Katherine M.K. Mitchell isn’t just a survivor. She is someone who exemplifies the power of pushing forward, persevering every day in the midst of life’s often difficult challenges.
In her extraordinary life, Katherine has had to deal with violent revolution, fallout from World War II, communist rule, a near-death experience on a destroyed ship while attempting to escape persecution, and mental abuse. In spite of the numerous trials, 83-year-old Katherine continues to persevere.
Katherine was born in Nazi-occupied Hungary. When she was five years old, her mother moved Katherine and her brother into an orphanage. The war was over. The Nazis were gone and the communist Soviet Union had taken over.
“My mother was unable to take care of us,” she says. “The worst part was that in order to be able to join that orphanage, my brother and I had to be fully orphaned. My mother had to agree that she would never tell anyone that we were her natural children in order that she could go on the staff of the organization and work for them. It was nearly two years of such a life of lying.”
At one point, a group of abusive, older boys chased Katherine onto an ice field. She caught a serious chest cold that nearly took her life.
In 1947, the orphanage joined with other similar groups in trying to escape from Europe. Together, they embarked on a rickety wooden transport ship called the Exodus. Their numbers grew to thousands.
The ship gained historical importance when the British navy tried to stop it from reaching land. The attackers shot tear gas into the ship’s hull. Katherine’s quick-thinking mother tore up towels and sheets into small pieces and dipped them in barrels of drinking water to provide make-shift masks.
“The older members of our refugee group went on top to fight back against the British, and many of them slipped on the oily deck to their death in the dark Mediterranean Sea,” Katherine says. “By the time the leaders of our ship gave up, there were so many holes in the frame of our ship that it was sinking.”
Thousands of passengers panicked, wanting to get out of the interior of the wooden structure. “They were pushing and shoving toward the outside,” Katherine says. “We all managed to get off the sinking ship, and although captured by the British sailors at least we were alive. Mother found a way for us to leave the orphan group and return to our homeland.”
Such trauma affected Katherine deeply, and for the next many months she refused to speak, she says. “I was old enough to enter the first grade, but the school would not take me if I wouldn’t talk,” she says. “My mother had to hire a speech specialist to bring me back to reality.”
Back in Hungary, now under communist rule, Katherine still carried the consequences of such overwhelming emotional pressures, which were devastating for a girl of five, she says.
In 1956, the family fled Hungary for the United States. “Once again, I was uprooted from the security I finally learned to live with,” Katherine says. The family escaped on foot on a snowy winter night. “We were back to being homeless, registering as refugees, asking for entry into the United States,” she says. “There is nothing more devastating than being swept away from the security of a life of routines and tossed into the unknown,” she says. “The fear of being kicked around any time again never left me.”
She had been a top student in her school and a nationally ranked gymnast. “I never wanted to leave all that behind,” Katherine says. “But my mother knew that the freedom we could not have at home was living in the land of America.”
The family arrived in New York, safe from communist oppression but penniless. “We had no idea what to do next,” Katherine says. “Luckily, a distant relative sponsored us [and] gave us some helpful advice.” The sponsor also provided guidance on how to get working papers and jobs, and enroll in school to learn English.
“There were many rules to follow before we would be accepted as immigrants who wanted to assimilate, who wanted to be part of this country,” Katherine says. “I was sad that going through the many paperwork requirements and spending month after month in refugee camps. I was not training as a gymnast and lost my ability to be competitive in the new country.”
Nevertheless, she kept learning about American ways of life. She took college classes, “studying to better myself and loving the freedom of not having a government tell us what to do,” she says. “I grew to love everything about being American, and did not remember very much of the first sixteen years of my life.”
Katherine married an actor, and the couple moved to Hollywood because there was not much acting work in New York at the time, she says. “Once in Hollywood, I was always curious why my husband was not getting any acting jobs,” she says. “He told me because he needed an agent. I had no idea what an agent was and what an agent had to do to get acting jobs for her clients. So, I learned about being an agent and passed the requirements to become one.”
Once she became a licensed agent for actors, she began going to studios to read scripts for TV shows. “My husband started to get acting jobs and was well liked by the directors he worked for,” she says. “Because I was reading so many scripts, I learned to understand the basics of screenwriting.”
While Katherine continued working as an agent, she enrolled in UCLA’s screenwriting school. “It turned out that script writing was ‘my calling,’” she says. “I was a natural, and little by little I worked my way into the Writers Guild of America West. That was the icing on the cake. I qualified to be a member of the craft union for writers!’
Katherine has worked on productions of shows including General Hospital, The Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantasy Island, and others. Later in her life, she became a novelist, authoring three well-received romantic adventure novels.
In 2023, Katherine published her memoir, From Budapest to Hollywood: Searching for the Promised Land, which details her life’s journey and how she flourished despite struggles. She has become a sought-after speaker, lecturing on topics such as screenwriting versus narrative writing. Now residing in Florida, she continues to write and encourages audiences to embrace their true selves and persevere through life’s obstacles.
Life comes with difficulties. “Some are harder than others, some are easy to overcome,” Katherine says. “Learning a new language was difficult. Learning how to get a job was difficult and especially how to work my way up into better jobs.”
Much of her strength comes from competing in gymnastics as a child. “Being an athlete of any kind develops a specific discipline; willpower,” she says. “You never stop practicing until you get it right. You never stop preparing for a competition… I managed to face and successfully overcome many difficulties in my life because of the discipline of being an athlete who never gives up.”
Katherine is most grateful for the gift of becoming a parent and preparing her daughter to face life’s challenges. She set out to raise her daughter to prepare for the future. But how could she plan for a future filled with unknowns? The answer was to teach her to think, “to figure out how to solve her problems and how to reach her goals,” Katherine says. “Thinking and logic are an art, and parents should show their children the way.”
In this way, Katherine echoed her own mother’s ability to be a guiding light in a sometimes difficult world. Her story is remarkable—and ironically, a screenwriter such as herself might dismiss it as implausible. But her experiences are real, and a shining example of how to persevere despite serious setbacks.
“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”—J.K. Rowling
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