THE GREAT ESCAPE: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
By Kati Marton
Simon & Schuster ₤18.99, 288 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤15.19

In 1957 John von Neumann lay dying in Walter Reed hospital in Washington. Outside his room, security staff waited to prevent him revealing classified secrets if he hallucinated. But in the event, von Neumann hallucinated in Hungarian.

Von Neumann was one of a generation of Hungarian Jews who were forced into exile. Kati Marton, a Hungarian-born American journalist, tells the story of nine of them in The Great Escape. Von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner were all scientists, Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz photographers, Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz film directors. Arthur Koestler retains his fame as a chronicler of totalitarianism.

Many of them came first to Berlin. But their antennae were hypersensitive. Leo Szilard took the train for Vienna, banknotes stuffed into his underwear, soon after the Reichstag fire. Others who waited until the following day were turned back at the Swiss border. From 1933 until his death in 1964, Szilard always kept two bags packed in case he needed to make a sudden departure.

For Koestler and Capa, the Spanish civil war was a defining moment. Koestler was captured by Franco’s men and held in the Seville jail for 95 days. A few years earlier he had toured the Soviet Union in the company of the Harlem poet Langston Hughes. Koestler’s novel of the two experiences, Darkness at Noon, was sadly prescient of what was to come, in Budapest as elsewhere, in the 1950s.

Capa was made famous by his photo of a Spanish militiaman hit by machinegun fire. He later took a series of shots of the D-Day landings that were nearly all lost by a lab technician. The 11 that survived are the best-remembered images of that day.

The filmmakers contributed to the war effort through their art. Korda made propaganda films for Churchill, and Curtiz made Casablanca. But it was the physicists who left their mark on history.

Leo Szilard, crossing London’s Southampton Row in 1933, was struck by a sudden insight that allowed him to picture an atomic chain reaction. When the war started, they were all in the US. Szilard visited Albert Einstein in Long Island, accompanied first by Wigner and then by Teller, to persuade him to write the letter to President Roosevelt that led to the Manhattan Project. Von Neumann joined them in Los Alamos. Szilard later became a campaigner for nuclear disarmament; Teller remained a notable hawk well into his nineties.

We still live in their world.