Old Joe Stalin certainly knows how to play for keeps.
—Alger Hiss
THREE AMERICANS HAD vanished without a trace—and no one seemed to be doing anything on their behalf. To Erica, the last free member of Noel’s immediate family, this was incomprehensible. Noel and Herta had rescued her in Spain, and then helped to raise her when her parents could not. That was not a debt Erica would leave unpaid.
A year after their disappearance, with only silence from Washington, Moscow, Prague, and Warsaw, Erica—the mother now of an infant and a toddler—decided to take matters into her own hands. She had a powerful contact in the German Communist Party, Leo Bauer, who had first pulled her into clandestine work during the war. She now wrote Bauer, asking for help in finding the Fields. Erica asked to meet Leo in Frankfurt, in the Western sector. Bauer wrote back saying he had interesting news regarding the Fields, but asked her to come to East Berlin. The State Department offered her security for her trip East. Washington, too, was interested in information about three missing American citizens. Erica turned them down. She could handle things better unencumbered by security. She would find out from Leo what happened to the Fields, and be back in France with Bob and her two babies in a couple of days.
Checking into the Hotel am Zoo off Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, Erica was suddenly gripped by anxiety. “I saw my bed in that room,” she wrote, “and I had just one desire: to crawl in and pull the blanket over me.” But she steeled herself. “Why should anything happen?” she asked. “Nothing ever happened before. . . . You go,” she urged herself on, and took the subway to East Berlin, crossing from the Western into the Eastern sector at the Brandenburg Gate.
The once buzzing intersection was now quiet. Erica could barely recognize Berlin’s prewar landmarks. The burned-out shell of the Reichstag, and the bare bones of the former great department stores, were still visible. But Cyrillic graffiti was scrawled on the walls of Hitler’s foreign ministry, and red flags flew along Unter den Linden. A year after the Berlin Airlift, she read tension on the set features of the uniformed guards she passed. A tall, elegant woman, tanned from her Riviera vacation of a few days before, in a well-cut suit and high heels, was a remarkable sight in East Berlin in August 1950. Soldiers in Soviet-style uniforms along the Wilhelm Strasse appraised her with hard looks. There were no idle strollers on the streets, and the echo of her heels on the deserted pavement amplified Erica’s anxiety. But she kept walking. She knew if she hesitated, she would turn back. She was determined and, as she later said, “my arrogant self.”
When she reached Communist Party headquarters off Unter den Linden, she passed smoothly through several checkpoints. In the lobby, she was informed that Leo Bauer had already left for the weekend. Striding out to the sidewalk, she released all the tension she had contained since her arrival. She had done her best for the Fields—she could return to her family with a clear conscience. To celebrate, she bought a lemonade from a street vendor. That was when she heard steps behind her. She did not turn around because she knew. A hand on her shoulder signaled that she would not be leaving. “Kriminal Polizei,” the voice said.
Thus began Erica Wallach’s own journey through the Gulag Archipelago—for that is where she was eventually dispatched. But Erica was a radically different inmate from the man she had tried and failed to rescue. The same qualities that led her into the Soviets’ trap—her cocksure self-confidence, her fierce pride, her disdain for authority, and her contempt for dogma—proved powerful survival weapons.
Station one on her journey was cell 7 in an old Nazi fortress—the notorious Schumannstrasse Prison. “Tell me,” Erica taunted her first German interrogator, “are there always Russians present?” She knew this was a sensitive point, since Germany was supposed to be a sovereign state. But from her first session, she noticed “a Russian sitting at the table . . . in civilian clothes, a well fed, well dressed, well groomed intellectual type, with gold-rimmed glasses. . . . He never said a word, carried on his conversations with the Germans in writing, on little scraps of paper, pushed back and forth.”
