In 1915, during the First World War, she became acquainted with anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary Ervin Szabó, who connected her with the work of the Galileo Circle.

There she was befriended by a community of representatives of the Russian Social Democratic Party opposed to the war, including Lenin, his wife Krupskaya, and Angelica Balabanoff.

During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, she worked in the propaganda department of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and she was a member of the Budapest Central Revolutionary Worker and Soldier Council.

With an excellent education and knowledge of several languages, she was called to Moscow to serve as translator to Karl Radek in the preparations for the historic Second International Congress of Communist Parties.

From 1927, she edited the Der linke Sozialdemokrat and organized the left opposition in the Vienna branch of the Austrian Socialist Party.

[1] When she returned to England from Bennington, Vermont in 1942/3, she worked in the Political Intelligence department of Foreign Affairs.

After Polanyi's death, she supervised the editing and publication of his posthumous works, and the translation of much of his oeuvre into Hungarian and several other languages.

She translated most of the novels and short stories of József Lengyel whom English critics named "the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn.