We can delay and effectively stop . . . the number of immigrants into the United States . . . by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way . . . and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.
—Breckinridge Long, State Department official
WITH FRIGHTENING SPEED, France fell to the German onslaught in June 1940. An enormous Nazi flag soon fluttered from the Arc de Triomphe as the German Eighteenth Army marched through the streets of Paris. In the south, the still unoccupied port city of Marseille teemed with thousands of French Jews fleeing the Gestapo, as well as refugees from Spain, Germany, and the Nazi-occupied territories of Eastern Europe. A handful of American relief workers arrived to attempt to fill the gap left by Washington’s shameful policy of non-rescue. Among the brave humanitarians was Donald Lowrie of the YMCA. Lowrie had heard of Noel Field’s relief work in Spain, and recommended him to the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee (USC), which was looking for someone to head up its office in Marseille.
The Fields’ earnest manner and Quaker simplicity suited the Reverend Charles Joy, the balding, amiable head of the Boston-based USC. The fact that both Noel and Herta were trilingual qualified them to work with a multinational refugee population. Besides, not many Americans were eager to take on a mission this dangerous, rescuing Jews and others trapped on the knife’s edge in Vichy France. After interviewing them in their home outside Geneva, Dr. Joy hired them both on the spot. There were no guidelines for their jobs. “Just do what you can for these people,” Joy told the Fields. In no time, Noel and Herta packed up their Vandoeuvres house and boarded the train to Marseille, one of the final places of hope in Europe in 1940. Erica, enrolled at the University of Geneva, stayed behind.
Among those in flight during the summer of France’s defeat was Willi Münzenberg, Lenin’s public relations genius who had spun Communist propaganda gold from Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions. Now, like Trotsky, Reiss, Krivitsky, and thousands of other Old Guard Bolsheviks, Münzenberg was out of favor with Stalin—and feared for his life. Repeatedly summoned back to the Kremlin, he defied calls whose meaning he well understood. Fleeing south, he was the target of at least two dictators, Hitler—for his years as an anti-fascist propagandist—and Stalin, who did not trust international Communists of Münzenberg’s ilk. On October 22, 1940, in the village of Montagne, outside Grenoble, hunters found Münzenberg’s decomposing body in the woods under a pile of leaves, a knotted cord around his neck. Suicide or assassination? Impossible to determine with certainty, but another of the twentieth century’s little-known but transformational figures had died a violent death.
The shimmering Mediterranean in the distance never fails to lift the spirits of new arrivals to the port city. High above the great harbor of Marseille, the silhouette of Notre-Dame de la Garde has been a symbol of sanctuary for generations of refugees. With its teeming port; narrow, winding alleys; peeling, pastel-colored houses; and active black market, Marseille was a place where one could disappear. Though the Gestapo had not yet arrived, Vichy France’s omnipresent, black-caped gendarmes already struck fear in many hearts. An unaccustomed quiet hung over the formerly bustling port. In the fascist mold, Vichy’s leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, replaced Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité with Travail, Famille, Patrie—work, family, homeland—as France’s national motto. Pétain also banned public playing of music and dancing, which only added to Marseille’s gloom. Not that French Jews, nor Czech, Hungarian, Spanish, or German refugees who crowded the cafés along the Vieux Port and La Canebière Avenue, were in the mood for dancing. Their chief occupation was waiting.
Until the Fields’ arrival, Varian Fry, the head of the New York–based Emergency Rescue Committee, was the refugees’ best hope. The tall, ascetic Fry burned with anger at Washington’s policy to “postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.” Fry’s specific charge was the rescue of Germany’s great—and now threatened—cultural figures. Arranging swift passage to America for them was his challenge. By breaking rules, bribing and deceiving both American and Vichy officials, Fry eventually saved two thousand writers and artists—among them Marc Chagall, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Ernst. But pressure from Vichy was mounting—Fry’s work was becoming increasingly more dangerous. Nearly as cold-blooded as Vichy’s behavior was that of the American consulate.
The lines of visa seekers formed early each morning in front of the American consulate. Even in sweltering summer, they were neatly dressed, in coats, hats, and gloves—as a reminder to those inside that We are people here, desperate now, but human beings, like yourselves. Nevertheless, the heavy, carved wooden door of the consulate stayed firmly shut for most of them. Inside, smug and sometimes cruel officials proved no friendlier than Pétain. America’s shunning of refugees came from the top. The State Department’s anti-Semitic Breckinridge Long controlled the quota on refugees, and he firmly believed that the fewer Jews admitted to the United States, the better.