Erica, like Noel, was asked to name all the German Communists she had known in Switzerland. She was flatly informed she had “turned them all into American agents”; she had given them “espionage instructions” when they became high officials in Germany. Her wry retort—“I never knew what a successful seducer I was”—did not amuse her interrogators. But she never lost her sharp wit or her sense of the ridiculous. “I shall soon develop a superiority complex,” she mocked an agent she dubbed “Caraway.” “Just think of it,” she told him. “There were all these old [Communist] war horses, with years of training and experience, who went through hell and persecution. . . . And then one day, they meet a little nineteen-year-old girl, and she just waves her hand and the fighters for a better tomorrow follow her blindly!”
She was still their prisoner, and would be for five years, but Erica declared her freedom from the start. Unlike Noel Field—or the broken Bolsheviks in the Budapest courtroom—she could laugh at their ludicrous fantasies because she was not—and never had been—a believer. To Erica, the party was not holy; it was cruel and ridiculous.
By giving her jailers nicknames, she diminished their power over her. Of a particularly brutal Russian interrogator she dubbed “Ivan the Terrible,” she said, “A scent of peaches surrounded him. Russian men love perfume . . . especially fruit perfume. . . . I knew from former experience how accustomed the Russians in East Germany had become to the submissive attitude of the Master Race toward their present rulers . . . but I was not going to give him the pleasure.”
Gradually, Erica began to understand why she was their prisoner. “The spy Field,” as Noel was called by her jailers, had “bought” her from her parents while he was spying in Spain. “It was not quite clear,” she wrote, “whether I had already been a spy in my own right, at the tender age of fourteen, when I started to ‘infiltrate’ the International Brigades in Spain, or whether Field had schooled me for special services in Switzerland . . . and then made me his top agent. . . . It was up to me to choose.”
Erica’s deep longing for her children ultimately shattered her defiance. “All I had to say was that I had been a naughty American spy,” she reasoned with herself, “and I was sorry, and wouldn’t do it again and everyone would be happy. What difference,” she concluded, “as long as I could get back to my children or at least hear that they were all right?”
“I was an American spy!” she blurted out at the end of a long night’s session. But even this lie was not enough to end her ordeal. It was one thing to implicate herself. She still refused what they most wanted from her: to name her “coconspirators.”
“Five days and five nights without one minute of sleep,” she recalled, “without once stretching out for even a second, with cold cabbage soup . . . and icy nights of mental and physical torture. . . . Every morning it was harder for me to walk back to my cell. The fifth morning, I was no longer able to stand up straight, and it took me an endless time to creep down the halls, my back bent . . . edging along the walls.”
For two and a half years she resisted. Two days before Christmas in 1952, Erica Glaser Wallach was tried before a military tribunal in Berlin’s Lichtenberg Prison, in the prison chapel with portraits of Lenin and Stalin as the new icons. She had neither a defense counsel nor any witnesses. Her codefendant was Leo Bauer, the man who had lured her to East Berlin—now accused of the same crimes. In the final words granted the accused, Erica said she would not defend herself against absurd charges. “The Spanish experience,” she told the tribunal, “was something so decent and so clean that . . . I would let no one, not even the Soviet Union, drag it into the mud. You have taken everything away from me: decency, fairness, and belief itself. Leave me at least one thing I can hold on to.”
The tribunal was unimpressed. Erica and Leo were sentenced to death by shooting.
Only once she was marched back to her cell did the full force of her sentence hit her. “Death,” she thought. “That meant not only the end of my life when I had barely begun it, it meant that I would never again see my children, my husband, my mother . . . never again taste all the beautiful things life has to offer. . . . Nothing ever again.”
Now, awaiting death, she reviewed her improbable life of thirty-one years and twenty-nine homes, and considered the journey well worth it. “I had known the luxuries and carefree pleasures of semi-feudal life in Pomerania; privations, hardships, and strenuous work in Spain and the rewarding, gratifying feeling of dedication; I had tasted the exciting life of a student in Switzerland, poor and hungry most of the time, spending my little bit of money on art, music, books, philosophy, politics, love, friendship. And I had met the cruelty and the ordeal human beings go through in order to exist.”
