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Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
Simon and Schuster
October 2006
On Sale: October 17, 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0743261151
EAN: 9780743261159
Hardcover
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Historical | Non-Fiction
In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed author Kati Marton
brings to life an unknown chapter of World War II: the tale
of nine men who grew up in Budapest's brief Golden Age,
then, driven from Hungary by anti-Semitism, fled to the
West, especially to the United States, and changed the
world. These nine men, each celebrated for individual
achievements, were actually part of a unique group who grew
up in a time and place that will never come again. It is
Marton's extraordinary achievement to trace what for a few
dazzling years was common to all of them -- the magic air of
Budapest -- and show how their separate lives and careers
were, in fact, all shaped by Budapest's lively café life
before the darkness closed in. Marton follows the astonishing lives of
four history-changing scientists, all just one step ahead of
Hitler's terror state, who helped usher in the nuclear age
and the computer (Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Leo
Szilard, and Eugene Wigner); two major movie myth-makers
(Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca, and
Alexander Korda, who produced The Third Man); two
immortal photographers (Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz); and
one seminal writer (Arthur Koestler, Darkness at
Noon). Marton follows
these brilliant products of Budapest's Golden Age as they
flee fascism in the 1920s and 1930s en route to sanctuary --
and immortality. As the scientists labor in the secret city
of Los Alamos in the race to build the atom bomb, Koestler,
once a communist agent imprisoned by Franco, writes the most
important anticommunist novel of the century. Capa, the
first photographer to go ashore on D-Day, later romances
Ingrid Bergman and is acknowledged as the world's greatest
war photographer before his tragic death in Vietnam. Curtiz
not only gives us Casablanca, consistently voted the
greatest romantic movie ever made, but also discovers Doris
Day and directs James Cagney in the quintessential patriotic
film, Yankee Doodle Dandy. Ultimately, The Great Escape is
an American story and an important, previously untold
chapter of the tumultuous last century. Yet it is also a
poignant story -- in the words of the great historian Fritz
Stern, "an evocation of genius in exile . . . an
instructive, moving delight." An epilogue relates the
journey into exile of three members of the next generation
of Budapest exiles: financier-philanthropist George Soros,
Intel founder Andy Grove, and 2002 Nobel laureate in
literature Imre Kertesz.
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