Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family / Edition 1

by Hermann Field, Kate Field, Norman Naimark

Overview

The disappearance behind the Iron Curtain of the American brothers Noel and Hermann Field in 1949, followed by that of Noel’s wife and their foster daughter, was one of the most publicized international mysteries of the Cold War. This dual memoir gives an intensely human dimension to that struggle, with Hermann narrating all that happened to him from the day he was abducted from the Warsaw airport to his release five years later, and Kate relating her unrelenting efforts to find her husband.

Thousands of potential victims of Hitler’s dragnet were rescued in 1939 and during World War II through separate efforts of the Field brothers. Arrested in Czechoslovakia in 1949, Noel was taken to Hungary and used as an example of American perfidy in show trials. Hermann went to Poland primarily to find out what had happened to his brother. After Hermann’s abduction, he was taken to the cellar of a secret Polish prison, where he was held for five years. He gives us a detailed account of his battle to survive, alternating despair and horror with mordant humor. Meanwhile, his family had no idea whether he was still alive and if so, where.

This moving story, based on detailed notes made by the authors during and shortly after the events described, presents an inside-outside counterpoint, as Hermann’s chapters on his inward journey in his cellar world alternate with Kate’s efforts in London to find him by scrutinizing accounts of political events in Eastern Europe for clues and penetrating the diplomatic corridors of power in the West for help. Hermann had been arrested by a Polish security agent who later defected and became one of the West’s most important informants on Soviet operations in Eastern Europe. The search for the Field brothers was complicated by their history of leftist connections, for this tense period in the Cold War was also the era of McCarthyism in the United States. The book ends with an Epilogue that analyzes the events of fifty years ago in the light of what we know today, as the result of newly available archival material.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804744317
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2002
Series:	Ordeal of an American Family
Edition description:	1
Pages:	488
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.07(d)

About the Author

The late Hermann Field was Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy, Emeritus, at Tufts University. Kate Field holds an honors degree in Economics and Politics from the University of Cambridge. She held an administrative position at Harvard Universityuntil her retirement.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

August Afternoon in 1949

A drowsy August afternoon like any other, the anticipation of evening coolness in the air. Behind me the loudspeaker was droning the names of passengers, flight departures, arrivals. Occasionally a familiar word: Krakow, Poznan, Gdynia ... Through the open window of the ticketing hail I waved a last farewell to my Polish hosts, the architect couple Szymon and Helena Syrkus, and Mela Granowska of the Polish Energy Ministry. Slowly their car swung on the gravel and headed back onto the Warsaw road. Szymon had an urgent appointment in town at 5:30.

    And I? I had almost a quarter of the earth to traverse to my university project in Cleveland. I was returning home to America, but also returning with redoubled urgency to the question that could not be evaded: What about my brother Noel? The past seven days here had merely been a futile respite. Day and night since Noel's wife, Herta, had told me in Geneva of his disappearance I had been racking my brain for some explanation, some clue. Last May his letters to her from Prague had stopped. Since then, no trace, only a growing sense of something preposterous, unreal, that injected itself unspoken into everything.

    And so it was, too, that I felt a foreboding, not yet identified, in my goodbye to my friends here. Hadn't some wedge been driven between our worlds, theirs and mine? Was it still possible to stand with one foot in each? To find a meeting ground between East and West where none existed any longer? The incident that morning as I was waiting for the busflashed across my mind. We had all laughed afterward, but it had left a distinct uneasiness. And what about Lolek and Anka's strange silence? No response to my phone call from Prague; their locked apartment door. What a contrast to my reunion with them on my visit to Warsaw in 1947. And just now, Mela's parting remark: "Promise to write a card tonight from Prague that you are all right." There seemed indeed a finality in the dusty wake of the departing car.

    "Pan Field, prosze"—Mr. Field, please. The loudspeaker cut across my thoughts; the drone surrounding me took sudden form. I turned from the window. At the counter only my processed ticket was handed back to me. "Your passport you will get on the plane." A porter picked up my checked-in baggage and beckoned me to follow. We cut across the gravel drive to the arrivals and departures shed. Customs, each passenger called one at a time. Some desultory poking around among my things, an objection to some Polish currency I had failed to spend, a mute signal from another official on the sidelines to forget it, a nod to the porter to pick up my suitcase again, and I was on my way once more, pleased at not having been asked about my undeveloped color films. Carrying them inconspicuously in my pocket had been a good idea.

    I followed the porter into the little adjoining departure room facing the flight apron. Apparently I was the first passenger processed. But no, a man was standing inconspicuously over by the far wall. Funny how I hadn't noticed him at first. He was staring intently at me. Without taking his eyes off me, he shifted toward the point where I had entered. Involuntarily, I glanced back too. My suitcase had been set down just inside the room, and already the door was closing behind the porter's back. I turned toward the glazed door facing the airfield. Maybe I could see the plane.

    "Dokumente." The man suddenly came to life. "Passport."

