Iron Curtain (53 page)

Although he also knew
Allen Dulles—a U.S. intelligence officer in
Switzerland during the war and later the director of the CIA—and might even have had some dealings with him, there isn’t any evidence that Field ever became an American agent as Hungarian, Czech, and Polish prosecutors would allege. Nevertheless, from the Soviet point of view, Field was the perfect victim. He had left the State Department in 1936. He had spent the war in Geneva, working for the Unitarian Service Committee, an organization that offered assistance to refugees fleeing Hitler. Naturally, many of these refugees were communists and thus he had friends and acquaintances all across Eastern Europe.

Ironically, Field fell into Soviet hands because he wanted to capitalize on those friends and acquaintances. In the spring of 1949, Field was unemployed and afraid to return to the United States, where his name had already been mentioned during the public hearings on Alger Hiss. He traveled from East Berlin to Prague to Warsaw, apparently looking for a job, as the Unitarians were closing their Swiss office.
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He returned to Prague in May—and promptly disappeared. His wife, Herta, went to look for him, and in August she disappeared too. Field’s brother, Hermann, and his stepdaughter, Erica Wallach, also vanished, the former in Warsaw, the latter in East Berlin.

Field’s communist sympathies didn’t prevent Soviet and Eastern European prosecutors from weaving an elaborate web of theories around him and his family, or from inventing stories about him that bordered on the fantastical. Indeed, to do true justice to this bizarre piece of the Eastern European Stalinist story would require another book the size of this one. Suffice it to say that, after 1949, knowing Field or even having met him briefly was enough to incriminate anyone living in communist Europe, however high their rank and however excellent their connections. Even those who weren’t
arrested fell under Field’s shadow.
Jakub Berman, Poland’s ideology boss—second only to Bierut in the communist party hierarchy—lived under a cloud of suspicion for years because his secretary,
Anna Duracz, had once met Field briefly.

Field’s arrest in Budapest set off a rapid chain of events. His incarceration was quickly followed by the arrest and interrogation of
Tibor Szőnyi, an anti-Nazi activist who had lived in Switzerland during the war and had known Field as well as Rajk. The Hungarian investigators were pleased because this implicated Rajk, along with dozens of others, by association. Eleven East Germans alleged to have known Field were arrested
in Berlin in 1950, Merker among them. Two years later, when Slánský and thirteen associates confessed to Titoism, Zionism, treason, and conspiracy, they were also alleged to have been organized by the “well known agent” Noel Field.

Although he lay at the center of the case, Field never went on trial. But others confessed, in public and in great detail, that they had been guided by his evil hand. At his show trial, Szőnyi declared that Field and Dulles had persuaded him to impose a “chauvinistic and pro-American spirit” on the Hungarian diaspora in Switzerland.
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Rajk confessed that he, Field, and Tito had plotted the assassination of the Hungarian leadership. Béla Szász confessed to an absurd conspiracy involving a Danish nanny he had known slightly and an Englishman he had met once while in exile in Argentina. His guilt was proven by the fact that he had briefly passed through Switzerland during the war, even though he didn’t meet Field there and had never heard of him.
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Gejza Pavlik, a Czech arrested by the Hungarians in 1949, confessed that he had joined a vast Trotskyite movement organized by Field and the CIA, which was planning to insinuate itself into the leadership of the Czechoslovak communist party.
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In
Prague, Slánský confessed that under the influence of Field he had “allowed hostile elements to penetrate the highest levels of the Central Committee” and had organized an “anti-state center” with the support of Freemasons, Zionists, and Titoists, among others. Otto Šling, a Czech regional party boss, confessed to working on behalf of the British secret service since the war. Bedřích
Geminder, the head of the party’s international department, confessed that he was in touch with “Israeli diplomats.” That they really were diplomats, and not spies, hardly mattered. In a world in which Field was a criminal mastermind, any foreign consul, however junior, was a dangerous secret agent.
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Soviet advisers both wrote the scripts of these show trials and helped “persuade” victims to make the necessary confessions, using techniques they had tried before. The art of forcing confessions had already been honed to perfection in the Soviet system, where the “usual methods,” as one Czech report later put it, began with an “endless interrogation of the victim, with the officers working in shifts so that he or she received only a minimum of rest.” In addition to this there were “beatings, torture by hunger and thirst, confinement in the dark chamber, the inculcation of fear about the fate of the prisoner’s family, subtly staged confrontations, the use of stool pigeons, the bugging of cells, and many other refinements.”
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Most of the time, this kind
of torture was referred to with euphemisms. Bierut and his sidekick
Berman frequently ordered the police to create “such conditions that they tell the truth.”
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Czech interrogators were told that “these kinds of people are very obstinate and we cannot give them time to get ready for the
trials.”
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The precise methods did vary from person to person and case to case. Szász was left standing for “seven times twenty-four hours,” and over the course of his imprisonment suffered five broken ribs. “Whether on instruction or simply for fun, they used me to relieve their boredom. They ordered me to stand motionless, then yelled at me or kicked the door, and on the pretext that I had moved, fell upon me and struck and kicked me all over …”
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Polish interrogation protocols contain records of guards who burned prisoners’ feet or hands, pulled their hair out, made them kneel with their arms in the air for hours, or forced them to stand on one leg for hours.
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General Spychalski was kept naked in a damp, dark, moldy cell.
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The Czech police beat a pregnant woman so badly that she miscarried. Another Czech woman, also pregnant, was made to sleep without clothes, mattress, or blankets for ten days. When she asked for a doctor, she was told that “it would be better if another beast like me would never be brought into the world.”
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Interrogations were also intended to “break” the victim psychologically. Prisoners were shown photographs of their spouses in prison, or were told that their children would suffer if they didn’t confess, or were persuaded to put their trust in a “kind” interrogator or an apparently sympathetic cellmate. In the case of the Eastern European communists, interrogators found it particularly effective to return again and again to the past. Incidents that had taken place decades earlier were rehashed over and over again. The suspect’s years in the underground were discussed at length, as were his wartime experiences. This obsession with the past was deliberate, as István Rév has brilliantly observed. After all, no one who had ever been in the communist underground could ever be absolutely certain about what had happened during those years of conspiracy. He could never be sure with whom he had really been speaking, and what secret games had been played without his knowledge:

