I met many people in the camp who managed to combine a shrewd sense of what was going on in the country . . . with a religious cult of Stalin.
—Eugenia Ginzburg
WAS IT A final shot of cruelty on the part of the Hungarian authorities that Noel and Herta’s first night of freedom should be spent in the same hilltop villa where they were tortured five years earlier? This time, however, the Fields were provided a comfortable apartment and—without blackout curtains and blindfolds—a spectacular panorama of the Danube below. For the first time, the Fields appraised the city where they had spent the past five and half years. They had seen nothing of this exotic place, with its amalgam of Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque architectural styles—all blended into a wholly different esthetic called Magyar.
As the secret police records reveal, however, they were far from free. Also clear is that in the minutely calibrated Cold War chess game, with two Western prizes at stake, Moscow had an unbeatable advantage. The Kremlin was privy to the Fields’ most “private” thoughts. The transcripts of their taped conversations capture every sigh and moan as the sleepless couple compare prison experiences.
“You don’t want to go home,” Herta whispers to her husband on October 29, 1954. (Did they perhaps suspect they were being recorded? The listeners express frustration at the Fields’ low voices and their nearly incomprehensible blend of English and German.) “And neither do I.” “It would make no sense,” Noel replies. “I read Stalin’s collected speeches,” Herta tells her husband. “Do you think it’s possible for a great hero to die?” she asks. They exchange stories of humane jailers and cruel ones. Noel speaks of the great changes since 1949, when a hunger strike would have only earned him extra beatings, instead of a chance at “rehabilitation.” On November 12, the recorder picks up Herta’s enthusiastic “It always gives me such a thrill,” she tells Noel, “when they call me ‘Comrade’!” She seems the stronger of the two now, and her role is to prop him up. “I have no future,” Noel moans. “My life is over.” “How can you say such a thing?” Herta rebukes her husband. “That we have no future? That is not in my vocabulary!”
Late at night, holding each other, the microphone records the Fields’ incoherent sobs as they recall their worst moments of captivity. “Those tortures,” Noel whispers, “those terrible tortures.” “Oh, I know,” his wife says, comforting him. “But Noel,” she said, “somehow you have to find the will to live.” After a lifetime by his side, she knows how to rouse Noel from the depths of despair. “You cannot die here,” she declares. “What do you think the Western press would do with that? They are all our enemies.” Stay alive for the cause that nearly killed us both, is her bizarre message. Herta, whose adoration and admiration of Noel since early childhood knew no bounds, had always expected great things to come his way. Now she bitterly recalled their pre-jail humiliation, and blamed America for the time when, as penniless fugitives, they lived in fear of an FBI subpoena. After five years in a Communist prison, she had no desire to face American justice. Listening to these late-night conversations, the Hungarian authorities and their Moscow minders hatched their plan.
Soon, the Fields were moved to a villa of their own. Perched on a steep hill, 38 Meredek Utca was the ideal location for a pair of soon-to-be defectors in whom Moscow and Budapest still had little confidence. There was little chance of a random encounter on Meredek Utca. Even today it is eerily quiet, without shops, restaurants, or street life. An owl’s hoot and a dog’s distant bark are all that break the perfect stillness of midday. The hum of the sprawling metropolis in the distance is muffled. Behind a high iron gate, the Fields’ modernistic house is a graceless hulk of poured concrete. A full complement of secret police agents posing as “staff” moved in with the Fields. Even during Noel and Herta’s frequent stays in various hospitals, they were taped, their telephone bugged.
A top secret internal memorandum, addressed to Minister of the Interior László Piros and dated November 1, 1954, outlines just how little actual freedom the newly freed Fields enjoyed:
We have fulfilled the following tasks:
Villa on Szabadsag [Freedom!] Hill with a garden, which will ensure the couple can stroll unseen and isolated from the outside world.
The following team will supervise them: Rudolf Nagy—whose cover will be that he is there to help with household chores, errands. etc.
We will also place hidden guards on the Villa premises. The guards are forbidden from communicating with the couple.
