History:In the first quarter of the 20th century, the brave and beautiful city of Budapest produced a unique group of men - nine in all - each of whom made an indelible mark in their chosen fields and whose work in the areas of literature, science, film and photography set a standard that could never be matched, largely because they were venturing into areas that had hitherto not even been considered possible.
Their stories - they include Arthur Koestler, Robert Capa and Alexander Korda - are narrated here by New York-based writer and journalist Kati Marton, whose own family came from Budapest. In the narrative is mirrored the city's own story of political upheavals allied to moments of darkest inhumanity, for the nine men are linked by their Jewish backgrounds and by the fact that they were all forced to flee the beginnings, in their beloved Hungary, of anti-Semitism, Nazi terrorism, the stranglehold of fascism and the straitjacket of communism.
Many of their survival strategies were similar. The first thing you did, when anti-Semitism loomed, was to change your name from a Jewish-sounding one to a Hungarian-sounding one.
Andy Grove, founder of Intel, started life as Andras Grof but changed to the more Slavic-sounding Andras Malesevic. By the time he had evaded the Nazis and reached New York, he was Andy Grove.
Budapest had been a cosmopolitan city of cafe society and conversation and for the children of the newly arrived tradesmen who made good, the transformation from trade to bourgeois status was swift and financially rewarding. Ambitious parents devoted themselves to the education of their sons and were rewarded: of the nine men, five became scientists who went on to lay down the ground rules for both the atomic and the computerised age, the former with disastrous results.
Leo Sziland, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller all went to work in the US on the Manhattan Project which spawned the A bomb. Only Sziland expressed real concern about what they had unleashed on the world. Later, during the McCarthy era, Edward Teller worked strenuously and maliciously to denounce Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project and Teller's former boss and though his colleagues were unhappy about this, they chose to remain friends with him because of their shared background.
The standard escape route from Budapest was Vienna, Berlin, Paris and New York. For some, there was one more stage: Hollywood. The man who reached the silver screen Mecca was film director Alexander Korda who subsequently made a home for himself in London, a location which was more in keeping with his cigar-smoking, manicured image than the noisy bustle of Los Angeles.
In 1949, Korda and Graham Greene collaborated to produce The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed. The Third Man - Greene gave many of Korda's characteristics to Harry Lime - encapsulates the moral degradation left in the aftermath of the war, where survival by any means was the name of the game - a game with which Korda (real name Sandor Kellner) was familiar from his Budapest youth.
Another major film-maker was Micheal Curtiz, who fled Budapest and went on to make the iconic Casablanca, basing Rick's café on Budapest's legendary New York Cafe, the city's most flamboyant meeting place for writers and artists. Coincidentally, the star of Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman, had a love affair with another of the Budapest nine - Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann), the war photographer whose genius is revealed in his photographs of the Spanish Civil War and whose compassion is shown in the photograph entitled Chartres which shows a young French "collaborator" surrounded by jeering women. Her head is shaven and close to her she holds a baby. Sixty five years later, we still want to know what happened to the small, innocent child.
Arrested aged 17 for taking part in a political rally, the young Endre Friedmann left for Paris, reinvented himself as an American photographer called Robert Capa and, following this metamorphosis, watched his professional career blossom.
His personal life, however, was filled with tragedy. Sent to Spain to record the Spanish Civil War, he persuaded his girlfriend, Gerda Taro, to accompany him. He survived while she was killed. Capa was killed by a mortar while working in Vietnam.
None of these men were practising Jews but they nevertheless paid the price. "Nothing is less certain than the past" is a Budapest saying, and though fleeing Budapest meant freedom it also took them into exile. Constantly harking back to their childhood in Budapest, few of them returned there: the shadowy memory of fear was more than they could deal with. Most of the men lamented the pace of life in America. In Budapest, they recalled, there had been time to sit in a café for hours exchanging ideas but Americans looked puzzled at a way of life that seemed to be going nowhere, unaware that, especially among young people, the cafes were ideal places for disputing and trying out new ideas.
Kati Marton asks why a book about this phenomenon has never been written before and then answers herself by suggesting that the uniqueness of the Hungarian language acts as a kind of impenetrable wall and this, allied to the fact that the men hid behind assumed identities further obscuring their presence on the world's stage.
This is a timely book but a difficult one to negotiate. Publishers are famous for disliking potted biographies and Marton has worked so hard to avoid this categorisation that a connecting thread between the nine stories is difficult to find. Locate it, however, and you will not be disappointed.
Mary Russell is a writer and journalist
The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World By Kati Marton Simon and Schuster, 271pp. £18.99