Almost anybody who had ever worked underground could be tripped up, confused, or misled. Anyone could be made to feel guilt about something he might have accidentally said, or unknowingly done. Some openly said so, either at the time or afterward. During his long interrogation, Gomułka was plied with endless, repetitive questions. Day after day, month after month, he was asked to tell the same stories over and over again, from different angles, by different people, almost all of them concerning “controversial” incidents in the now distant past. He was asked how he had met particular people, when he first heard the names of others. He was asked to recall events that had taken place a decade before. Sometimes, an entire day was spent on a single person or incident.
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Several times Gomułka was asked about Spychalski, who had been the leader of the wartime communist militia and in that capacity had led an operation against the Home Army, allegedly in concert with the
Gestapo. He was questioned about some more recent comments Spychalski had supposedly made about the need to rid the Polish army of Soviet advisers. He was also asked in enormous detail about the murder of the communist
Marceli Nowotko, which took place during the Nazi occupation and which was probably carried out by one of Nowotko’s communist comrades. Gomułka was also accused of knowingly hiring “unreliable” people. In response, he told his interrogators that he had done so because he thought the “unreliables” in question were Soviet agents and that he was obliged to make use of their talents.

The questioning took its toll. Gomułka’s interrogators at first described him as “calm.” Later, however, he became “nervy” and “weepy.” From time to time he wrote plaintive letters to the Central Committee: “As of today I still do not know either the reason for my
arrest or the state of my case, although 11 months have passed since I was placed in isolation.” He began to complain of leg pains, a lack of exercise, and poor medical care. He wrote plaintive letters to his son, wondering if he had been forgotten: “Sooner or later I’ll have a breakdown.” All of this was reported to Moscow. Later, after Stalin had died and Gomułka was released—in due course he would replace Bierut as
the communist party boss—
Nikita Khrushchev would inquire sweetly after Gomułka’s health, even offering to send Soviet doctors to help him recover.

Behind the “nerves” and the “weepiness” surely lay far greater fears. Gomułka knew enough about communism to understand that torture and death might come next. But from his account, and from accounts of the interrogations of Slánský, Spychalski, and others, it’s also clear that the recollection of the past—the murky, confusing, conspiratorial past—created emotional and psychological trauma even when no violence was used at all. The Soviet comrades appear to have understood very well that the people they were dealing with could be made to feel uncertain, uneasy, and even guilty about their lives. This was true of those who had been arrested as well as those who had not been—or not yet. Before he himself was imprisoned, the Czech communist
Oskar Langer told his wife: “These men are perhaps not guilty in the everyday sense of the word. But just now the fate and interests of individuals are of secondary importance. Our whole future, maybe the future of mankind, is at stake.”
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Perhaps in the grander scheme of things, which ordinary mortals could not understand, the arrests were somehow necessary. “In the dark,” writes Rév, “it is always difficult to explain appearances in a clear way, for nobody follows normal rules.”

Others felt uneasy as well. Indeed, an ominous sense of déjà vu enveloped communists, communist sympathizers, and former communist sympathizers in both Eastern and Western Europe.
Arthur Koestler, the German-Hungarian writer, sat weeping beside his radio in
London, “ ‘convulsed’ for two days” by the public confessions of his old comrade
Otto Katz, on trial in Prague.
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He and others had witnessed all of this before, though many had repressed these bad memories for the sake of the battle against fascism. Now the duplicitousness of the Soviet regime was staring them in the face once again. And once again all of the party slogans looked empty and ominous. “My life is at an end,” said the Czechoslovak victim,
Geminder, “and the only thing I can do is to embark on a road of truth and thus save the party … I am walking to the gallows with a heavy heart but relatively calm … the air is becoming purer and one obstacle along the victorious road to socialism is being removed. The party is always right …”
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The political impact of the arrests and convictions of leading communists between 1949 and 1953 is not easy to measure. By that time, show trials
were a familiar spectacle in Eastern Europe. Home Army soldiers in Poland had been subjected to them; priests and pastors had been subjected to them; Cardinal Mindszenty himself had publicly confessed to plotting the launch of the Third World War. But the sight of the nation’s heroic leaders confessing in public to absurd crimes left ordinary citizens feeling both afraid and confused.
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If the accusations weren’t true, then that meant the party had reached new levels of paranoia. But if they were true, then the country really had been penetrated by enemies and spies. Even among members of the secret police the confessions simultaneously produced a strange mixture of fear and disbelief. Szász’s interrogator laughingly called the truncheon he used to beat prisoners the “people’s educator,” and yet at the same time his cynicism was “interwoven with some sort of bigoted and sentimental blind faith.”
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In the long run, the trials planted doubts about the reliability and even the sanity of the communist leadership, though these were not necessarily expressed at the time. One historian tells the story of two Hungarian sisters, both loyal communists, who separately grew disenchanted with the regime during the trials. Despite living in the same apartment, each remained convinced that the other was still a believer, and both continued to repeat Stalinist slogans, even to each other, just as they did outside the house.
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Like the accused, the public was also expected to act as if they believed the truth of what was being said, even if they had private doubts.