Erica thus faced death squarely, and did not buckle. Nor did she offer up names to save herself. She waited for her death sentence to be carried out. “I lived a full, almost complete life during this eternal year. Acquaintances were timidly struck up, friendships developed, even love affairs ensued—all through the thick prison wall. To keep my balance, I followed a rigorous schedule for the entire day. I had learned to judge the time almost perfectly, and I kept strictly to my hours, from the ten-minute exercises in the early morning, to writing poetry and books in my head in the evening. I made myself review all the knowledge I had ever acquired, and went back to school, with regular half-hour lessons each of French, English, Latin, history. . . . I composed thirty-six poems in prison, which later I was able to write down without hesitation. . . . I made menus for a week of freedom. . . . I composed songs for my children and I played chess.” Behind the high walls of her Berlin prison, Erica declared her freedom. She even managed to connect with other prisoners, despite the walls separating them.
One of Erica’s fellow inmates in the cellar where she awaited her death sentence, Curt Pohl, recalled their intense, life-saving interaction. “Can you still remember?” he wrote to her once he was free and living in West Germany. “Narrow corridor in the NKVD cellar, dim light, foul air, mysterious sounds, and a wall too thick to always understand the knocking signs? True, you already understood everything. . . . Nevertheless I managed to remember: ‘Inform Robert, Hopefield, Warrenton, Virginia, USA.’ I was almost happy being your neighbor, and forgot where I was. Indeed, I firmly believed I would soon be freed, and I wanted to do everything from my home-town for my courageous ‘neighbor.’ I thought of your two children who were deprived of their mother in such a cruel fashion. Perhaps you remember that I was very worried about my pregnant wife, and you knocked consoling words from your cell. That calmed me down for quite a while. . . . That house of cards was knocked down when I was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. . . . How I missed your consoling knocking . . . but I was already in Vorkuta in the Capital Mine. . . . I secretly feared for your life since you always ‘knocked’ the notion of ‘international case.’ ”
Meanwhile, Erica’s husband waged a desperate search for his wife. A University of Virginia graduate whose taste in women had previously run to blond socialites, Robert Wallach never wavered in his five-year campaign to find and free Erica. “Once you’ve been married to Erica,” Wallach told his sister Hope Porter, “you can never be married to anyone else.” On August 29, a distraught Wallach wrote his mother-in-law, Marie Therese Glaser, “I haven’t yet decided what to do as far as the children are concerned,” he wrote. “They are all you and I have left now.” The following month, on September 23, 1950, Wallach again wrote Mrs. Glaser, “If, as U.S. officials believe, Erica is still in Germany, the only thing that can be done is to arrange an escape. This, they say has been done more than once, and though it requires the payment of tremendous sums of money, they assured me that they would make every effort,” he wrote Erica’s mother, adding ominously, “If, however, they found that she is no longer in Germany, they think that there is little if any hope.”
Cruelty and paranoia had their mirror image on the other side of the East-West divide. On February 9, 1950, Republican senator from Wisconsin Joseph R. McCarthy, speaking in Wheeling, West Virginia, launched a ghastly era. “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department,” McCarthy told the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club, “named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as members of the Communist Party, and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”
Erica’s distraught husband fell victim to the State Department’s hysteria. Later that fall, while Erica was still held in Berlin’s Schumannstrasse prison, American authorities gave Bob Wallach forty-eight hours to leave Germany. “No reason whatsoever was given,” Wallach wrote his mother-in-law. “Nor am I told where this order originates. My passport has been restricted to France and Switzerland, which implies that it is perhaps the State Department which is behind everything. You can imagine what this means—having to leave Germany.” It meant giving up his quest to rescue his wife.
“What happened to you,” Noel’s younger sister, Elsie, an Urbana, Illinois–based physician, wrote Wallach on November 24, “is incredible and abominable. . . . For a year and a half, Kate Field and I have been trying to convince [the State Department] that none of the Fields disappeared voluntarily. I thought we had finally been listened to, but apparently not. . . . Every time I go to Washington there are fewer and fewer of my former friends . . . because of this infernal red hysteria.”
