After years of staying away, the American-Hungarian writer Kati Marton has returned to Budapest for the premiere of a stage adaptation of her memoir Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America. The monodrama, directed by János Mohácsi and starring Erika Marozsán, opened at the Central European University's Budapest building, a setting that carries its own symbolic weight in a city where Marton's family history is deeply entwined with state repression.
Marton, a Peabody Award-winning journalist and author, had avoided Hungary for years after the government of Viktor Orbán branded her an "enemy of the people"—the same label once applied to her parents by the communist authorities. The play's premiere marks a personal and artistic reckoning with that double stigma.
A family history written in surveillance files
The memoir traces the fate of Marton's parents, both journalists who reported for American news agencies from communist Hungary. While researching their story, Marton discovered that the family's nanny had been an informant, filing regular reports on their household. The surveillance files were extensive: "I really am talking about several thousand pages," Marton said. "On every single page my parents are referred to as enemies of the people."
When her parents were imprisoned, Marton and her sister Juli were first sent to their grandparents. But the grandparents were given passports to Australia, where relatives had emigrated, and the state confiscated their flat in Buda—a common tactic of psychological pressure. Prison officials told the parents that their two small children had been left without adult supervision. Marton recalled this "cruel choreography" as a deliberate method of breaking people.
The two girls were eventually placed with temporary foster parents on the outskirts of Budapest. Marton remembers the pervasive fear: people did not dare speak about those who had disappeared, including her own parents. Former family friends never visited the girls.
The drama also encompasses a deeper silence. Marton's Jewish grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz, a fact never discussed at home. She was raised Catholic and only learned the truth about her family's origins decades later.
Marton's return to Budapest is not just a homecoming but a confrontation with history. "The communists branded my parents enemies of the people because they were well-off," she said. "When I began to reconstruct my family's story, I discovered, while reading through the thousands of pages of surveillance reports, that they probably had the thickest file in the archive."
The play has also been staged in the United States, but the Budapest premiere carries particular resonance. It comes at a time when Hungary's political climate remains tense, with independent media and civil society under pressure. Marton's own designation as an "enemy of the people" by the Orbán regime echoes the tactics of the past, a point she has made explicitly.
For audiences in Budapest, the play offers a mirror to current debates about memory, justice, and the fragility of democratic norms. As migration returns to the EU agenda and five EU states aim to open migrant return hubs, the continent is again grappling with questions of who belongs and who is cast out. Marton's story is a reminder that such labels have human consequences.
The play's run in Budapest is a testament to the enduring power of personal narrative in the face of state power. As Marton put it, "It is the play based on that book that has brought me to Budapest."
