The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World

Kati Marton, award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent andbestselling author, discusses her critically-acclaimed book,  The Great
Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. As the New York Times
writes, The Great Escape “describes the crossroads where art and politics
meet, the perils of dictatorship and the horrors of war, all of it punctuated by the
frantic struggle to create the atomic bomb.”
And the New Yorker:  “Marton illuminates Budapest’s vertiginous Golden Age and the
darkness that followed…. By looking at these nine lives — salvaged, and
crucial — Marton provides a moving measure of how much was lost.”

================

In The Great Escape, Kati Marton follows nine survivors over the decades as
they flee fascism and antisemitism, seek sanctuary in England and America,
and set out to make their mark. The scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller,
and Eugene Wigner enlist Albert Einstein to get Franklin Roosevelt to
initiate the development of the atomic bomb. Along with John von Neuman,
who pioneers the computer, they succeed in achieving that goal before Nazi
Germany, ending the Second World War, and opening a new age. Arthur
Koestler writes the most important anti-Communist novel of the century,
Darkness at Noon. Robert Capa is the first photographer ashore on D-Day. He
virtually invents photojournalism and gives us some of the century’s most
enduring records of modern warfare. Andre Kertesz pioneers modern
photojournalism, and Alexander Korda, who makes wartime propaganda films
for Churchill, leaves a stark portrait of post war Europe with The Third
Man, as his fellow filmmaker, Michael Curtiz, leaves us the immortal
Casablanca, a call to arms and the most famous romantic film of all time.
Marton brings passion and breadth to these dramatic lives as they help
invent the twentieth century. 

The event is free and the public is welcome to attend.

hm 10/22/14