On the first anniversary of Erica’s disappearance, her husband, back in Virginia, wrote her mother, “It is now almost a year since our Erica vanished—the loss, temporary though it may be, becomes more painful as time goes on. It is only the children that keep me back, even though I realize that any personal efforts of my own would be futile.”
Wallach closes with a powerful reminder of just how high the cost to the Field family Noel’s disastrous life choices had become. “Elsie Field was here again last week,” he wrote. “She has given up her doctor’s practice, and travels the country seeing influential people, and trying to do what she can to persuade the State Department to move vigorously.”
A year later Elsie Field—now working full-time on her brothers’ cases—again wrote Wallach. “Kate [Field] and I have been getting absolutely nowhere. After submitting our reports and pleas to [George] Kennan [a Soviet specialist at the State Department] and getting assurances that Kennan would explore the situation for possible approaches to the Soviet Union, the State Department let us know that Kennan did not consider it in the best interest of this country or our people to open up the subject in Moscow. And now he got himself kicked out [in September 1952, Kennan was declared persona non grata, five months after he arrived as ambassador, for comparing the Soviets to the Nazis.]” Elsie closed on a note of despair; “The Department has told me that it can make no further approaches to any other country unless we come up with some new evidence; and this we are unable to do.”
Nonetheless, Bob Wallach continued to pressure the State Department. “I went to the State Department,” he wrote Mrs. Glaser on November 20, 1952, “and made another request that they at least ask the Russian authorities for information. I believe that when the Republicans take over the Government, there is at least a chance that they will do this. The Democrats are of course terrified of doing anything for anybody connected to the CP.”
But by late 1952, Erica was no longer in Berlin. Shipped to Moscow for execution, she was held in a “death cell” for six months. Then, on March 5, 1953: the miracle. The Little Father of the People breathed his last. Though Stalin’s death did not result in the immediate end of the Gulag Archipelago, executions became more rare, and the inmates’ lives somewhat less brutal. Instead of being shot by a firing squad, Erica was dispatched to the most punishing of all the stations of the Gulag. Reserved for the toughest criminals, Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle, was where Erica Wallach discovered her real strength.
Behind three rows of barbed wire, under the relentless gaze of soldiers from four watchtowers, in the biting frost of the Arctic winter, Erica rarely saw the sun. With her fellow convicts, she laid railroad ties in subzero temperatures. Somehow, she more than merely survived this punishing regimen; she was strengthened and humanized by it. Her relationships with her fellow inmates—and even her guards—were based on an honesty unimaginable to those outside the barbed wire in the Soviet Union. There is a stunning contrast between the grotesque lies she and Noel and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet prisoners were forced to concoct as “confessions” and Erica’s blunt yet human interactions in the frigid Vorkuta bunkhouses.
In a vodka-fueled outburst, one of Erica’s guards recklessly confessed how much he hated his job, and said he, not Erica, was the real prisoner. “In a wave of affection,” Erica recalled, “I drew off my gloves and took his head in both my hands. . . . ‘Misha,’ I said in my limited Russian, ‘you are a good man. . . . You must not do anything foolish. You are not the only one whose eyes have been opened here. Things are different now. A lot has changed already, and you can speed the process.” The irony of the inmate trying to lift the guard’s spirits is rich.
Real change arrived at a glacial pace to the labor camp. At the end of 1953, Erica was finally allowed to write her family for the first time. “Dear Bob,” she wrote on a postcard addressed from Vorkuta Barracks, “So happy to be able to write for Xmas. I am healthy and well (have gotten fat). Honestly, you need not worry. Only a terrible longing for you all. Please write detailed news about yourself, the children and mother. . . . I want her to know how sorry I am for having caused her such suffering. I do hope I’ll soon get home and be able to make good a little bit. I have been thinking continuously about my darling children. Please send pictures of all of you. . . . Can’t wait to hear from you. Please hurry and I’ll hurry to get home.”
