Both of us sought to forget the existence—the very names—of those we loved.
—Noel Field, letter to Erica
AROUND THE TIME Erica received the photograph of her children, Noel—still in custody—began a hunger strike. During four years as an inmate in various Budapest maximum-security prisons, he had never been charged with a crime, never faced a judge or jury. Nor did the Soviets ever intend to free him. Field—a ghostly shell of a man, an American—was too grave an indictment of the Soviet Union to expose to the world. Since the Soviets kept denying he was in their custody, Noel was kept in solitary confinement with only his Hungarian guards as his twice-daily sullen—and at times brutal—companions. Having served his purpose, Field was now a useless encumbrance.
On June 20, 1954, the despairing prisoner handed his guard a letter that contains the almost unbearable depth of Field’s private agony—as well as his extraordinary love of Herta. “After long personal struggle,” he addressed his interrogator, Major Kretschmer, “I have decided to turn to you with a question, I decided years ago not to ask, partly out of fear that I would not be told the truth, partly out of fear of hearing the truth. . . . I am putting this in writing to avoid a mutually uncomfortable situation, and also because I don’t want to see the answer on your face. So, for that reason I ask that you also put the answer in writing, which I can read when I am alone. The question: Is my wife alive or not? . . . Just so you understand the significance of this question, I add my autobiography’s most significant fact—something I barely touched on in my confession: that since age nine . . . I have loved one and the same woman.”
He had also begun a hunger strike. To stop him, his Hungarian captors made a deal with Noel: resume eating and we will review your case. “Write to the Soviet authorities,” he was told, “Maybe you’ll get a new hearing.” So Noel did. During the spring of 1954, Noel wrote a sixty-five-page letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Without a trace of anger for the terrible wrongs he had suffered, drenched in wretched humility, the letter makes painful reading. Field still grovels before authority, still pleads to be let into the magic circle of the party that degraded and brutalized him.
“Honored Comrades!” he addresses the people who came within a breath of destroying him, his wife, and his family, “I am not asking for my freedom,” he assures them. “My future life has no sense or meaning—it is broken—and at age fifty it holds no real appeal for me.” Field then tells his “honored Comrades” that his case cannot be honestly aired because “imperialists and warmongers” would only exploit it for their own purposes. Thus, he humbly asks for the party to allow him and his old comrades [for he is unaware of their fate] to return to the good graces of the party, and live as good Communists. Field outlines how loyally he has served the party, and accepts total blame for his punishment. He faults himself for lack of “Communist character” to withstand torture. Everything is his fault. “We are Communists,” he declares, “not traitors.” He calls himself a “pathological coward” but one who never betrayed the cause. Everything he ever did, from working in the State Department, to his humanitarian work rescuing refugees, was for a single cause: the party. Perhaps the most bizarre part of the letter is that Field declares himself a loyal American.
Finally, Field requests a new investigation of his case—not for himself, but for the party’s own good. This, he tells his Soviet comrades, would “fulfill my final, most sacred duty.” No faith could ask for a deeper submission.
Field’s reprieve came not from Moscow, but from Washington. On September 28, 1954, the man who supervised the arrest and torture of Noel and Hermann Field appeared in a State Department auditorium and faced the world media. In a CIA-organized news conference, Josef Swiatlo, reviled Polish secret police agent, awkward in his ill-fitting new suit, stunned the press with his announcement. The Field family was alive, Swiatlo said. Unaccustomed to the harsh lights now aimed at him, the former torturer admitted that the charges against the Fields were fake, and that their imprisonment was a travesty of justice. He spoke with authority, Swiatlo assured the astonished reporters, because he had interrogated the Field brothers.
Josef Swiatlo’s own escape from the East could have been lifted from the pages of a John le Carré thriller. While on a West Berlin shopping trip the prior December, Swiatlo slipped away from his Polish delegation and turned up at the American embassy in Berlin. He requested, and was granted, political asylum in the United States. An extremely high-value defector, Swiatlo had been confined to a CIA safe house outside Washington for nine months of debriefing prior to his press conference.
Even as Swiatlo related details of the Fields’ incarcerations, the State Department filed notes of protest to Budapest, Warsaw, and Moscow, demanding the immediate release of Noel, Herta, Hermann, and Erica. As reporters rushed to file their stories, Swiatlo, under heavy guard, was quietly whisked out of the State Department. Under a new identity as part of a witness protection program, he disappeared forever.
Swiatlo’s announcement, and the Radio Free Europe broadcasts to the Soviet empire that accompanied it, roiled the already choppy waters of post-Stalin Eastern Europe. In Budapest, American ambassador Christian Ravndal delivered a note to the Foreign Ministry, demanding to see Noel and Herta Field. At the Fő Utca maximum-security prison, a redbrick fortress on the Buda side of the Danube, a startled Noel was rushed from his cell, shaved, and showered. “I am led to a large office,” Noel recalled. “I am solemnly told that I am free. My mind does not take it in. ‘My wife, where is she?’ I manage to stammer. ‘You shall see her in a few minutes.’ Tears now, the first in years. In a little while the door opens and in its frame stands she who has been part of my life since the age of nine.”
Two shell-shocked survivors, Herta and Noel, faced mirror images of each other, a gaunt, gray-haired, ghostly pale couple who had been robbed of middle age, relieved now that they were both alive, their devotion to each other and to their faith intact. “Have you remained true?” Noel asked his wife. “Yes,” she answered, “never for one moment have I doubted.” “Nor I,” Noel answered. Then, turning to the guards, he asked, “Is Stalin still alive?” “No,” he was told. “He died more than a year ago.” The Fields were shaken by sobs.
When told of Noel’s first words to Herta, “Have you remained true [to our cause]?” Erica was shocked. “This is not the man I knew,” she said. “Not a word about the lives ruined? Those killed or forced into suicide? This is just a Party man. The human being has disappeared.”
On October 28, 1954, Noel and Herta Field walked out of the Fő Utca Prison. But they were not free.
“They must guarantee their loyalty to the Hungarian Republic,” read a memo from the minister of the interior, László Piros, “and that after their release they will make such a declaration in front of journalists and condemn the American government’s policy of war and announce their desire to settle in Hungary. They must guarantee that they won’t seek any relationship with the American or other capitalist country’s embassies.”
Hermann, also suddenly freed after his five-year ordeal in a Warsaw dungeon, wanted only to be reunited with Kate and the sons he barely knew. Not for a minute did he wish that reunion to take place in the country that had imprisoned him without ever charging him with any crime. “I first got the news [of Noel’s release] over the radio,” Hermann recalled. “Hungary had released Noel and Herta. Had this event been timed to upset my plans once more? Instead of relief and joy,” he said, “I felt a kind of resentment. . . . [But] no—nothing would delay my departure [from Warsaw] at this late point, not even Noel’s being freed, not even his need for me.”
Prison freed Hermann of his illusions about a system that promised everything and delivered jail, torture, and total control over its population. His older brother’s power over him would take longer to shed.