Dr. Laszlo Bence [an AVO officer] will supervise their health.
For now, we advise good cooking, to be provided by the Comrade Janitor’s wife, who will also clean.
Regarding reading matter: all languages, but only those available in the East Bloc.
No permission for radio or press for now.
Record player and records are all right.
Captain Tibor Metzler, who speaks perfect German, is a good conversationalist, and was head of intelligence in Vienna, should handle the couple’s political indoctrination.
Comrade Captain Mrs. Molnar, age 32, will be assigned to Mrs. Field.
Captain Metzler and Captain Molnar are to spend 3–4 hours a day with the Fields.
Their assignment: to assure the couple’s loyalty, to assure that they express criticism of the US warmongering to journalists—which is why they wish to live in Hungary.
To assure that the couple do not contact any capitalist Embassies, or do anything to harm the interest of the People’s Republic [of Hungary].
To assure that they will agree to spend at least 1–2 years here.
Tell them that their case is “still under review.”
Noel’s jailers were able to dictate the precise terms of his “freedom” because he was still the penitent, seeking the high church’s blessing and forgiveness. Noel’s single-minded goal was Soviet certification of his innocence of the fake charge that he was a CIA agent.
No outpouring of emotion or compassion from fellow victims of Stalinist injustice greeted Noel and Herta in Budapest or elsewhere. The Fields never denounced the brutal regime whose victims they had been, nor condemned the crimes committed in Stalin’s name. Nor was their return to “freedom” celebrated by joyous reunions with loving relatives and friends. Only one American came to call on them: Ambassador Christian M. Ravndal. Ravndal, a handsome and sociable diplomat, arrived at Meredek Utca with a thick bundle of back issues of the New York Times and a warm welcome to the Fields. Over tea and cookies, the three Americans chatted amiably about common friends in the State Department. Noel expressed dismay at Joe McCarthy’s harassment of two colleagues, Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent. He was silent regarding his own—and his wife’s, his brother’s, and his foster daughter’s—treatment by the Soviets.
On Christmas Eve in 1954, a curt Hungarian government press release announced that Noel and Herta Field had requested political asylum in the country that had jailed them on false charges. At a time when thousands were desperately trying to escape the giant prison of the Soviet empire, the announcement may well have been unprecedented. In the game of Cold War chess, Moscow achieved checkmate.
Now, Ambassador Ravndal requested a second meeting with the Fields. For this visit, the AVO instructed Noel to be “polite, but cooler” than the last time. Field performed according to instructions, and stated that his asylum request was genuine and made of his own free will. A formal note from Ambassador Ravndal immediately confirmed the exchange and its consequences.
“I am authorized to inform you,” Ravndal wrote,
that in view of your voluntary request for political asylum in Hungary, your repudiation of the United States, your sympathy with and intention to work actively for Communist objectives, including those directed against the United States Government, all responsibility of the United States to assist and protect you has ceased. In these circumstances the United States can take no further responsibility for your well-being or for your safe return to the United States.
I am further authorized to inform you that while your request for asylum in Hungary is not of itself a hostile act, the coupling of this request with your indicated desire to render service to a foreign state and to work against the interests of the United States is wholly inconsistent with American citizenship. You are advised that you may formalize this renunciation of American allegiance by renouncing your American citizenship before an American diplomatic or consular officer. . . . I must further inform you that you will be held accountable at such time as you may again come into United States jurisdiction for all treasonable acts which you have committed while you remain American citizens.
Field, typically, was shocked by the predictable reaction he provoked. “Neither I nor my wife,” he wrote Ravndal on February 16, 1955, “willingly renounce our American citizenship. Even if we should be deprived of our formal citizenship . . . we should not recognize such unilateral action, and should continue to regard ourselves as Americans. . . . In our conversation to which you refer, I drew a clear distinction between the United States and the present policy of its government. It is this policy which I repudiate, and not the United States. . . . It is my intention,” Field closes, with the clearest expression of just how far removed he was from reality, “to work for international peace, an activity which, if it should clash with the ‘interests’ of the United States Government is certainly not directed against the interests of the American people.”
