which the conservatives now consider a dirty word. There was this wonderful joke, because so many of the Quakers were Jewish in background. You know the Quaker faith is called ‘The Society of Friends'? So the line was—I can't remember the setup—but the punch line was: ‘Some of my best Jews are Friends.' It's a great line.”

Although his parents did not identify as Jews, Holbrooke says their experience as refugees—his mother's escape from Nazi Germany, his father's from Stalinist Russia—informed his professional focus. “There's absolutely no question in my own mind that my involvement with refugees, starting in 1978, is related to the fact that my parents were refugees. Although my mother refuses to agree that she was a refugee; she was ‘an immigrant.'” He smiles.

“There isn't any question that people like Mort Abramowitz, who was ambassador to Thailand in the seventies, and myself, were driven in part by the fact that the U.S. had failed in its responsibilities vis-à-vis refugees in the thirties and could have saved an enormous amount of people if the State Department itself had not been as bad a bureaucracy as imaginable in dragging its feet on permitting entry into the U.S. for refugees. The then–assistant secretary of state was a virulently anti-Semitic man named Breckenridge Long. He was a terrible man. I ended up in his job, so my photograph's on the corridor along with this dreadful Breckenridge Long. So for all of us, refugees were key.”

Not just key, but formative—more so, it seems, than Holbrooke lets on to me. In June 1999, when Holbrooke testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at his confirmation hearings for the U.N. ambassadorship, CNN reported that
“an emotional Holbrooke teared up when describing his father's background as a European refugee and, unable to read the rest, he
submitted that part of his statement into the record.”

“What you want to know”—Holbrooke points a finger toward me— “is whether the fact that I came out of a Jewish background was a factor or not in who I am or what I do, and you know what?
I don't know
. It's your book. You decide. If you think it did, you can say it, and I won't disagree with you. If you think it didn't, you can say it, and I won't disagree with you. All I can say is that every single person is the combination of his or her experiences subliminally submerged and accumulated, and combined with one's DNA when one comes into a problem.”

However he feels about his Jewish DNA, Holbrooke is held up as a compassionate Jew by countless Jewish organizations that have hailed his peace efforts. He has received prizes from the World Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, Jerusalem's Hebrew University, and Yeshiva University. “Les Gelb has this great joke that they're inventing Jewish organizations to give me awards,” he says with a laugh. “Don't ask me. They invite me; I'm very proud to do it.

“But I just want to go back to my core point,” he says to me. “I've often said to people that my background made no difference to my positions. But that really is a tautological issue. You don't sit in a room and say, ‘Gee, my mother was a refugee from Hitler and my father a refugee from Stalin, two societies where anti-Semitism ran rampant, therefore I have to take a certain position on Israel or refugees.' That isn't the way it works.”

In the foyer, we can hear his wife arriving home. “I'll tell you something: Kati's story is more interesting than mine.” Kati Marton walks in, somehow managing to look modish in a track suit, clearly busy, but offering a hospitable smile as I'm introduced. “I was just saying how much more interesting you are than me,” Holbrooke tells her. “I'm going to change my clothes, but tell Kati what you're doing,” he says to me, and he urges her to relate her life story on the spot. Marton has to feel somewhat ambushed, but she's polite. “Can I just make a cup of tea first?” she asks her husband. They have an easy banter about their evening plans, and then she encourages me to follow her into the kitchen, where she puts up a kettle as her husband grabs the ringing telephone.

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.”