While turning a cold shoulder to Hitler’s victims, Washington placated Vichy and slammed Fry. “This government,” Secretary of State Cordell Hull cabled, “can not repeat not . . . countenance the activities of . . . Mr. Fry . . . however well-meaning he may be, in carrying on activities that evade the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations, signed, Cordell Hull, Secretary of State. September 26, 1940.”
Fry fired back in the American press. “One vice-consul,” he wrote, “receives applicants with his feet on his desk, pipe in mouth. He never gets up from his chair, even for women. Applicants stand for hours in the waiting room, stand again while the vice-consuls question them. One woman swore she paid an American consular employee $12 to get a seat after five hours of standing. . . . A German rabbi,” Fry continued, “obtained an immigration visa in Berlin—valid for three months. It took this man many weeks to get out of Germany. He arrived in Lisbon late in July and got a reservation on the SS Excambion, leaving for New York on August 8—exactly three months from the day his visa was issued. But the vice-consul wouldn’t let him get on the boat. He insisted that the visa had expired at midnight on the seventh, and nothing would move him to give the man the benefit of the doubt or to renew his visa.”
Within a year, under State Department pressure, the Emergency Rescue Committee recalled Fry to New York. His absence had devastating consequences. “When I arrived in New York,” Fry wrote, “I learned that the State Department had devised a new and cruelly difficult form of visa application, which made it almost impossible for refugees to enter this country.”
Fry never let up on his private campaign to rouse Americans from their apathy. Unlike Noel Field, Fry was convinced that eventually his country would do the right thing. Varian Fry and Noel Field—two lanky Harvard graduates of roughly the same age and social background, pedigreed nonconformists—should have been natural allies. Ironically, Fry, an open antiestablishment renegade, was willing to break laws and provoke Washington. Field, a clandestine Communist, was not. Fry—a sharp-eyed observer—saw through Field’s facade sooner than most.
Through Fry, Noel befriended French journalist Michel Gordey, who helped the Fields find a room in a boardinghouse on the rue Rouvière. “Noel had a collection of Spanish Republican and Russian records,” Gordey recalled, “which he used to play for us. It was very brave to play such things then in Vichy France.” Noel’s seemingly direct manner impressed Gordey, as it did so many others: “He looked you directly in the eyes, with an open, friendly gaze,” Gordey said. “A typical American, kind, big hearted, starry eyed. I had no inkling that he had Communist sympathies. But it was clear that he was very moved by the misfortunes of the anti-fascists. He had a wonderful heart, very generous. He didn’t have much money, because he was always giving it away to refugees he thought needed something more than he did. There were often terrible scenes with Herta because he gave money and food away. After the first two or three weeks of each month, the Fields had nothing left to live on, and no more pay until the start of the following month.”
It did not then seem noteworthy to Gordey that Noel had a special interest in Communist internees. Those Fry turned down for help as being hard-core Stalinists, Field took a special interest in helping. “He used to speak very indignantly about the West’s betrayal of the Spanish Republicans,” Gordey said.
Field’s assignment as head of the USC in France was to ease the suffering of all thirty thousand refugees from Spain, Germany, and forty-two other countries—languishing in internment camps just outside Marseille—through medical and human intervention. At Field’s direction, the USC opened camp hospitals and worked to ease the camps’ squalor—insofar as that was possible. Field also had his own plan, however, which he did not share with either the USC or Fry: to help repatriate as many interned Communists as possible to their own countries, to seed the ground for an eventual postwar Communist takeover. Ironically, the same American consular officials who harassed Fry left Field alone. Field was trying to send “his” refugees East, not to America. In fact, one of the more callous consular officials in Marseille, Hugh Fullerton, in a cable to Washington, tore into Fry as a “troublemaker” but expressed concern lest Noel Field damage his own health by working too hard.
With USC funding, Noel Field soon opened a clinic at Marseille’s 25 rue de l’Italie. Almost immediately, lines of the sick and hungry—and those who had no place to go—snaked outside the building. To help look after them, Noel hired a Russian-born doctor, Zina Minor, herself a refugee. The attraction between the tall, blond young doctor and her new boss was immediate and strong. “Noel was very attractive,” Dr. Minor recalled. “He had a long, thin face, a terribly earnest air, gray hair already then, and a boyish manner.”
In the intensity of their lifesaving work, Noel dropped some of his usual armor and confided to Zina things he had not shared with his own family. “He never hid from me that he was a Communist,” Dr. Minor said. “Even a Stalinist. We used to argue. I would say, ‘I can’t understand that to make the world perfect for everyone, you have to hurt so many people.’ But,” Zina said, “he was an idealist Communist. He must have been living a double life, but I didn’t realize it at all. I would never have believed he was an agent.”