Field was equally unprepared for the world’s reaction to his defection. “To my utter amazement,” he wrote on January 17, 1955, “I have found my name on the front page of some newspaper almost every month, and the end is evidently not in sight by a long shot,” he wrote. “I had somehow imagined that little Noel and little Herta had long ago been forgotten.” This letter was addressed to one of the few people with whom Noel allowed himself a degree of candor: Monica Felton, a British Communist, dispatched by Moscow to Budapest to shepherd Field’s transition to “freedom.” “You told me I had been mentioned in the Rajk and Slansky trials,” he wrote Monica. “I had no idea of the extent to which my name had been bandied about not only in the enemy [i.e., Western] press, but in our own.”
Field’s interaction with Felton offers a rare glimpse into his generally obscured hard core. Together, they plot how to pull Hermann back into the camp from which he was just liberated. Even after paying the highest price for Noel’s treachery, his family is still insignificant compared to the party’s need for a major propaganda score. “The fact that Hermann is not planning to return to America,” Noel wrote Felton, “is in itself a positive fact. . . . I am sure from all I’ve heard that there can be no question of separation [from his wife!]. On the other hand, it would be worse than useless if Kate went to Warsaw [this at a time when the recently reunited Kate, Hermann, and their sons were about to sail for Boston] and then found after sometime that Kate couldn’t stick it out [in Warsaw]. . . . The main thing to aim for in Hermann’s case: continued silence [about his prison experience] and a non-return to America. . . . After all, the political significance of the actions of the two brothers would still be positive and would supplement each other: both refuse to make negative propaganda [about their imprisonment], both refuse to go home.”
Noel’s letters to his siblings are uniformly cheerful accounts of his new life. “Herta and I love the place we’re in now, and, as we overcome the language barrier, this feeling is likely to increase,” he wrote to Hermann on March 11, 1955. “We’ve been going to the opera on the average once a fortnight. Last Friday, for instance, it was a glorious performance of Mozart’s Don Juan. We’ve been to more operas this winter than in ten years of our pre ’49 life. Not to speak of the movies. There are some swell films being produced here of late, some of which, I hope, will also find their way abroad.” The move to Budapest, Noel seems to imply, was based on its rich cultural offerings.
Weeks passed, and though reports of the Fields’ release were front-page news worldwide, Noel had yet to face a single journalist—an event both the Hungarians and their prize feared and were determined to avoid. As a substitute for a personal appearance, a committee of the Ministry of the Interior was dispatched to work with Noel on a press release. The Ministry was not pleased with Noel’s draft:
1. His statement has to be more decisive, more concrete, more to the point.
2. He should condemn the politics of the United States more sharply.
3. The condemnation of Allen Dulles, who carries on with his dangerous politics should be supported by concrete evidence.
4. The Marxist phraseology, however, should be avoided.
In other words, Field’s statement cannot sound like what it is: dictated by Communist officials. Field was of higher propaganda value as a “progressive American” than as a hard-core Stalinist.
Field, wrote Mrs. Ferenc Kuhari, an AVO major serving as his “secretary,” “is trying to avoid his duty . . . trying to avoid using stronger [anti-American] language, under the pretext that he wishes to avoid harming American comrades.”
Back and forth flew the memoranda. Dozens of agents massaged the “personal” statement from the American; it had to sound firm, anti-American, and pro-Soviet, yet believable too. A tall order, to explain how a man who had passed through the nightmare Field just barely survived could still defend such a system, and hail it as the promise of the future, the camp of peace.
“We are not among those,” Field finally declared in his public statement, “who blame an entire people, a system or a government for the misdeeds of a handful of the overzealous and the misguided.” Thus did Field exonerate one of history’s most cruel human experiments, blaming the jailing and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents on a few excessively fervent bad apples. In closing, Field said he and Herta owed their jailers and torturers “a debt of gratitude” for acknowledging their innocence.
