When the fighting broke out . . . every anti-Fascist in Europe felt a thrill of hope. For here at last . . . was democracy standing up to Fascism.
—George Orwell
I lived in a city called Barcelona, which I loved more than any other place—and which is no more.
—Noel Field
EVERY GENERATION DATES its coming of age from one pivotal, permanently searing event. For Noel Field’s generation, the Spanish Civil War was that event. The evil lurking just offstage during the thirties erupted full-blown in Spain, in 1936. The Spanish Civil War—though perhaps not the first total war—wiped out the centuries-old distinction between soldiers and civilians. Everybody was a target for German and Italian carpet bombers who rained their inferno on entire towns and villages. Spain was the first war based on ideology: fascism versus democracy. After Spain, almost nobody could have illusions about what was coming.
The war for Spain finally presented the West with a chance to stop talking about fascism and start fighting it. But America and much of Europe still only watched the massacre from the sidelines, hiding behind a policy of nonintervention, the latest excuse for inaction. The heroes were the plain people of Spain who shamed leaders in London, Paris, and Washington who said it was no use—let evil spend itself. The so-called Loyalists—supporters of the democratically elected leftist government—mobilized to resist Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s right-wing power grab. Hitler and Mussolini rushed to arm Franco—and test their new weapons of mass destruction before the coming bigger war.
Stalin emerged the winner. By letting Franco and his allies conquer Spain, the West handed him a huge moral victory at precisely the moment the Kremlin most needed it. The Spanish Civil War coincided with Stalin’s bloodiest wave of terror. For Communists like Koestler and scores of others with growing misgiving about Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini’s bleeding of Spain was reason to jump back in the anti-fascist fight.
It seemed as if every writer, journalist, photographer, or activist sooner or later made his or her way to Barcelona, Madrid, Toledo, and Teruel. Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, George Orwell, Robert Capa, André Malraux, and Martha Gellhorn—and thousands of others—all played their part. “Spain,” wrote journalist Murray Kempton, “was the passion of that small segment of my generation which felt a personal commitment to the Revolution.”
It was also the war that produced the most iconic and horrifying painting of the last century. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica depicts the total destruction of a small Basque market town. A billboard-size canvas in black and white, Guernica does not depict the destruction from the sky of an undefended town. Rather, it is a shocking evocation of the death of everything: men, women, children, and animals, a light going out over the world. Guernica is the Apocalypse rendered visible, and it roused people of conscience more powerfully than words.
By the time the Fields returned to Geneva from their Moscow trip, the Spanish Civil War had been raging for two years. The League of Nations hadn’t done much to stop the bloodletting. In the war’s hopeless last days, however, the League assigned Noel and a team of “commissioners” to arrange the “orderly repatriation” of thousands of members of the International Brigades. Up to 35,000 volunteers from nearly every country—including almost three thousand Americans—volunteered with the Loyalists. Noel’s dismal duty was to extract these fighters from the battlefield and repatriate them to their own countries. Hitler had already occupied Austria, the Rhineland, and Czechoslovakia. It was hard to avoid the obvious fact that a Europe-wide war was imminent. What to do about thousands of defeated, demoralized militia fleeing Franco’s onslaught was Field’s hazardous assignment.
Spain was to be the hinge event in Noel Field’s life. In Spain, in 1938, Field, the hardened Communist, discovered his barely tapped humanitarianism, and the sense of fulfillment he experienced in easing others’ misery. There was abundant human misery in Spain. “Four stirring months in Republican Spain,” Noel wrote, “thought and action then found heartwarming, soul satisfying unity in the absorbing task of giving aid to hundreds of anti-Fascist victims.” In Spain, too, Noel befriended and helped rescue hundreds of Communist fighters—members of the International Brigades. “Steadfast, clear eyed,” he said of them much later, “they were my guides and mentors. I revere them still.” In time, they would bitterly regret they ever heard the name Noel Field.
“I think the happiest time in Noel’s life was in Spain,” Paul Massing recalled. “There he could actually help people concretely. But,” Massing ruefully noted, “he did not seem to have learned any more about practical Communist politics in Spain than in Moscow.”
