It’s farewell to the drawing room’s mannerly cry,
The professor’s logical whereto and why,
The frock-coated diplomat’s polished aplomb,
Now matters are settled with gas and with bomb.
—W. H. Auden
PEACE!” EXULTED THE London Daily Express. “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield has come adorned with nobler laurels,” intoned the more staid London Times. It was Friday, September 30, 1938, and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain—returning from his fateful Munich meeting with Adolf Hitler—was mobbed by thousands of his grateful countrymen. “The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem,” Chamberlain assured them, “is only a prelude to a larger settlement in which Europe may find peace.” Amid general European jubilation, five hundred thousand Frenchmen who had been called up for military service were told to go home.
Three months later, on December 17, at 9:00 a.m., the Wehrmacht’s panzer division clattered over Prague’s cobblestones. Later the same day, Hitler’s private train rolled into the Czech capital. Standing in his open-topped car in driving snow, his arm outstretched, the Führer entered the gates of Prague Castle, former symbol of Czech independence. No conqueror in recent memory had so completely savored his moment—and the humiliation of yet another nation. Inside the medieval fortress, Hitler signed a document that proclaimed that Czechoslovakia had “ceased to exist.” Hitler thus solved another European “problem” by incorporating it into the Reich.
A near-suffocating gloom hung over much of the Continent that winter of 1938–39. Europe was suspended in anxiety. Everywhere, people rushed to buy gas masks and stockpiled canned food, and cities practiced blackout drills. Listening to staticky radio broadcasts, the French, Czechs, Dutch, and Belgians tried to make sense of the deal Chamberlain and Hitler had hatched. As Hitler filled concentration camps with dissidents, Jews, and Gypsies, an ocean away, Americans by the thousands thronged the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. Against a swelling tide of panicked refugees, the United States tightened its borders and slashed immigration quotas.
For many Europeans, suicide became a rational option. Koestler—now a stateless refugee—recalled a conversation with his Parisian neighbor, the writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin. “ ‘If anything goes wrong,’ ” Benjamin asked Koestler, “ ‘have you got anything to take?’ For in those days we all carried some ‘stuff’ in our pockets. . . . I had none, and he shared what he had with me, sixty-two tablets of a sedative, procured in Berlin during the week, which followed the burning of the Reichstag. He did it reluctantly for he did not know whether the thirty-one tablets left him would be enough. It was enough. A week after my departure he made his way over the Pyrenees to Spain, a man of fifty-five with heart disease. At Port Bou, Franco’s Guardia Civil arrested him. He was told that next morning they would send him back to France. When they came to fetch him for the train, he was dead.”
What went through Noel Field’s mind on August 24, 1939, when he read in the newspapers that the Great Anti-Fascist himself had signed a treaty of nonaggression with Hitler? No doubt Noel found a way to rationalize this latest evidence of Stalin’s treachery. “He always said Stalin knows what he is doing,” recalled Dr. Zina Minor, a young doctor who later worked for Field in Marseille. “Noel gave the breaking-eggs-to-make-an-omelet argument.”
The Communist Party had an explanation ready. The morning after Stalin signed the treaty, the French Communist organ published its rationale. The new treaty, l’Humanité explained, was a “supreme effort of Stalin to prevent the threatening imperialist war.” While most American Communists were shocked by Stalin’s deal with Hitler, their official organ, the Daily Worker, continued to end its editorials with “Defend the Soviet Union!” Noel Field certainly did.
Western delusions and disengagement from Hitler and Stalin’s lethal race for power finally reaped their reward on September 1, 1939, when German tanks from all directions rolled into Poland. Forty-eight hours later, World War II was under way. The first of the Field family to be swept up in the war was Noel’s younger brother, Hermann. A twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate and practicing architect, Hermann, too, possessed the family’s nonconformist streak. But the younger Field was a more balanced man, sociable and self-confident. Where Noel professed to love humanity, and agonized about how to serve it, Hermann enjoyed its company. In London, he’d met and fallen in love with a bright and outgoing English girl named Kate Thornycroft. Kate shared Hermann’s distinctly leftist politics—in the age of Hitler, almost a given for the young. Hermann’s girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, a humanitarian activist, persuaded him to go to Kraków, Poland, to do what he could for refugees streaming across the Czech-Polish frontier. In common with much of Europe’s refugee population in the thirties, these Czechs were mostly Jewish, socialists, or Communists.