The Hungarians now had another problem: how to keep their Cold War trophies happy. “We have to make plans for some sort of a social life for them,” writes an AVO general in another top secret memo, underscoring that it is essential to prevent the Fields from succumbing to homesickness. “They don’t know anyone in Hungary,” the memo states. “They might fall in with the wrong sort of company, or they might think about leaving. . . . Please find out through their ‘secretary’ how they imagine their lives in Hungary, what sort of work they would like to do.”
As usual, Noel’s siblings had misjudged their brother. His decision to seek asylum in the East was a blow to his family. After four months of silence, Hermann finally wrote Noel. It was his toughest message, and a departure from his habit of accommodation. “If you had simply made a statement,” Hermann wrote, “that you wished to stay on for the time being . . . without implying that you were seeking Hungarian protection from your own government, you might have avoided any sharp clash. Instead, after [the United States] made numerous diplomatic efforts on your behalf over many years, you rewarded them by a propaganda coup for Hungary. . . . You have to face the fact that you have put yourself under the protection of a government which is hostile to your own in the Cold War.” Hermann reminds his brother of the obvious: “I can only retire into private life if you are out of the news. . . . If you are publicly involved in attacks on U.S. policy, you might well force me to dissociate myself [from you] and take a public position myself to avoid any ambiguity.” (The Hungarian authorities may have allowed Field to receive such less than positive letters from his family, but the archives reveal that all the while they monitored, translated, and analyzed his correspondence. Field’s surveillance continued into the 1960s, by which time Moscow no longer feared the loss of this Western prize.)
In spite of fresh embarrassment and continued pain caused by Noel, his brother and sister still tried to spare his feelings. “I just can’t bring myself to write [to Noel] about the nightmare of the past five years,” Elsie wrote Hermann on April 24, 1955. “With all that we did and the State Department did. I know that [Noel and Herta] have suffered far more than I did. . . . I have no aptitude for conveying the way we tackled the tragedy of the past five years. . . . It is still a nightmare for me.”
Noel well understood that his siblings would never have the heart to make a clean break. And even if they did, his family’s anguish was a minor consideration. “You speak of your wish,” he wrote Hermann, “that ‘the case of the errant Fields may at last pass from the news and that we all can once more become private individuals and lead our own lives as we choose.’ . . . In saying that you seem to assume that we wish to do so. Yet you know that my life has always been a political life, and that for me there is no such thing as a separation between private life and political life. . . . Because of the interference,” he wrote Hermann, “not in the East but in the West . . . because of the attitude of the American authorities . . . I shall not be permitted to retire into private life, even if I should wish to do so.”
At this point in the narrative, my own family’s saga intersects with the Fields’. A top-secret Ministry of the Interior memorandum dated January 5, 1955, with the subject “The Case of Noel H. Field,” notes that “Endre and Ilona Marton of the Associated Press and United Press, have several times submitted official requests to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and have, through their own connections attempted to interview Mr. and Mrs. Field.” The American authorities were no longer guarding the Fields’ privacy nor their address. My parents were known to be close friends of Ambassador Ravndal. A Marton-Field meeting now became a real threat to the state working hard to keep him under wraps. In another top secret memorandum, dated February 2, 1955, from AVO officer Mrs. Ferenc Kuhari to the minster of the interior, she states, “I have informed Field that the Comrades do not think he should telephone the Martons. The Fields felt this might be the best solution. The Martons have repeatedly asked Ravndal for the Fields’ telephone number and address. Until now, Ravndal has withheld this information from them. Now, he has let the Fields know he will no longer keep their address a secret, and if they themselves do not get in touch with the journalists, he will let them know where to find the Fields.”
On February 24, following a night of bridge at the home of the American military attaché, a swarm of AVO agents surrounded our family car, grabbed my father, and drove him to the Fő Utca maximum-security political prison on the Buda side of the Danube. The jailer who led my father to his cell congratulated him on his “VIP cell,” “recently vacated by the American agent Noel Field.”
My mother was allowed three more months of freedom, to make arrangements for her young children, before they arrested her as well, in June 1955. She was incarcerated in the same prison, but my parents saw each other only once, during their pretrial hearing.
