The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World Kati Marton Simon & Schuster, New York 2006, $27, pp. 271

From Budapest to Casablanca

Susan Rubin Suleiman

Hungarians are talented, some well-known witticisms tell us. (“How does a Hungarian always manage to come out of the revolving door first, even though he entered last?”) But the Hungarian Jews that Kati Marton writes about in this engaging book were more than just talented; they were a truly extraordinary lot. Scientists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller helped steer the Manhattan Project during World War II; André Kertész and Robert Capa are icons in the history of photography; filmmaker Michael Curtiz directed the immortal Casablanca, while Alexander Korda produced The Third Man and other landmark films. And Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, the classic novel about Stalinism.

All these men were born before the first World War, during the “golden age” of Hungarian prosperity, and all were raised in Budapest, the glittering capital on the Danube that was home to much of Hungary’s Jewish population. Educated and culturally integrated, the Jews of Budapest thought of themselves as “Hungarians of the Jewish faith,” full-fledged citizens of a country they loved. In journalism, the arts and liberal professions as well as in industry and more esoteric circles of philosophy and academic thought, Hungarian Jews wielded influence that far outweighed their numbers, which never exceeded six percent of the country’s population. In Budapest, however, Jews made up one in five of the city’s residents, prompting some anti-Semites to dub it “Judapest.” Not all were secular; many practiced Neolog Judaism, somewhat akin to American Conservative Judaism. All spoke Hungarian as their native language, unlike some Jews in the provinces who carried on their lives largely in Yiddish.

This was the world that molded Marton’s subjects, all of whom, with the exception of Curtiz, came from secular Jewish families and none of whom practiced Judaism as adults. (Curtiz’s family was Orthodox; those of von Neumann and Szilard, by contrast, pushed their assimilation almost to conversion, to Catholicism and Protestantism respectively). And this was the world they left behind when the devastation of World War I and the rise of anti-Semitism made them unwelcome in their native land. Anti-Semitism was nothing new to the region, but it didn’t help that Jews comprised the leadership of the short-lived Communist regime led by Béla Kun (Kohn) in 1919.

When Admiral Miklós Horthy became Hungary’s dictator after Kun’s fall, he could easily blame the country’s problems on “Jewish Bolsheviks.” In fact, two of Marton’s subjects, Michael Curtiz (originally Kaminer and then Kertész) and Alexander Korda (whose name in Hungary was Sándor Kellner), had worked for the Kun regime as young filmmakers, and were forced to flee soon after its collapse. The others, some still in their teens or younger, left later, part of the first big wave of Jewish emigration from Hungary. They were followed after World War II by the second and third waves consisting both of Jews who had survived the Holocaust and those exiled after the failed 1956 October Revolution, the anti-Soviet uprising crushed by Red Army tanks. It was in this third wave that Marton’s parents and she herself, as a young child, fled Budapest.

Marton begins her book with an event that unquestionably changed the world—Leo Szilard’s and Eugene Wigner’s July 1939 visit to Albert Einstein in the United States that eventually led to the detonation of the world’s first atom bomb. The two Hungarian scientists, who had known Einstein in Berlin years earlier, asked him to inform President Roosevelt of nuclear fission’s potential, and to urge him to set up an American team of scientists to work on it. Szilard and Wigner took lead roles in the resulting Manhattan Project, as did Teller and von Neumann, both of whom went on to become influential cold warriors and advisers to the U.S. government after the war. Szilard, by contrast, had a change of heart as soon as the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and devoted much of the rest of his life to trying to stop the nuclear arms race. As for Wigner, he returned to his research and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

After this dramatic opening, Marton recounts the stories of these four and her five other subjects chronologically, starting with their childhoods in Budapest, moving through their years of wandering between the world wars and into the dark years of World War II, and ending with their post-war careers and deaths. It’s a challenge to tell these stories in alternating segments for each period, a bit like juggling nine balls. The result is sometimes disjointed, but the simultaneous approach does allow Marton to situate these men in the larger history of Europe and the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

We see André Kertész shooting his haunting, unorthodox photographs in Paris while Curtiz makes a highly successful group of films with Errol Flynn and Koestler works as a Zionist journalist in Palestine. Later, Robert Capa travels to Spain, where his dramatic shots of civil war led many to call him the world’s greatest war photographer. Wigner and von Neumann set up shop with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; Korda leaves Hollywood to make his name as a film producer in London; Koestler writes Darkness at Noon, and Kertész moves to New York, where he fades from the scene until he is rediscovered 20 years later. The four scientists spend the war years in Los Alamos developing the bomb and Curtiz directs Casablanca. It’s a whirlwind tour of individual lives and of history, but a compelling one.

Marton’s first-hand research included numerous unpublished materials from archives in Hungary and the United States. She has also read a great deal by and about her subjects and tells their stories in clear, highly readable prose. Necessarily, her approach lacks depth, for each one of these extraordinarily talented artists and scientists alone could be (and has been) the subject of books longer than this one. The originality of Marton’s project is that she traces all of these men’s achievements back to Budapest, though she tends to ascribe too much influence to the city’s vibrant, intellectual café culture: it takes more than that to produce genius, which some of these men clearly possessed.

These remarkable individuals were not technically of the same generation (the oldest, Curtiz, was born in 1888, while the youngest, Capa, was born in 1913), but all came of age during a great epoch and were forced by the vicissitudes of history to strike out onto the world stage. This “magical blending of opportunity and adversity,” as Marton calls it, helps explain the success of so many other European exiles of the interwar period, as well.

Ultimately, there is no definitive explanation of why these men excelled as they did. It may have been the refugees’ drive to succeed or an unusually high degree of intelligence. It may have been the special talent of Hungarians or pure blind luck. Whatever drove them, possibly all of the above and more, we must marvel at their achievements.

Susan Rubin Suleiman, a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, is co-editor of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary: An Anthology. Her new book is Crises of Memory and the Second World War.