Here they hang a man first, and then they try him.
—Molière
TWO WEEKS AFTER her husband vanished, Herta had not alerted anyone, least of all any Americans. She blamed Washington for his disappearance. If not the FBI, she reasoned, then perhaps Moscow had reactivated Noel as agent, which of course she must not reveal either. With each day without news, her anxiety mounted, however. It wasn’t like Noel to be out of touch for more than a few days. “She was very secretive about it,” Hélène Matthey, with whom Herta was staying in Geneva, recalled. “But I told her, that if she was going to be my guest and my friend, I couldn’t help her if she wouldn’t say what was worrying her.” Herta, like Noel, was practiced at keeping things to herself.
On May 22, 1949, Herta wrote to Noel at the Palace Hotel. The letter was intercepted by Czech security services and passed along to Budapest, where I found it in the Hungarian secret police archives. It is a heartbreaking account of a woman at the very edge of despair. It is yet another example of the breathtaking depth of Stalinist cruelty.
“It’s a long time since I have had news from thee, dearest,” his wife wrote. “These past ten days seem like so many weeks, a small eternity. First I thought I would wait with writing till I had heard from thee. But thee may come back to the hotel, where I imagine my previous letters are waiting for thee and then thee will be upset if thee finds no recent news. . . . It is not like thee to keep me waiting like this,” Herta wrote plaintively of the longest separation of their two and a half decades of marriage. “In my imagination I saw thee run over by a car, sick in a hospital, burned to death in a hotel fire. . . . I called the Palace Hotel and [was told] thee had left without leaving an address. So the hotel had not burned down, it did not sound like sickness or accident and I calmed down considerably . . . and decided that I had better just wait patiently til thee is going to communicate with me again. . . . I read a lot and go for very long walks, to smooth my ruffled tranquility and to make the days go a little faster. And my thoughts are with thee all the time, dear, beloved husband. Ever thine, Herta.”
“Finally,” Matthey recalled, “Herta announced, ‘I’m going to Prague. I would rather be in prison with Noel in Prague, than be free here in Switzerland.’ ”
Herta asked Hermann to go with her. Noel’s brother was in Italy, leading a tour of architects around war-devastated sites. He had just accepted the job of dean of the School of Architecture at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He and Kate and their two young sons were soon to leave for America. But Herta pleaded with Hermann to help her search for Noel. Reluctantly, Hermann agreed.
They met in Prague on August 4, 1949. Making the rounds to several ministries, Czech officials promised they would investigate Field’s mysterious disappearance, and told the Fields to come back in a week.
To pass the time, Hermann decided to visit his architect friends, Szymon and Helena Syrkus, in Warsaw. Mr. and Mrs. Syrkus were obliged to report to their local party official the American’s visit. Another Field, in another Soviet satellite planning its own show trial, was an unexpected gift for Moscow. Warsaw was ordered to gear up for Hermann’s visit.
After a week spent looking at war destruction in Warsaw, Hermann was dropped off by his friends at the Warsaw airport for his return flight to Prague. He passed passport control and cleared customs. Then a porter politely ushered Hermann to a special departure room. Field assumed the room was for VIPs. Instead, Hermann was greeted by an unsmiling, heavyset man blinking behind thick horn-rimmed glasses: Josef Swiatlo, deputy head of the notorious Department 10 of the Polish Ministry of Public Security. “Just a few questions, Mr. Field,” Swiatlo said. “Please follow me.” Annoyed but not unduly concerned, Hermann assumed he would be queried about photographing unauthorized sites. He did not ask to see anyone from the American embassy before he was bundled into the back of a van with blacked-out windows and driven to Warsaw’s secret police headquarters, from there to Miedzeszyn, a dungeon in Warsaw’s outskirts, and oblivion.
Hermann’s Prague-bound plane took off without him. Mr. and Mrs. Syrkus, who had dropped him off at the airport, were arrested within days. The Moscow-ordered purge of Polish “Fieldists” was under way. For the seemingly innocuous act of handing Noel’s letter to her boss, Jakub Berman, Anna Duracz—age twenty-five—was arrested on October 15, 1949, as a “Fieldist.” She survived an attempted suicide, was eventually freed, and quit the Communist Party shortly thereafter.
Herta stood for a long time on the tarmac of the Prague airport, eyes fixed on passengers disembarking from Warsaw, waiting for Hermann. The airline had told her that though his name was on the flight manifest, no one had seen him board the plane.
Seized now by panic, Herta wrote Hermann’s wife, telling Kate that her husband, too, had gone missing. On August 26, 1949, three months after Noel vanished, Kate Field called the American embassy in London. It was the first word the US government had of the disappearance behind the Iron Curtain of two American citizens.