    I was surprised. "Haven't ... Niema ... On plane," and groping for an adequate Polish word, I pointed toward the field. He had moved over to that door himself and beckoned me to follow. I started to, but then he pointed back to my suitcase. Why, of course, take it along: an official ushering me to the plane. But there was something strange and imperative about this man. And why no porter? He opened the door and beckoned me to go ahead, suitcase in hand. How odd; no plane anywhere in sight.

    "Prosze," and he pointed to an open door on my right just beyond the one we had emerged from. I entered with the stranger close on my heels. Maybe it was just a matter of having to change that Polish money into Czech currency before leaving. I recalled the nod of the customs official a few moments earlier. Of course.

    The triple shift from customs through one door, then another, and now through a third had the predetermined air of sleep walking. As the door closed Behind me I found myself in a small corner room and, facing me, two men standing behind a large table. One was in uniform, apparently an officer; the second was a rather heavyset civilian with a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth.

    "Empty your pockets," the latter ordered in German, as if this were perfectly routine. He even looked surprised when I said, "I don't understand." The demand was repeated, now with unmistakable firmness.

    I experienced a moment of hesitation, a "why?" and a feeling of amazement, followed by an awareness of not being surprised at all. And then the flash of recognition, even relief. Obviously: it was those color films in my pocket! How stupid to have created suspicion by not declaring them myself, especially after the incident that morning.

    "Please, if that's what you want," and with a forced smile I deposited the two film cartridges on the table. "Since you have no facilities for color developing in Warsaw, I was advised to ..."

    "Quickly, quickly," the man with the drooping cigarette broke in. "Empty all your pockets."

    I shrugged and did as I was told. He pointed to a chair. I sat down. Silence settled over the room, the three men casually observing me from their various positions. The man with the cigarette picked up one of the film cartridges and inspected it. This was my cue. "They require special developing since they're color."

    He looked up, amused. "We'll take care of them for you, all right."

    I gave up. A pity if my efforts to make a record of Warsaw's reconstruction progress were spoiled.

    Outside I heard airplane motors not far away. Through the upper part of the curtained side window I could see the top of the control tower. Occasionally the man in it glanced down this way as if aware that something unusual was going on in here.

    Five minutes went by in silence, ten. Why this absurd inactivity? I looked ostentatiously at my watch. It was almost departure time. "Excuse me, but I think I should be going to the plane." The man with the cigarette nodded indulgently.

    Again a stretch of silence. Maybe, I thought, the plane is late on the run here from Prague, and on account of this film business they want me to wait here instead of with the other passengers and they'll put me on at the last moment. Yet I knew better. That wasn't it. Well then, what? Instinctively I shied away from further speculation. I should have desisted from taking any color pictures in the absence of proper processing facilities here. Obviously the incident that morning had caused suspicion and the confiscation now.

    That morning I had been waiting for the bus at the intersection of the Alea Niepodlegloszci and the Sierpnia and decided to photograph a rather promising apartment block with balconies under construction across the road. As I was getting my exposure reading, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked around. A youth in his teens seemed to be asking what I was doing. I pointed to my camera and then to the construction site. The youth shook his head. "Nie wolno"—Not allowed. I shrugged and answered in English, "Okay, I won't in that case," put my light meter away, and turned back to the bus stop. But the youth stuck to me, tugging at my jacket and beckoning me to follow him into the high, modernistic office building just behind us. To a uniformed official at a reception window I again tried to explain, but evidently his German was not up to it, and English was even more futile. He told me to take a seat while he got busy volubly on a telephone.

    I waited fifteen minutes and was getting impatient, as I had been on my way to a lunch date in the center of town with a leading Polish city planner. The man behind the window merely shrugged. Judging from the flow of officers checking in and out, I concluded that this was some military establishment. Another fifteen minutes. I became more insistent and showed my passport. Again some telephoning. After another half hour a militia officer appeared and, addressing me in German, asked to see my passport, listened to my explanation, and then apologized at my having been detained, pointing out that the error had arisen due to my intending to photograph a defense building. Advising me to be more careful henceforth, he left as abruptly as he had appeared. I asked the man at the window whether I could now go on my way. He nodded, all smiles and apologies.

    Before I got through the door, I bumped into a second officer coming in all out of breath. He stopped me and asked me to follow him upstairs into a small office. "It will be necessary to take down a protocol about this before you leave," he explained in good German. On a blank white sheet he put down my personal data, and then he asked: "What were you doing in front of the Ministry of National Defense?" So that's where I was. Laboriously he noted down that my interest had been not in it but in the apartment building going up across the street, and that anyway I had not actually taken a picture but only a meter reading. I signed the sheet, and as I left at last the officer admonished me that as an architect I should recognize the nature of a building! Getting into a taxi, I had glanced almost in fear of new trouble toward the fateful, scaffold-surrounded construction. It looked just as innocent as before—obviously an apartment house in the making. Nevertheless, clearly suspicions had been aroused by all my photographing this past week, and this airport scene was the payoff.

    In the little room, the silent passage of time was unnerving. A growing dread forced my mind into ever smaller circles, shutting out all but the little pile of things from my pockets on the table, the three uncommunicative faces, the telephone on the wall in the corner, the top of the control tower through the window, until all finally dissolved into one urgent reality: the plane. The plane—would it go without me?

