Marton delivered this sobering warning while standing in Budapest, the city her family had been forced to flee decades earlier. She spoke to a student body of over 100 nationalities at an institution founded specifically to nurture open society values in post-Communist Central Europe. She connected past and present through her own family's story — discovering as an adult that her grandparents, whom she'd been told were Roman Catholic, were actually Jews killed at Auschwitz. Through her books on Raoul Wallenberg and the archives of the Communist secret police, she had documented how ordinary citizens can be turned into tools of a terrorist state through fear. Yet she balanced this warning with hope, pointing to individuals like Wallenberg and Holbrooke who stood up to hate and bureaucratic indifference to save lives.