My parents—who had covered the Rajk trial, as well as the Fields’ disappearance and its abrupt finale—were unable to cover the story of Noel Field’s next chapter as Communist propagandist. Inmates themselves, they awaited their own trial on fake charges of spying for the CIA. After my parents’ arrest, no Western journalist located the Fields until December 1956. Then, during the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution, my mother and father—newly freed from prison—found the Fields, and finally conducted the only known press interview with Noel and Herta Field.
By the summer of 1956, Hungarian officials had found a “suitable” job for Noel as an editor/translator at the New Hungarian Quarterly—a state-sanctioned literary and political journal. In cramped and smoke-filled offices above a women’s dress shop at 12 Váci Utca (today an H&M department store and an Estée Lauder boutique flank the building), Noel groomed English translations of censored articles and short stories meant to showcase the best of Hungarian culture and the arts for the English-speaking world. Not much actual censorship was required, however. Everybody at the NHQ practiced self-censorship and had assimilated unwritten taboos. The Communist Party and the Soviet Union were beyond criticism. All references to the West, “the capitalist/imperialists,” must always be accompanied by a verbal sneer.
A certain wariness about getting too close to the American Communist in their midst prevailed in the editorial offices of the NHQ and Corvina Publishing, where Noel also worked. Noel’s colleagues—cultured, English-speaking survivors of multiple political storms—were not fiercely dogmatic. They were, to a man, bewildered by someone who had willingly forsaken the near-mystical protection of an American passport. But they ended up liking this stranger in their midst. “Goodness radiated from him,” Corvina editor Ferenc Aczél recalled, “and an eagerness to be helpful. Noel had the appearance of an ascetic—very tall, hollow cheeked, wide eyed. He mixed English and German. But he never spoke of himself, or of prison,” Aczél said, adding, “There was another former inmate on our staff, Paul Justus. Noel and Paul were quite close, and they would argue. Justus had no fingernails, nor teeth left—as a result of torture. Noel told Justus he forgave the torture and the terror—as acceptable ‘mistakes’ on the road toward the perfect Workers’ State. Well, Justus did not buy this. So they argued. Neither convinced the other.”
In the words of NHQ colleague Miklos Vajda, Noel was “the only pure Communist” in the office. “We did not know if he was informing on the rest of us.” The records reveal that indeed he was. When a colleague criticized Szapad Nep, the party organ, for being “content free,” Noel reported him to the authorities. The man was promptly fired.
Aczél, a still-dapper octogenarian, recalled Noel and Herta as “an extraordinarily close couple. They held hands when they walked together,” Aczél said. “Of course people noticed Noel in the street. He was so tall and still elegant and did not look at all Hungarian.” Noel, however, never fully recovered from the trauma he sustained in the torture chambers of the villa. A slow-moving man who breathed heavily, he seemed decades older than his years. At his death, his colleagues were shocked to learn that when they first met him, he was in his early fifties.
With the only independent journalists—my parents—in jail and the Americans keeping their distance, Noel settled into his new life. He was well rewarded for his cooperation. The state paid him one hundred thousand forints compensation for his five years of prison, and ten thousand forints a month for his expenses. At a time when the average Hungarian earned twelve thousand forints a year, this was a princely sum. Each morning, an agent/chauffeur drove him to his Váci Utca office.
A secret State Department cable from the Budapest embassy, dated April 26, 1956, notes that “on Sunday April 21, the drafting officer [Donald Downs] attended a concert by Hungary’s famed pianist Annie Fischer, and discovered that the Fields were sitting directly behind him, two rows away. It was clear that [Downs] was also recognized by the Fields as they rose hurriedly at intermission and, averting his gaze, left the auditorium, returning just before the second part of the program started. Both [Fields] looked in much better health than when last seen by [Downs] in December 1954. Mrs. Field in particular looked as if she had put on considerable weight. Noel still retained his long, shaggy hair and although a little heavier, carried himself in a very stooped manner. Whatever they have been doing, it would not appear that they have been suffering financially as both were considerably better and more smartly dressed than even the higher up government officials and their wives who were also in attendance.”