For her mother, this first sign that her daughter was alive was a moment of pure joy. “I recognize my child very well in this letter,” she wrote Bob on April 23, 1954, “the sweet, affectionate little girl she was before Hitler ruined our home. . . . She never had a teenager’s carefree youth,” Erica’s mother noted, adding bitterly, “In Switzerland, she was under Noel’s influence.” But, she warned Bob, “Be prepared for a changed woman. The years of being treated as a criminal, mistrusted by people . . . of course she longs for love and understanding. We must not fail her. . . . If only I could take her in my arms. I know what it means to lose everything in life . . . Erica is a broken woman.”
Her mother underestimated her daughter. Erica was miraculously unbroken. She was buoyed by her first letter from her family and—best of all—a photograph. “The photograph showed two children standing in front of a fireplace, a little boy of four, and a six-year-old girl,” she said. “Both were very blond, both looked happy and healthy. Both were complete strangers to me.”
Her release, however, did not come. Her mother continued to send heartbreaking pleas for help to everyone, from the members of the Soviet Politburo to the Archbishop of Canterbury. “I appeal to you to grant the release of my daughter,” Therese Glaser wrote in 1954, “the only surviving member of my family. . . . We were formerly refugees from Nazi oppression. . . . I lost my only son, killed in action while serving as a Captain in the last British air battle in April 1945. My husband died three years later. My daughter Erica is all that is left to me.” The Archbishop’s secretary sent a polite form letter expressing His Lordship’s regret.
At last, in September 1955, Erica was shipped to Moscow, to the notorious Lubyanka Prison, to begin her “rehabilitation.” The KGB officer charged with her case listed all the spurious charges for which she had been sentenced to death, and asked her to plead guilty or innocent. Erica, ever straightforward, pleaded innocent to all charges except one: “Propaganda and Agitation against the Soviet Union.” “I criticized the Soviet Union,” Erica bluntly admitted. “Well, then,” Agent Gorbunov replied, “tell me what you don’t like about our country.” “The lack of freedom to say, write, paint, and compose,” she answered. “I do not like that.” Give examples, he said. “There are so many, I can’t remember them all. . . .” Erica cited Shostakovich and Picasso as two great artists vilified by the Soviet Union. How good it felt to speak plainly to power that seemed actually to listen.
Gorbunov had one other piece of business to take up with the inmate: a letter from Noel Field, recently freed in Budapest.
“Dear Kid,” Field wrote, “You are always in our thoughts and hearts. Please let us hear from you. Hoping to see you soon. Noel and Herta.”
As always, Noel had more than one agenda in mind. “It is more than likely,” Field wrote his Hungarian minder, Comrade Toth, “that Erica is being torn by conflicting loyalties and that this will be exploited in the interest of the ‘Cold War’ advocates. We have no idea what Erica’s present outlook is, but if there is any chance of influencing her in a positive direction, we should like to contribute toward this aim, especially since we fear that the other members of her family will drag her in the opposite direction.”
The idea that the man who was the cause of her five-year Soviet captivity now wanted to keep her there is almost beyond belief. When told that Noel Field was living in Hungary, and offered her a home there, Erica reacted sharply. “Hungary!” she exclaimed, “What in God’s name is he doing there?” “I was not only surprised,” she wrote, “I was upset.”
“Where do you want to go, then?” Gorbunov asked. “The United States,” she answered, “where my family is.”
“All that is left for me to do then,” the KGB officer said, “is to apologize. In the name of the Soviet Government, I have to ask you to accept our honest apologies. . . . We took five years of your life and there is no way to give them back to you.” Erica accepted his apology, but turned down Gorbunov’s offer of monetary compensation.
She did ask for one thing. “After I was sentenced, they took all my belongings,” she told Gorbunov, “including my wedding ring. I want the ring back.” The ring, however, was lost. Erica would not relent. She was not leaving without her wedding ring. “I waited around for three weeks . . . I would ask them every day about it. Finally,” she said, “one day, they found it.” She began her homeward journey the following day.