    Another half hour must have passed by in silence. The sun's rays had crept from the floor to the wall. At one point there was a flurry of airplane motors, but then quiet again settled in outside. The plane. I did not even dare look at my watch lest it confirm my growing dread. Make a scene? But I felt silly, guilty somehow. The fact was that I had evaded declaring those films. There they lay right before me, the cause of all this trouble. But was that all there was to it? If only someone would say something.

    The man at the door pulled its window curtain a little to one side and peered out. He nodded to the man with the cigarette, who went over to the telephone. Some arrangements were made in a muted tone. He hung up. Again the room settled into a long silence. After a while a motor was audible close by outside. It stopped. The man at the door slipped out, then returned. The man with the cigarette said in German, "Please, take your suitcase and follow this gentleman."

    I went through the door—and stopped abruptly. I found myself looking directly into the open rear-end of a small delivery van. I set my suitcase down and turned inquiringly to the men.

    "Predzej"—Quickly, get on in. They lined up solidly between me and the building. The half-perceived flash of an idea passed through my mind: Demand contact with my embassy. Still better, just make a dash for it across the field and shout for help. But I knew: that sort of thing only happens in the movies. And so, as if in a dream, I found myself clambering onto the floor of the van, the original stranger close behind me with my suitcase.

    The door swung shut. I was in semidarkness, the only light coming in through a little oval pane in the rear door. Through it I could see the other two men get into a second vehicle, which rapidly receded as we got under way, swaying and bumping over the grass. I tried to think, but it was all too preposterous to find a starting point. Obviously there was no question of the plane anymore, but that was not yet a disaster. I could take the night train instead. Of course, Herta and Karel would get a fright at the airport in Prague when they found I was not on the plane as arranged. At once Noel's disappearance would come to their minds. If only I could phone through before they drove out there, to let them know I would be delayed until tomorrow. I would try. I felt better.

    I concentrated on the little cut-out with its images racing into the distance behind us. I tried to establish where we were going. We were speeding along a highway in wide open country, the car by now close behind us. Several times I caught a glimpse of the receding airport tower. Some modern apartment buildings were on the right. Why yes: the Rakowiec housing project, designed by the Syrkuses, which I had inspected with them only a few hours earlier on the way to the airport. So I was heading back to the city along the same road on which I had just left it. But where to? I strained to identify buildings, road signs, streetcars as they flashed by. The Filtrova, for sure, and then I spotted the colonnade of the Polytechnic Institute and, shortly after, the familiar balconies behind their scaffolding—the unfortunate starting point of this crazy day. A short distance farther along the Sierpnia we cut across the Marszalkowska, Warsaw's Fifth Avenue, full of rush hour traffic in spite of the ruins. We slowed down. Our horn tooted as we swung across an unidentifiable street and passed through an iron gate guarded by uniformed security militia. After some maneuvering in the shadowed courtyard of a tall building we came to a stop. The motor was turned off, and in rapid sequence the door swung open, my traveling companion crawled out with my suitcase, and the heavyset man with the cigarette appeared and beckoned me to climb down and follow him through a door within a step or two of the back of the van.

    Proceeding down a long carpeted corridor with doors on either side, I was ushered into a small room with heavy drawn curtains, even though it was still daylight outside. The sole furniture: a writing table and three chairs. The uncommunicative man entered behind me, carrying my suitcase. Once more we were alone together. He came over and tapped me on the arm and indicated that I should raise my hands over my head. To my surprise he promptly started frisking me from my shoulders to the bottom of my trousers. This was too much. I should demand contact with the embassy and put an end to this! But then I was struck by the humor and incongruity of finding myself so suddenly in such ignoble circumstances. "Our guest from America ..."; "Our architect friend ..."; "Our honored colleague from Cleveland and friend of the new Poland." These words still rang in my ears. And now? If my erstwhile hosts could only see me.

    He pointed to a chair in the corner, which I took. He then tackled my suitcase with concentration, dumping its contents onto the table, fingering each item in turn as if expecting at any moment to make some momentous discovery.

    His search was interrupted by the entrance of a severe-looking woman in her thirties, who sat down at the table and started all over again with my things, listing them on a sheet of paper: pajamas, toothpaste, letters, architectural drawings, socks—every smallest thing, occasionally asking me in excellent German to identify a doubtful item.

    If they go on this way, I thought, I'll miss the night train too. But she speaks German. I can make myself understood, at least. I began: "Where am I?"

    She looked up sarcastically. "You know very well where you are."

    I tried again: "What's the meaning of all this?"

    All I got was an enigmatic "You know very well."

    "I asked a reasonable question and expect a reasonable answer. I had a plane to catch and you made me miss it."

    She kept on writing. "That's up to you and not our problem."

    I tried a new line: "But I was to be met at Prague airport, and ..." She looked up. For the first time she seemed really to notice me. She turned to the uncommunicative man and consulted with him in a low tone. He went out. I felt triumphant. At least they know now that they can't drag this on and on without anyone noticing. Probably now they'll agree to put me on the night train if I telegraph to Prague and allay fears by stating that I had simply missed the plane.