Field was oblivious—willfully so, perhaps—of the fact that Stalin transported his brutal purge to the Spanish battlefield. To his horror, George Orwell soon discovered that this was also a war Stalinists waged against all other socialists. “Aren’t we all Socialists?” Orwell asked. “I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties. My attitude was always ‘Why can’t we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?’ ” For Stalin, Spain was just another skirmish in his own war for absolute power.
Even as Franco’s forces approached Barcelona, the Kremlin’s agents turned on socialists, leftists, and anarchists not directly aligned with Moscow. Stalin’s relentless hunt for Trotsky—frustratingly elusive in Mexico—was transferred to the streets of Barcelona. Socialists who volunteered to fight the fascists were suddenly smeared as fascists and “Trotskyites.” “This charge,” Orwell wrote, “was repeated over and over in the Communist Press—part of the world wide drive of the official Communist Party against ‘Trotskyism.’ ” The charge of “Trotskyite” against the likes of Orwell was as irrational as leveling it against the heroes of the Russian Revolution facing firing squads back in Moscow.
On January 29, 1939, across the Spanish border from the dusty, inhospitable French town of Perpignan, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Noel wrote his family his most heartfelt and moving letter. Revealing qualities new to the man, it is also a vivid document of that savage war.
“I know you will forgive my long silence,” he begins,
We have lived in a horrible daze, both of us, and God knows when we’ll be able to snap out of it, if ever. When horror is piled on horror, one ceases even to be able to cry. . . . The calendar has simply stopped for all of us. Yes, if I try to figure it out, it must be that I fled with the remaining members of the [League of Nations] Commission Sunday night, a week ago. And before that I lived in a city called Barcelona—which I loved more than any other place I have ever been—and which is no more. Barcelona ceased to exist at noon last Wednesday.
I sit in the Prefecture here alone for the first time in many days. Herta is somewhere in the border regions helping run a cantine. Thank God for our car. It has saved her. She goes off early in the morning, takes others with her. And reporters come back telling me they saw her among the refugees, handing out food. Refugees. You don’t know what that is. You cannot imagine it. Goya’s engravings. There’s been nothing like it in generations. Hardboiled officers who went through the World War in Flanders and saw the Belgian disaster are speechless with horror—the World War was nothing.
And nothing we can do. Except try to tell about it and get it to the heartless, careless, happy world outside. So I talk to reporters, feed them all I can, tell them of that tunnel between Cerbere and Portbou, in which thousands have been jammed for days, thousands more pushing in, unable to get through because on the other end is happy, peaceful, gallant France. Babies born in the eternal darkness on the railroad tracks, old men dying, famine, human excrement, festering wounds, sleeplessness, terror of every sound that reminds of alarms or bombs. For days on foot, barefoot, in nightgowns, bitter north wind, rain, hour for hour, day and night, planes low flying over the roads, bombing. Machine gunning. Trucks loaded with humans of all ages, standing for hours, moving a few blocks in one day, humans heaped up in the ditch and on the roadside, dead and dying on top of each other, as truck after truck blows sky high.
In the fields all through what remains of Catalonia, thousands and thousands exhausted, starved, calmly lying down to die, chewing bark and grass. The horrors of China in the midst of Europe.
As town after town, village after village is wiped out by bombs and machine guns, they stumble on to the next place, hoping by moving to escape from the inferno.
In a military telephone booth, I was trying to phone our office. Dark, stinking. I hear a moan. As my eyes adjust to the dark, an old woman huddled in a corner, starved, barely able to speak. Beside her, a bundle stirs and groans: her husband, at the point of death. Too late to eat: my chocolate lies in their bony hands, they can’t manage it anymore.
Two weeks later, Noel continued his unfinished letter:
During one spectacular battle, we counted 76 planes over Barcelona. . . . As Acting Secretary General (of the Commission) I had to take numerous decisions and deal with high officials in important matters. Thank heavens I didn’t pull any serious boners though my hair still stands on end when I think of some of the problems I had to deal with. . . .
Mother, I trust my silence hasn’t caused too much worry. The press boys assured me they mentioned me in their stories, so I assume you had an inkling of my doings. . . .