In the chaotic frenzy of the USC clinic, and in the bleak internment camp barracks outside Marseille, Noel was surrounded by people who were not only hungry and ill, but traumatized from all they had witnessed. Here, amid so much visible agony, Noel found a state of well-being. He was serving humanity—as he had dreamed as a youth. His new self-confidence and pride shines in a June 14, 1941, telegram to USC’s Boston headquarters. “Supplement clinic highly welcome . . . have rented large apartment for Unitarian medical and dental dispensary . . . other half use with social work. Our staff includes chief doctor, assistant physician, surgeon, dentist, pediatrician, social workers. Signed, Field.”
Anyone who has spent time in refugee camps knows that the sight of children—idle and quiet—amid such misery is a particular heartbreak. One of Noel and Herta’s first initiatives was to organize a kindergarten at Rivesaltes Camp, housing entire families of Spanish Civil War veterans. Like Le Vernet, it was a heartless place on a barren patch of land surrounded by barbed wire, without heat, and with open sewers. Into this bleak, malodorous camp marched the once squeamish Noel, who pitched himself into setting up a school for the unhappy children. “At Rivesaltes thousands of children are being educated and occupied,” Field proudly informed the USC board of directors. Back at their Boston headquarters, Noel’s stock was rising.
But even as he gave of his last measure to feed the hungry and care for the sick, Noel’s focus never wavered. “I lived and worked more and more completely as a Communist,” he later wrote of this period, “without inner doubts. And the harder the work, the happier I was. I was conscious that I was making a valuable contribution to the antifascist struggle. . . . My goal,” he said, “was to set up a Red Aid—to save our cadres.” Red Aid on the Unitarians’ dime was not what the church elders had in mind. For quite a while, however, the fog and chaos of war, infrequent communications, and Noel’s talent for duplicity kept the USC in the dark.
For the first time in his career, his colleagues were not bureaucrats or diplomats, but humanitarians. Saving lives or, at a minimum, easing the pain of those written off by others, was their shared mission. Dr. Joseph Weil, the head of the Jewish Children’s Aid Society in Marseille, was also impressed by Noel and Herta’s dedication. “They radiated goodness,” Weil said. Like Zina Minor, Dr. Weil gained Field’s confidence and recalled his astonishment at Noel’s “burning sympathy” for Stalin. “When I tried to timidly insert a little realism, Noel looked at me with a sort of rapture, which he always had when he spoke of his political vision.” Noel spoke of the imminent birth of a classless society, and the end of corrupt, American capitalism. Weil recalled that all the Communists in the camps seemed to know Field, and thought of him as romantic and generous, but a political innocent.
There was at least one American official who shared Varian Fry’s humanitarian values and pierced through Field’s facade. Among the refugees’ staunchest allies in France was US vice-consul Hiram Bingham IV. Bingham, a son of US senator Hiram Bingham III, sheltered refugees—including novelist Lion Feuchtwanger—in his own home. He also freely issued Nansen passports, the lifesaving, internationally recognized travel documents sanctioned by the League of Nations for stateless refugees. None of this pleased the State Department, and soon Bingham, like Fry, was recalled to Washington. Transferred first to Lisbon, then to Argentina, Bingham was passed up for promotions. “Excessive activism” blotted his copybook. Hiram Bingham finally resigned from the Foreign Service in 1945, driven out by those willing to implement a cruel policy. Bingham—like Fry—tried to warn others about Field. “Bingham was the first to tell me to beware of Noel,” Gordey recalled. “It was in August 1941. The consul came to Marc Chagall’s house in Gordes, to see the painter,” Gordey said. “Referring to Noel, Bingham alerted me that ‘things were not as simple as they looked.’ I was very surprised, and had no idea what he meant.”
In March 1945, Fry wrote his friend and colleague Daniel Bénédite, recently freed from a Gestapo prison. “You remember Noel,” Fry wrote. “If you or any of your friends still have any relations with him at all, I advise you to break them immediately and completely. . . . I can only add that I am in possession of evidence against him which I am sure you would accept as adequate ground for an immediate rupture, if I were able to send it to you.”
Bénédite already had his own suspicions. After Varian Fry’s recall to New York, Bénédite asked Noel if the USC could take care of Fry’s refugees. “What sort of people are they?” Field asked. “All sorts,” Bénédite answered, “except Nazis and Communists.” Noel declined to help, revealing to Bénédite a hard core usually masked by his earnest dedication.