Arriving at Kraków in April 1939, Hermann proved coolheaded and brave in the eye of a powerful storm. Without any prior experience in rescue, working for the newly formed British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, Hermann saved hundreds of newly stateless Czechs by facilitating their transit to Britain.
On May 13, 1939, he wrote his mother, “I’ve got 800 human beings to look after . . . and everything is running out: the money to feed 800 mouths, the accommodation, the British visas, the patience of the Polish police and the government. Meanwhile the situation along our frontier looks worse and worse,” he wrote as German troops massed on the border. And then, in a phrase hard to imagine coming from his elder brother, Noel, Hermann wrote, “I never in my life felt so fond of human beings as I have here. They and life with it are something much richer and more real than ever before.”
He describes the cruel triage involved in rescue. “All day long,” Hermann wrote home on June 24, “people are breaking down and pleading, going off their heads because of what I tell them, people taken away under my nose because if I save them today, they will only have to go tomorrow. They don’t even dare ask me anymore when their turn to go to England comes. Their request is ever so small—just for me to give them 2 weeks protection, or ten days, or a week or two days. . . . It is almost impossible to explain to their faces, but I try, and very often they get quiet, and simply go away and disappear. . . . I often wish they would get mad at me, as they do with the others,” wrote the young American, suddenly responsible for life-and-death decisions. “Choosing is very hard and depressing and then what is to happen to those that are left? Poland won’t have them. Germany won’t let them back. They can’t leave, and yet won’t be tolerated here,” he wrote, providing a thumbnail sketch of the twentieth century—and foreshadowing the twenty-first.
A casual reference to his brother’s Communist recruiters, Paul and Hede Massing, underscores the Fields’ closeness to the two Soviet agents. Hermann wrote his mother, “Tell P[aul] and H[ede] they would discover lots of familiar faces here. I did my best for them, you can be sure,” he wrote pointedly, “The losses have been awful though. If the [Massings] come across any Crakow alumni during the next months, they should give them my love. I feel as if wherever I go in the world, I will always find friends. For, by the time my 400–500 departures [i.e., refugees he rescued] have been scattered to the four winds, there will be hardly a country without them. Some 200 went East.” A decade later, those two hundred who “went East” would bitterly regret their association with one of the Field brothers.
On August 31, “at 5:30 in the morning we were awakened by sirens,” Hermann wrote his mother, “and went to the window and felt relieved that at last we were getting the air raid drill that had been promised for some days. . . . Then, someone came rushing in, ‘Didn’t we know that German troops had already crossed the frontier?’ ”
As the Wehrmacht poured across the Polish border, the Luftwaffe rained fiery terror from the skies and panic spread like lava around Hermann. “All I can remember is the noise of breaking glass all around me, of doors caving in and clouds of plaster dust all around us. Then, after a brief moment of silence, the women (and men) beginning to scream and sob and rush around aimlessly, trying still to hide themselves although the planes had long since departed. Then came the wounded and shapeless pieces of people being rushed past on stretchers.” World War II had begun.
On September 2, 1939—the day after the outbreak of war—Whittaker Chambers drafted a memo. He listed Noel Field, Larry Duggan, and Alger Hiss among those State Department officials spying for the Soviets. Chambers named Field and Duggan as actual Communist Party members, and J. Peters as “responsible for the Washington sector.” He handed his memo to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, charged with security at the department. In the tumultuous days following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Chambers’s memo did not get much attention. President Roosevelt dismissed it with a brusque “I don’t want to hear another thing about it!” FDR was gearing up the nation for war against Hitler, not Stalin. More surprisingly, J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful director of the FBI, didn’t much care about “reds” in the highest reaches of government either. Germany, not the Soviet Union—considered weak and backward—was the immediate threat to world peace. Deemed least credible was Chambers’s charge against Alger Hiss. When asked if Hiss, his former protégé, could possibly be a Soviet agent, Justice Felix Frankfurter snorted in disbelief.
In the predawn darkness of September 3, Hermann Field fled Kraków, “without my headlights, my car packed to the ceiling, with the American flag stuck big on all sides, my lights pasted over with blue typewriter paper, my staff all gone . . . moving out of town at snail’s pace. Kraków—full of beauty and summer—now it was like a dead thing of stone.”
Hermann survived and was eventually reunited with Kate. They married during the London Blitz and sailed for New York during the spring of 1940. Hermann’s real nightmare, however, was still almost a decade away.