Well, hasta luego and love
Noel
Saturated as Noel’s letter is with despair, he writes with the quiet self-assurance of a man who has been to hell and back, who has finally had his testing, and is—perhaps for the first time—proud of himself. As Franco’s troops advanced, Noel scurried from makeshift hospitals to refugee camps along the Franco-Spanish border. His official role as member of the League Commission was to count the heads of members of the International Brigades staggering across the border into dismal, jerry-rigged French refugee camps. Fifteen thousand fighters—nine thousand of them German—and others from all over Europe and the United States now needed help repatriating to their homelands, and a high percentage of them were Communists. Surrounded by “comrades” at last, Noel was in his element. In action, he forgot about his anxieties, and collapsed from sheer exhaustion each night.
Shockingly, on the French side of the Spanish border, the heroes of Spain were greeted as criminals. Noel spent days at Le Vernet, a former army barracks hastily converted to warehouse the human flood. From a distance, the fifty acres of parched land surrounded by barbed wire might have been mistaken for a concentration camp. The regime inside Le Vernet was punishing. Four times a day, there were roll calls lasting up to an hour each. Any infraction was reprimanded by the guard’s leather crop. Those who could were put to work building roads. Almost everybody was starving. In fact, except for its stated purpose, Le Vernet was no better than a Nazi concentration camp, save that its purpose was not the killing of inmates.
Undoubtedly, Noel’s Soviet control had provided him with lists of Communist refugees to contact and try somehow to rescue. At this stage, Field could do little more than offer encouragement and a promise that he would return with more tangible aid later.
In the midst of so much human misery, Noel struck up a friendship that would prove tragic for those it touched.
The Glaser family were refugees from Schlawe, Pomerania—a region now divided between Germany and Poland, on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. The Glasers’ journey perfectly distills the tumultuous last century. Wilhelm and Marie Therese Glaser—an idealistic doctor and his cultured wife—had high hopes for their precocious daughter, Erica. Everything changed one morning in 1934, when twelve-year-old Erica, walking home from school with a friend, saw “the scene that will forever stay in my mind,” as she recalled. “A group of half-naked people beaten through the streets across the market place with sticks, whips, fists by surrounding hordes of uniformed gangsters, followed by a screaming mob. . . . I realized to my horror that the victims were people I knew, ordinary, decent citizens of [Pomerania], middle-aged men and women, little shopkeepers, a dentist and his wife. And here they ran weeping and crying, the men stripped to the waist, the women wearing a few rags, covered with blood and dirt, and tears, around their necks the cardboard stigma of their infamy: ‘I am a Jewish swine.’ ” It was the end of the old Germany, and of Erica’s childhood.
Soon Erica was the only one in her high school who refused to join the Hitler Youth. She learned to brawl and defend herself against the schoolyard bullies whose favorite target she became. But far worse was coming.
Erica Glaser’s indomitable spirit and reckless courage are rarely found outside the pages of fiction. After Herta, she was to be the most important person in Noel Field’s life.
Dr. Wilhelm Glaser was one of those rare Germans who read Mein Kampf and took Hitler at his word. He moved his family to Spain, then an island of democracy in darkening Europe. In 1936, civil war tore Spain, and the now fourteen-year-old Erica was again witness to and victim of history. “At first there were only small bombs,” Erica recalled, “and the people of Madrid ran out to see what was falling from the sky . . . [only to be] mowed down by machine guns. Soon the big German bombers came in large formations, every two hours on the dot, even at night. When there was no moon and we had hopes for a peaceful night, they began with incendiary bombs, and the city, brightly lit, presented a better target than ever. German precision had one advantage: we all regulated our clocks, our next meals, our lives accordingly.”
Schools closed, so Erica was forced to choose a more practical education: nursing. The teenager was soon cleaning and bandaging the wounds of Loyalist soldiers and civilians.
Her parents were preoccupied—her father working in a field hospital; her mother running a boardinghouse, their primary income. Each morning Erica walked to the “front,” at the edge of town, and back home at night. “My long blond braids drew special attention in a country where ‘rubias’ were rare and desirable,” she recalled. “Sailors lined the Paseo, and pursued me relentlessly. . . . One of them remarked that I might be a German Fascist. I turned in anger to protest. . . . Luckily, they soon realized that I was only a child, and a foreigner at that.”