    The heavyset man appeared in the door. My earlier passivity was now gone. I turned on him angrily. "What does all this mean? I'm an American architect and was here by invitation. You have no right to interfere with my departure. You are violating my rights."

    In a calculatedly deliberate manner, he pulled a chair over and straddled it, leaning on the back rail, the cigarette drooping from his lips. He stared at me for a moment and then with pointed emphasis said: "Long before Hermann Field chose to come to Warsaw we were well aware of whom we were dealing with."

    I was dumbfounded. But I ignored the ominousness in his voice and merely said, "If you know who I am, then why all this now? You must be aware that I came here because of my friendly interest in your reconstruction and to visit colleagues."

    "And perhaps see other friends too?"

    "Yes, to see Dr. Gecow and his wife, old prewar friends from student days."

    "And did you see them? No?"

    "I tried to, but they were away on vacation."

    "On vacation?" He nodded with exaggerated seriousness and whispered something to the woman; they both smiled. I felt more and more agitated. I raised the matter of the Prague airport again: "I was to be met at the plane in Prague. I must let them know that I am delayed."

    An indulgent nod, and then, as if in afterthought: "And who are 'they'?"

    "My sister-in-law and a Czech friend."

    He got out a notebook. "And their names?" I gave them.

    "Noel Field's wife perhaps?" So he knew my brother's name. "And where is he?"

    What should I say? If they learned about his disappearance, wouldn't that at once redouble their suspicions about me? "I don't know at the moment."

    He repeated with feigned surprise: "So you don't know ..." Then, after a pause: "And how can your friends be reached in Prague?" I pointed, feeling more hopeful, to my address book on the table. He reached over and took it and found the information. Then he whispered something to the woman and got up and went out, whereupon the uncommunicative man reappeared, like an alter ego.

    The woman laid her list to one side while the man scooped my things haphazardly back into the suitcase. She pulled a number of sheets of lined paper out of the table drawer and wrote some sort of long heading. I felt still more hopeful. Was there time to make the night train? The woman looked at her watch as if she had read my thoughts.

    "Your full name, please, and your date of birth."

    So it wasn't over yet. I told her.

    "Your father?"

    I told her: Herbert Haviland Field. Yes, American, born in Brooklyn Heights in 1868, zoologist, dead. Mother, Nina. Died two years ago; born in London in 1874. Me? Born 1910 in Zurich. I explained that I had grown up in Switzerland because my father was director of an international zoological institute there until his death in 1921, when the family returned to America. Our home there? In Cambridge, Massachusetts (how she struggled with that word!). Went to school there, two years of grammar school and four of high school. Then? Harvard University. Yes, also in Cambridge. Graduate studies in Zurich. Profession? Architect in Cleveland, Ohio.

    She looked annoyed. "You are not answering properly. That is too sketchy. We will start again with when you finished the university."

    "But how much longer will this take? Since you made me miss my plane, I must catch the train tonight for Prague. Surely you don't want to create an international incident with this?"

    I was getting worried again. Would this stupidity jeopardize any last chance of prying Noel quietly out of whatever trouble had hit him? The whole point of my going earlier that month to Prague, where he apparently had disappeared, had been to approach the Czech authorities privately through friends in the hope of locating him without fanfare. Although I was skeptical that this plan would work, Herta had pleaded for it in view of the controversy around Noel at home in connection with the trial of Alger Hiss, which would make his disappearance a front-page sensation. Until I learned from Herta whether our efforts had succeeded or failed, it was essential that nothing catapult Noel's disappearance into the press. If the news was negative, there would be no recourse other than to put the whole thing in Washington's lap, where I was convinced it belonged in any case. The urgent matter now, though, was for me to have the final picture from Herta. I would then be leaving for home from London with Kate and the boys ten days hence.

    In response to my protest the woman simply said, "It's all up to you. The more detailed you are, the quicker we'll be finished." She came back to the matter of my return to Europe in 1934. Had I been married?

    "Yes, my first wife, Jean, and I came on separate graduate fellowships for study in Switzerland, I in architecture and she in German literature." On our way there, I pointed out, I had attended a summer seminar on city planning at Moscow University. I also mentioned our month's adventure as farm laborers on a state farm between the Volga and the Urals. Surely that would work in my favor, indicating at least a sympathetic interest toward the Soviet Union. We proceeded to Jean's and my two years as students in Zurich and then my three years in England on my first architectural assignment, and Jean's and my eventual separation and divorce in 1939. Then that strange, unplanned interlude of activity on behalf of refugees from Czechoslovakia following Hitler's takeover of the rump of that country that same year, which took me to Prague and Krakow and pitched me into the center of the German invasion of Poland in September. I pointed out that among the many I was instrumental in saving at that time were a number of Czech communists who were playing a prominent role in the current regime. Then the first winter of war in England with Kate; the next summer, newly married and taking the last American evacuation ship from Ireland; and the remaining war years in New York, working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and developing an interest in the problem of rebuilding war-devastated cities. I emphasized the help given to visiting Russian architects and building engineers through my efforts in New York, and also my interest in Czech and Polish reconstruction, as evidenced by my including both countries in my architectural study tour of Europe in 1947 and my visit again this year.