The same day, the Czech secret police received Moscow’s order to arrest Herta Field, still in Prague. Agents now called on Herta at the Palace Hotel and told her that they had located her husband in a hospital, in Bratislava. The agents offered to drive her there. Unlike her husband, she needed no chloroform for the drive to the Slovak capital. “You’re going to your husband,” her guards assured her. “We have promised him so.” “I had the impression,” she later said, “that this reunion would take place in the next few days. The guard even said, ‘We let you come to help your husband.’ ”
In Bratislava, Herta was handed over to Hungarian agents. By day’s end, she was prisoner of the villa on Eötvös Utca. Instead of a reunion with Noel, her interrogator told her, “Your husband is a criminal. You are in our hands. . . . You cannot live in America or the West . . . but [if you cooperate] you can live here.” She was unaware that she and Noel were under the same roof. She was merely told Noel’s life depended on her “good behavior.” In her cell, she “imagined” hearing Noel nearby—which, indeed, he was. “I heard my husband groan,” she said later. “A heavy, shuddering groan, as if he were in great pain. It seemed to come from the floor above. . . . One night, my husband was placed in the cell next to mine. He woke up, as he often does from dreams, with little moans. I heard him say, ‘All gone, all gone.’ ”
After a few weeks of interrogation at the villa, Herta was moved twice more. Most cruelly, she, like Noel, was kept in solitary confinement—for their capture was too explosive to risk exposure. Around Christmastime in 1953, Herta experienced a moment of searing heartache. “I had asked the prison doctor to give me my glasses back,” she recalled. “The commanding officer showed me a pair of glasses and asked me if they were mine. . . . The glasses were my husband’s. I recognized them by their peculiar gold frame and their green tinted lenses.”
One wonders what went through their guards’ minds, as they shuffled from the despairing Noel to the broken Herta driven nearly insane with worry and longing, three cells away.
In the light of all we know about the Stalinist capacity for brutality, the Fields’ pursuit of Noel straight into the monster’s maw now seems incomprehensible. What were Herta and Hermann thinking as, like lambs to slaughter, they made themselves available for victimhood in Budapest and Warsaw? The answer is, first, that we benefit from a hindsight they could not draw on. Second, they were sympathetic to the stated goals of the Soviet system, and dangerously naïve about its ruthlessness. Herta, moreover, would have followed Noel anywhere.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. captured Hermann’s innocence prior to his imprisonment. Lecturing in Cleveland in 1948, Schlesinger had a chance encounter with Hermann. “Henry Wallace had just announced his presidential candidacy,” Schlesinger recalled. “I found myself embroiled in an increasingly angry argument with the Fields [Kate and Hermann]. Hermann was glowingly and naïvely enthusiastic about the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe and bitterly critical of ‘pro-fascists’ in the State Department. Identifying communism with city planning and land reform, he was cheerfully oblivious of any machinery of repression and terror. Hermann Field,” he notes, “was no Communist himself but a hopeful liberal whose Quakerism would not permit him to see evil in people who, like Communists, professed good.”
There was one other equally strong motive for Hermann to temporarily abandon his wife and two young sons to cross the Iron Curtain in search of his brother. He admired Noel, six years his senior, and considered him a role model and father figure. “The moment in 1921,” he recalled, “when I was eleven, when everything changed, with my father’s premature death, Noel became my mentor, determined that my father’s Quaker humanism should continue to guide us as a family. The image of Noel,” he mused, “before we left [Switzerland] in 1922 addressing a student ‘No More War’ rally in the big hall of our villa overlooking the lake and the Alps. . . . Me, the kid brother, sitting on the fringes, but listening, absorbing, Noel emerging from Harvard as an authority on world disarmament.” Thus, Hermann, the loyal and admiring younger sibling, made easy prey.
From the depths of despair in the dungeon outside Warsaw, which would be his home for five years, Hermann reflected on his fate. “Was this to be the end of my life as I had known it?” he wondered. “Were Kate and the boys in Cleveland—and America itself—gradually to become distant memories, part of a wonder that once was called life? . . . How blind of me not to have seen the writing on the wall. . . . Don’t worry [he had told those who tried to warn him to be careful]. What could anyone have against me?”
It never occurred to Hermann Field that as an American probing around Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe in 1949, he had crossed into enemy territory, and that it was not personal. He was not only the enemy, he could be extremely useful. In party jargon, Hermann was referred to as a “useful idiot.” Now, in the inhuman silence of his freezing cell, he had time to “search for a clue.” “Images of my brother enveloped me,” Hermann recalled. “Noel at the State Department . . . at the League of Nations. Noel in Paris the last time I had seen him, in 1947 . . . depressed.” Hermann realized how little he actually knew the brother for whom he had given up his freedom.