As Madrid fell to Franco’s forces in 1938, Erica—still tending the injured—contracted typhoid fever. Now, again, the Glasers were stateless—and in flight. Erica was too ill to travel. Such were the times that families often faced choices this cruel: whom to save, whom to leave behind. To save themselves, the Glasers left Erica behind in a makeshift clinic.
At an International Brigades hospital near Barcelona, a chance meeting brought the Fields and the Glasers together. The two German-speaking couples quickly found common ground. When the Glasers shared their distress at Erica’s condition, and their inability to look after her, the Fields sprung to action. “We have no children,” Herta told Marie Therese. “We can take her with us to Switzerland, and look after her.” With no better options, the Glasers agreed to this informal adoption.
Shortly thereafter, the hospital where Erica was being treated was bombed. All foreign patients were evacuated north, to “sanctuary” in France. “I found myself in an ambulance,” Erica recalled, “squeezed between two severely wounded soldiers. The two men next to me moaned steadily with pain, the one opposite had a head injury, which had affected his mind. Periodically he would roll his eyes and fall on top of me. In the middle of the night we ran out of gas and sat there waiting to be captured [by Franco’s forces]. . . . I could not yet walk after four months of typhoid fever and had to crawl on all fours. In the evening of the next day we were finally rescued by a truck and taken to the last assembly place for the foreigners in Spain. It was a sight I have never forgotten.”
The legendary war photographer Robert Capa might have captured the human misery that greeted Erica in Perpignan: a surreal tableau of cots and stretchers in ragged disorder around the main square, bearing the abandoned flotsam of war—with no doctors or aid workers to tend them. The locals, hearts hardened by too many such scenes, were not helpful. Erica tottered around the town center searching for her parents. A former militiaman spotted the distraught blond teenager and told Erica he had a letter for her. “It’s from someone called Field,” he said. He no longer had the letter but he said he had read it. “Field says to contact him in the Grand Hotel, here in town. He and his wife want to adopt you and take you to Switzerland.” And so, exhausted, dirty, and hungry, Erica made her painful way to the Grand Hotel.
For the young girl who barely survived the Madrid evacuation, still reeling from the aftereffects of typhoid, the sight of Perpignan’s Grand Hotel was a shock. “The big hall was brightly lit,” she recalled, “and reeling with elegant, well-fed people, in evening dress. All eyes . . . were on me: tall and thin, with a narrow, pale face, dirty hair with straw in it, a man’s leather coat, a worn-out skirt practically down to my ankles.”
At the sight of this unsmiling adolescent who had clearly seen enough and lived enough to be a child only in years, the Fields saw a chance for a family. The object of their enchantment, however, was sullen and monosyllabic. Fiercely proud, Erica did not easily accept kindness from strangers. “The Fields,” she said, “whom I hated sight unseen, had to be extremely patient and kind to stand my horrible behavior in the beginning of our acquaintance. It took me a long time to be able to admit that they were ‘nice.’ ”
“That child has no heart!” Erica’s father—heartbroken at having to part from his daughter—exclaimed when they were briefly reunited in Perpignan, only to part again. (As stateless refugees, the Glasers faced internment in France, and ultimately settled in Great Britain.) Erica took the news of the “adoption” calmly. She had a heart but, more than anything, she was determined to survive. She would not see her parents for seven years.
Before long, Erica, living with the Fields in Geneva, was back on her feet and enrolled in school. Self-confident beyond her years, combative and uncompromising, Erica matured into a tall, athletic young woman, physically and intellectually fearless. Noel and Herta doted on their “dream daughter.” (Certain accounts of the Fields allege that their affection for their foster daughter might have crossed a line into behavior inappropriate for “parents,” but surviving family members deny this rumor.) Herta and Noel’s adoration of Erica shines through their correspondence. “I repeat in writing what I have already told you,” Noel wrote her on February 18, 1942. “I admire you and respect you for what you have made of yourself. My confidence and belief in you—which were always there—even in troubled times—have been justified.” Erica was as open and blunt as Noel was devious and opaque. He loved her—and saw a great future for her as a Communist.