    Impatiently she interrupted me: "Go back to your work in Krakow in 1939."

    What was there to say? It was ten years ago and I had given it little thought since then.

    By now exhausted, I had stopped thinking about the night train. That too was behind me, and the hours were going by with no more meaning than in a dream. And as in a dream, it began to seem as if the monotonous drone of my voice came from someone outside myself. The only other sound in the room was the incessant scratching of the pen, on which I tried to fix my eyes in the idle hope that the faster it moved the nearer we would be to the end. At some point I ate a sandwich and drank some beer.

    On and on the questioning went. New York again. Midnight passed. The shift in 1947 to my downtown center planning project in Cleveland. My impending architectural deanship at Western Reserve University. How unreal and far away it all sounded! The present: 1949. We had to have reached the end at last.

    "And your brother?"

    Yes, here it was, the question I had been hoping in vain would be forgotten.

    "Your brother, when did you last see him?"

    "Two years ago. In 1947."

    "Where?"

    "In Paris."

    "And where is he now?" For the first time she looked up to watch my response.

    It was no use. To hedge would only look as if I had something to conceal and make things worse. "He disappeared from his hotel in Prague in May, a few days after arriving via Paris from Geneva, where he and his wife live. The Czech authorities are investigating the matter for me, and that is why it is so urgent I get back to Prague without delay." I went on to describe Herta's call for help from Geneva just after I had arrived in London to join Kate and the boys; my response of flying on to see her and her subsequent plea that after my conference in Italy I go to Prague, where I had loyal friends from the refugee relief days before the war; and my decision while they were looking into the matter to come briefly to Warsaw, where I had already been invited by my colleagues Szymon and Helena Syrkus.

    She looked up. "And why didn't you go at once to the U.S. authorities? After all, isn't that the usual thing when one of your kind gets into trouble?" I couldn't fail to sense the sarcasm in her voice. I was furious. Was that the thanks I got for trying to protect Poland's neighbors, the Czechs, from inevitable embarrassment about this inexplicable incident within their own borders?

    "I shouldn't have to explain that to you," I blurted out bitterly.

    This time she didn't even bother to look up, didn't show the slightest reaction. Her pen was moving steadily across the sheet, on and on. But now with every new word I felt I was being sucked willy-nilly into something beyond my control or comprehension. Somehow, imperceptibly, the whole affair had taken a new turn.

    But what in fact had I done? Nothing whatsoever. All they had to do was develop my films to establish that. At most I'd exercised bad judgment, but without hostile intent, And yet, was the intrusion of Noel's disappearance merely a coincidence? Could there be any connection between this craziness and my search for him? "One of your kind"—the words rang ominously in my ears. I had the sickening sensation of treading in a morass and sinking ever deeper.

    "Tell me what you know about your brother."

    Wasn't this my chance to make them understand that they should be concerned about Noel? Hadn't he proved his friendship for the new Poland immediately after the war, when as European director of the Boston-based Unitarian Service Committee he had taken the difficult initiative of establishing an American-sponsored hospital in the devastated mining region of Silesia? The effort had received wide international recognition and had the full support of the Polish health authorities. I emphasized that more recently, in the emerging Cold War climate, Noel had come under attack at home, accused of bias toward communists in his relief work, even of being a communist himself. That should impress them!

    "But go back earlier."

    I told her that in 1936 he left the State Department, where he had been its specialist on the successive naval disarmament conferences, and shifted to the disarmament section of the League of Nations in Geneva. Then in 1938, with the republican defeat in the Spanish civil war, he was appointed a member of the League commission for the evacuation of the international volunteers caught in the final retreat. His dedication then and later, during the war, when many of these people were lingering in French internment camps, had saved many lives—including the lives of many Poles. Surely now the authorities should be concerned with what had happened to him rather than complicating everything by delaying my departure.

    Another hour passed. When the door finally opened and the man with the cigarette stood before me and nodded for me to follow him out into the corridor, I saw him as if through a haze. I rose automatically. I had no will left to challenge him, wanted just to put an end to tonight. All I was aware of in the room I entered was the sofa in front of me, on which I dropped and immediately escaped into overwhelming sleep.

Table of Contents

Prologue	1
1. August Afternoon in 1949	5
2. Warsaw Courtyard	16
3. Journey to Nowhere	29
4. Vacation's End	41
5. But Muffin Could Hear	49
6. Shock	62
7. Days and Nights	75
8. London 1949	105
9. London 1950	127
10. Face to Face	146
11. Stanislaw	179
12. Cell University	187
13. The Oppression of Time	208
14. As the Second Year Began	215
15. Unequal Battle	231
16. Peepa	250
17. London 1951	265
18. London 1952-1953	274
19. Breaking Point	289
20. Twenty Months of Twilight	310
21. FinalSummer	321
22. Forest Paradise	343
23. London 1954	362
24. London: Battle for a Soul	376
25. Breaking Out	387
26. The Mist at Dawn	400
27. Kate	407
Epilogue	413
Afterword by Norman M. Naimark	419
Identities of Names in Text	427
Notes	429
Annotated Bibliography	433
Index	439

Interviews

From the Author

This book is the first opportunity we have had to fully tell our story to the English-speaking public. We wrote down recollections of our ordeal shortly after Hermann's release from a Polish prison cellar in l954. This is the basis of the present book. For fear of hurting some people who were still alive, and of feeding into Cold War tension and McCarthyism, we did not publish our story at that time. Now, as we sit comfortably in our New England farmhouse, we reflect on the events which so radically altered our lives (and nearly ended Hermann's) fifty years ago.