Herta shared her husband’s single-minded preference for saving Communists above all others. A Hungarian refugee named Eugene Gonda and his pregnant wife had been receiving a monthly allowance from the USC while waiting for passage to Martinique. Gonda’s USC stipend was suddenly cut off—without explanation. When Gonda asked why, Herta answered, “You are too noisy an anti-Communist.” To what extent this was mere accommodation to Noel’s Stalinism is speculative at this remove. If it is possible for two human beings to fuse into a single one, however, Noel and Herta Field achieved such a melding to a remarkable degree.
A sad coda to the story of two principled and fearless public servants, Varian Fry and Hiram Bingham IV, is that only in death were they recognized for their courage. Neither man’s career ever recovered from the lifesaving and State Department–defying rescue of Jews. Today, however, the square in front of the American consulate in Marseille, where once the hopeless waited in vain for the door to open, is named Place Varian Fry. Few passersby appreciate that bit of historic irony. In 2006, the US Postal Service issued a stamp honoring Hiram Bingham IV, diplomat and humanitarian.
Sometime in 1941, Dr. Zina Minor introduced Noel to Jo Tempi. “Dark, thin, harsh, a terror of a woman,” Gordey remembered the German Communist. “Tempi was full of enormous vitality and will power. Noel developed a wild passion for her. Jo,” said Gordey, “was a fanatical communist.” The Berlin-born Tempi (who, like so many in the Communist underground, had a string of aliases) was a Comintern agent, in and out of German prisons. Like Arthur Koestler, Tempi, too, had worked for Willi Münzenberg as a Comintern propagandist.
Noel loved and needed women and felt his affairs were unrelated to his marriage—his source of comfort and stability. The Fields’ relationship may have been extraordinarily close, but it was devoid of passion, almost platonic. However practiced a deceiver Field may have been in matters of espionage and national loyalties, he could not hide his love affairs from the woman who had shared his life since childhood. “Noel and Jo’s affair lasted from 1941 to 1946,” Gordey said. Tempi’s presence shattered Herta. “She was terribly jealous,” Zina Minor said, “but also terribly afraid of losing him, and Noel was dependent on her. He was fond of Herta, but Noel’s eye roved. Herta adored him completely.” Noel was now frequently absent on “field trips” with Tempi, leaving Herta disconsolate. Unlike his dalliance with the sweet-tempered Zina Minor, the affair with this “terror of a woman” would exact a high price.
Noel soon hired Tempi to run USC’s clinic in Toulouse and, when Paris was liberated, to run their new office in the French capital. “I once asked Noel who were the people in his Unitarian outfit,” Paul Massing said. “ ‘Oh, well, they are Unitarians,’ he answered. ‘But in my office, I have only Communists. My right hand, Jo Tempi, is a Communist, and a good one.’ ” Some of his colleagues found it hard to tell if Jo worked for Noel or the other way around.
As the war ground on, Noel spent more and more time delivering messages between Communist exiles interned in France and those hiding in Switzerland—where the Communist Party was illegal. Together, Noel and his comrades dreamed and planned for a bright Communist future in their own countries, once the Nazis were defeated. Meanwhile, Noel did his best to keep them healthy, well fed, well funded, and connected to each other.
Until 1945, the Boston Unitarians were oblivious to Noel’s misuse of their philanthropy. Field’s reports reassured the USC that “With every day that passes,” as he wrote Dr. Joy on May 1, 1942, “we can point with increasing pride to the fact that we are an American organization and that the help we are giving has its source in America.”
In November 1942, as Allied forces landed in North Africa, German troops marched into Vichy France, making all of France part of the Third Reich. The roundup of Jews started immediately. Thousands of Jewish refugees were dragged from French internment camps, and deported and gassed by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Americans in Marseille were now enemy aliens—marched off to the same camps where the Fields had been helping others.
Minutes ahead of the Gestapo’s arrival, on November 10, Noel and Herta boarded the train from Marseille to Geneva. At Annemasse, the final French station before the Swiss border, Vichy police stopped the train. The Germans had instructed French gendarmes to detain all Americans. In a show of anti-Nazi defiance, however, the local French police chief offered the Fields his own car for a getaway. With its official Vichy tags and a French gendarme behind the wheel, the Fields tore past German roadblocks into Switzerland—and safety.
Mont Blanc’s icy peak peering through the clouds over Lake Geneva was a welcome sight after the Fields’ heart-stopping escape. Once safe in too-calm Switzerland, however, the couple felt strangely deflated—overcome with a realization that their most intense and productive period had just ended. Field had proved a resourceful, energetic, and inspiring leader where lives were at stake. At the same time, he felt immensely proud of his role in preparing for a postwar Communist Europe.