Despite the end of the Cold War, there are still some pieces missing in the puzzle of what happened to us. The demise of the Soviet Union, however, made it possible for Hermann to have access to the police files in Hungary and learn the details of his brother Noel's interrogation. This also made possible the Swiss documentary film Noel Field, The Invented Spy, which revealed much about the way in which he was made to contribute to the show trials in Eastern Europe. This film coincided with the publication of our story in German under the title Departure Delayed in 1997 and in Polish as Opozniony Odlot in l998.

Editorial Reviews

"The book is written from two different perspectives . . . interwoven with great skill, even elegance, and the reader is thus treated to a powerful and multi-dimensional narrative that is bound to become a classic. It will be required reading for anyone who has a serious interest in the origins of the Cold War."

International History Review

This remarkable document is a moving love story, a tale of sinister international intrigue and a revealing probe of Cold War politics. In 1949, American journalist Noel Field vanished in Prague. His brother, architect Hermann Field, traveled to Europe searching for Noel--and he too disappeared without a trace from the airport in Warsaw. The Field family's Kafkaesque ordeal got worse: when Noel's wife, Herta, went looking for him in 1949, she too disappeared; then Noel and Herta's foster daughter were arrested by East German secret police and spent five years in German and Soviet prisons. These disappearances behind the Iron Curtain made front-page headlines when Noel, a State Department worker during the 1930s, was named as a friend and associate of Alger Hiss in Hiss's 1950 perjury trials. Most likely arrested (it's still unclear) for being imperialist agents, the brothers were held incommunicado without trials, tortured and put in solitary confinement in Eastern European prisons until 1954, when they were exonerated and released. In this book, Hermann, who endured psychological torture, endless interrogations and a straitjacket and survived by dint of his iron will, subversive wit and Quaker pacifist faith, describes his experience. His courageous narrative (reminiscent of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon) is told in counterpoint to chapters written by his devoted English wife, Kate. One of the ironies of the story is that the Field brothers, reviled by their communist captors and used as props in a wave of purges and show trials, were both communist sympathizers (and Noel may have served as a communist agent) who had aided antifascist refugees escaped from Eastern Europe during WWII. B&w photos. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The book's significance lies less in its revelation of details of the Field incident. Much more it is the detailed description of solitary confinement, of the nightly interrogations, of the subtle dual effects of sugar bread and whip on the psychology of the prisoner, as well as the documentation of the conditions of incarceration, which raises the book to become an important historical document. Beyond that it is the gripping story of a man who in the face of the most abhorrent conditions was able to maintain dignity and self respect.

Hermann Field describes how his initial hope of the whole arrest being a mistake gradually shifted to sheer despair. The torture of isolation, the withdrawal of every kind of intellectual stimulus, the complete inactivity, the sense of being buried alive, all these led to the captive almost feeling the start of the interrogation as a relief. After weeks of questioning Field was almost prepared to confess to the indicated agent activity. Solely through a confession did it seem possible to escape the round and round of interrogations and solitude. But in the last moment he refused to make the expected admission.

Shortly before year's end the interrogation stopped abruptly. What Hermann couldn't have known: the Kostov show trial in Sofia and the one against Rajk and company in Budapest had meanwhile taken place. The obstinate Field hadn't confessed "in time" and thus lost in significance. Shortly before Christmas a basic change occurred. After months of solitary, he was to share from then on for several years his cell with Stanislaw, a Polish intellectual.

The two couldn't have been more different. Stanislaw "was catholic, conservative, anti communist, steeped in Latin culture coupled with a quick Slavic temperament . He lived by the strong prop of faith with an underlying dose of mysticism which to me bordered on superstition. He countered the disasters that had dogged most of his life as they had that of his country, with an intense capacity for full enjoyment, for the attraction of the existential moment. On my part, I was raised in the Quaker environment of service, of will over pleasure, of reason over faith, of a belief in progress and the essential goodness of man in a vision of a world without violence and with equal opportunity."

However, in spite of, or just because of this difference , this dissimilar pair achieved the necessary hold enabling them to survive the years of incarceration. Twice Field, who sought to improve their conditions and to accelerate a decision about his case, looked death straight in the eye. Nonetheless he was able even in the circumstances of the Polish cellar to separate himself from his circumstances: "So in my personal agony and close view of these terrible faults of Communist rule, was I to allow myself to become an uncritical Capitalist yes man and a fanatical fighter against Communism? As I looked at the true villain in human frailty in each one of us, obviously that also was not the rational response."

After his release and financial indemnity by the Polish government, Hermann Field was unwilling to become a part of the Western publicity mill. Thus the life of the Fields documents a firmness against the black/white thought processes of the Cold War, a position which survived all personal blows of fate.
—Suddeutsche Zeitung (translated)

Ulrich Mählert

"The little crack at the top of my cellar window often provided a glimpse of a cloud moving against the blue of the sky. At night it revealed the bulb of a lamp post outside which sometimes acted as a backdrop to streaks of rain passing in front of it as a visual confirmation of the clatter in a nearby down spout. And one night—truly a wonder—the bright clear disk of a full moon with fluffs of clouds scudding across it, a special visitation for me in my tomb, with the world that I had once known and been a part of. Somewhere far off, this same moon hung over the night in which Kate and the boys were asleep. Perhaps she had noticed it too and had the same thought that it alone could be seen by both of us, a bond beyond the reach of man's inhumanity. It happened just that one night. It was over a year before I caught a glimpse of the moon again."

Hermann Field was not a hostage in the usual sense. At the behest of Moscow, in August 1949 the Polish secret police had got the Dean of Architecture at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, into its power. However there were no ultimatums. Neither his wife, Kate, nor the American government were recipients of counter demands in return for his release. More than that, for five years all parties in question denied his being in their hands. It was only Hermann Field's name that was used. The man himself had to disappear to make it impossible for him to defend himself when others,because of their association with him, were damned, hunted down and destroyed.

A malicious idea, thought up in the Kremlin, claimed that the brothers Field-Hermann and his brother Noel, kidnapped in May 1949 in Prague-had before and during the Second World War undertaken to convert communists from Central and Eastern Europe who had emigrated to the West into anti Soviet spies and agents.

Furthermore, in the postwar period, while Hermann and Noel Field were held in solitary after their kidnapping, in the Soviet satellite states the show and secret trials against communist party and state officials were staged. The name Field floated through the court rooms as the spirit of all evil and served—that was the actual purpose—the ideological manipulation of the masses. Of all this, the isolated and kidnapped Hermann Field had no knowledge. And his wife knew nothing as to what had happened to him. In London, where she stayed with her parents, she tried to fit together an endless puzzle.

At the end of 1996, Hermann and Kate Field published chapter by chapter in alternating authorship the story of their forced years of separation. Great is the distance in time between their experiences and their account of them. Nonetheless, nothing has been lost in immediacy. After Hermann's release—result of a curious act of providence worth following up—he and Kate, each individually, put down their experiences. Then they laid their notes aside as they once more "resumed their normal life."

More than four decades later Hermann and Kate Field decided to allow a book to take shape from the original manuscripts. The world of "socialist reality," in which they had once placed many hopes and wishes for humanity, had collapsed. The fate of the Fields-including Hermann's brother Noel and Noel's wife-reflect early causes for the end of one social system.

For years, Kate's efforts came to naught as she battled for her husband, lacking any leads as to where even to seek him. Hermann existed in complete isolation from the world outside. His ability to replicate mood images, such as the example cited at the beginning of this review, give the memoirs their artistic strength. The substance of the account would have been worth reporting anyway just in its unadorned factuality. However Hermann Field's images of the externality surrounding him, determined the form of expression. While maintaining full authenticity, when it came to narrating experience he was impelled to literary creativeness. This fact lifts the book out of the contemporary flood of autobiographies of politicians, mimes and other prominent figures swamping the market. Devoid of self justification and vanity, it provides evidence of events engraved deeply into the history of the 20th century. The fates of individuals reflect the most heated phase of the Cold War which affected millions of people and held sway over their lives for a long time.

A presentation full of suspense, from beginning to end, awaits the reader, whether he be a witness from that or later generations. Every section of the book is gripping and striking, both the chapters of the husband from the perspective of his cellar grave on the edge of Warsaw and those of his wife as seen from London from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Is it the human quality of the two Fields or the wisdom grown of age that permits them to write without rancor? In any case the intensity of their feelings and their clear comprehension make them sympathetic to us. From their humanistic and anti fascist backgrounds one can understand their anger and sadness that one of our global social systems imploded, the surviving system now without the threat of its competitor. The threat to the world emanating from Hitler's Germany had made active Anti Nazis out of the American citizen Hermann Field and the English Kate Thornycroft.

Kate who became Hermann's wife in 1940 worked in 1939 for an English refugee committee with the task of saving and supporting Anti Nazis threatened in Prague, just seized by the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo. On the plea from his friend, the 29 year old architect Hermann Field agreed to a secret mission to the Moldavian metropolis. His assignment was to rescue the German, Sudetengerman, Austrian and Czech opponents of Hitler-among them numerous communists-who now after the occupation were trapped there, and to siphon them off to Poland and to bring them from there to England. At the center of the book stand the consequences years later of these interventions.

Kate tells of her life between despair and hope. Hermann takes the reader along into his cell and interrogation existence. It is nightmarish, abstruse, perfidious and filled with drama. Fascinatingly written are the phases on the edge of death with the final sentence "..Unlike the dead, I still had the privilege of surveying what life had all been about, and I went at it with intense curiosity."

Departure Delayed is a criminal case that could not have been contrived, renewed evidence that there is nothing more sensational than reality itself.

Junge Welt

Abducted into the Gears of the KGB: An American Family as Stalin's Hostage in the Cold War.

It happened on the afternoon of August 22nd at Warsaw airport: The American architect, Hermann Field, about to fly to Prague, had already bid farewell to his Polish hosts and passed through customs, when he was ushered into a small room. There Colonel Josef Swiatlo, assistant head of the Department X of the Polish Security Ministry was awaiting him. Without explanation, and shielded from the possibility of the other passengers' awareness of the incident, Field was arrested by Swiatlo and taken to a secret location.

Not until October 1954 did Hermann Field return to freedom from his jail hideout in a Warsaw villa converted for the holding of special prisoners. Behind him lay a time span of physical, psychological and spiritual terror without parallel. Hermann Field had become Stalin's and Beria's Cold War hostage.

Written after a gap of almost four decades, Hermann and Kate Field now present their autobiographical report Departure Delayed (Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg). It proves to be not only the detailed account of the tragic fate of one individual in the Cold War, but at the same time brings back to life a political era which in spite of its monstrous cruelty, threatens to disappear from general historic memory.

Hermann and Kate Field, true to their humanistic credo as "convinced anti fascists," wanted above all to help its victims. When the Second World war broke out, the Fields were working for the British sponsored Czech Refugee Trust Fund, a small liberal aid organization, Hermann Field in Krakow, Kate in London. Putting his life on the line, Hermann Field also saved hundreds of human beings from being shot or from certain death in concentration camps by organizing their flight from Czechoslovakia or Poland to England. Once again among those thus rescued there were a large number of communists who later were destined to play a considerable political role in their countries.

When in 1948 Tito broke with the Soviet Union and undertook to establish in Yugoslavia its own socialism independent of the Soviet Union, Stalin and his secret police chief Beria set every effort in motion to suffocate in its germ every sign of independence in the communist parties of Eastern Europe. In this situation Stalin and Beria developed their paranoid fiction of a widespread "imperialist conspiracy" within the leadership of the individual East European communist parties. By way of spectacular trials of leading party functionaries, Moscow wanted basically to make clear who had the last word. The show trials were not put together to achieve legal punishment for an actually committed crime. Rather they had a political-tactical function.

The plan for an "imperialist conspiracy" developed its own dynamics. Quickly the so called "west-emigrants" became the focal point of the "Soviet advisors" whose assignment was the preparation and execution of the trials in line with Moscow's concepts. It must have seemed a bit of good luck to Stalin and Beria that Noel Field repeatedly went onto communist soil and sought out high level communist party functionaries. When Hermann Field, in search of his brother, also turned up in Eastern Europe, and in addition Herta Field landed in Prague with the same mission, the lock snapped shut. On August 25 1949, she also disappeared from Prague's Palace Hotel.

Now the avalanche began to roll. In preparation of the Rajk trial in Hungary, Noel and Herta Field were abducted from Prague to Budapest and at once brutally interrogated. Noel Field signed a false confession which listed several dozen names as supposed "imperialist spies." Although Noel Field immediately recanted it, his "confession" was used both in the Rajk trial and later in the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia.

Meanwhile Hermann Field was held in part in "reserve," further trials being planned in Poland itself and in East Berlin. But Hermann Field, as he reported, defied all torture to which he was subjected to the edge of suicide in resisting getting a "confession" out of him. Thousands of pages of interrogatory papers of the security service proved worthless for their assigned purposes. Only with Stalin's death in March 1953 did the trial and death merry-go-round come to a standstill. But another year and a half went by before Noel, Herta and Hermann Field could become free human beings again. In spite of all they had endured, Noel and Herta stayed on in Hungary. In an article, "Hitching our Wagon to a Star", published after his release, Noel Field declared that his heart belonged, as before, to the communist cause. He died in Budapest in 1970, his wife ten years later. A documentary film Noel Field: the Invented Spy, by Werner Schweizer which will shortly be released, pursues the traces of his secret life.

With Departure Delayed Hermann and Kate Field have further illuminated this case. A "political thriller" of breath taking tension and a work of human grandeur and of historical-political reflection, as rarely encountered.

Die Welt

"This remarkable document is a moving love story, a tale of sinister international intrigue, and a revealing probe of Cold War politics." —Publishers Weekly

"One of the most compelling memoirs to emerge from the dark days of Stalinism. It is a valuable contribution to history, and it is an impressive tribute to the unconquerable human spirit."—Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

"A 'political thriller' of breathtaking tension."—Die Welt

"The book is written from two different perspectives . . . interwoven with great skill, even elegance, and the reader is thus treated to a powerful and multi-dimensional narrative that is bound to become a classic. It will be required reading for anyone who has a serious interest in the origins of the Cold War."—International History Review

From the Publisher

"One of the most compelling memoirs to emerge from the dark days of Stalinism. It is a valuable contribution to history, and it is an impressive tribute to the unconquerable human spirit."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.