Still missing from the Fields’ new lives was final and total certification as Communists. On January 13, 1956, Noel Field wrote to the Hungarian Communist Party, stating, “My wife and I herewith declare our desire to become members of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, and we request permission to make formal application for admission, taking into account our status as non-Hungarian political refugees. We are, of course, ready to take whatever preliminary steps are required, and to undergo the necessary political and ideological examinations.” Field sounds like a man preparing to take holy orders. “By conviction, we have been communists for over twenty years and have endeavored to act as such in our life and work.”
Field’s timing was absurdly off. A few weeks later, the cause for which Noel had sacrificed his life was shaken by its roots. Three years after his death, Stalin’s own disciples suddenly dislodged the Father of the Peoples from his pedestal. On February 25, 1956, in the Kremlin, at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the party, broke with Stalin. Denouncing his crimes, errors, and “cult of the personality,” Khrushchev declared, “It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person . . . to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god”—precisely Noel Field’s crime.
It was a confusing time for Stalinism’s remaining fervent adherents. The Communist god’s decapitation sent shock waves of fear and euphoria through the Soviet empire—perhaps nowhere more so than in Hungary. Rákosi, Stalin’s self-proclaimed “best pupil,” was still in power. In Budapest, the excitement of a measure of free speech and the thrilling prospect of reform were in the air. In classrooms and cafés, Rákosi’s sadistic rule and senseless forced industrialization were now openly discussed. Rage—controlled by fear until now—was building. So was revulsion as the details of the past were more openly discussed.
In June, the most haunting symbol of the terrible decade emerged from prison. Julia, the widow of László Rajk, her six-year-old son gripping her hand, faced hundreds of Communists. “Let me tell you this,” the forty-four-year-old Mrs. Rajk said, “Horthy’s jails were better—even for Communists—than Rákosi’s prisons. Not only was my husband killed, but my little baby was torn from me,” she told the hushed audience. “These criminals have trampled underfoot all sentiment and honesty in this country. Murderers should be criticized. They should be punished.” No one could have delivered that message with greater power and urgency than this woman, with her sunken cheeks and dark, burning eyes.
By the summer of 1956, the population’s long-banked fury was as hard to tame as a roaring river. In August 1956, one man tried. “It is not for us,” Field wrote in the Communist Party organ, “but for the enemies of progress to doubt and regret. . . . They thought the ship was rotting and would founder, and abandoned it to its fate. . . . Who can doubt that the clouds are dispersing and that the ship, though still undergoing necessary repairs, was and is fundamentally sound?” Field proclaimed, as if from a planet far, far away.
The vast majority of Hungarians did not share Field’s delusions. In October, revolution was sparked by László Rajk’s reburial. In a solemn ceremony in Hungary’s pantheon of Communist heroes, one hundred thousand people, including Rajk’s widow and young son, lined up to pay their respects. Oblivious to the icy rain that did not let up during the entire service, hatred and a grim determination to avenge their comrades’ pointless murders etched the mourners’ faces. Noel Field, whose forced testimony helped to convict Rajk and his “accomplices,” was not among the mourners.
Two weeks later, on October 23, a spontaneous street demonstration by university students shouted its demands for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, for free elections, and for students’ right not to join the mandatory Communist Youth League. Thousands of citizens joined the students in the streets of Budapest—and soon in the provinces. Rákosi fled to Moscow. Along with the loathed man, fear itself disappeared. By nightfall, the demonstrators hacked away at the giant statue of Stalin near Heroes’ Square. When it finally tumbled, the crowd roared, and the revolution had its symbol. The Hungarian tricolor, with a large hole where the hammer and sickle had been cut, became the uprising’s second icon.
Caught off guard, Soviet forces retreated. The revolution seemed miraculously triumphant. (I remember those exhilarating days of October 1956 as my childhood’s most dramatic—and hopeful. I saw those days through my parents’ eyes—and read on their faces expressions I had never seen. Suddenly everything seemed possible. Change was coming. I was a child, but it was in the air and on my newly freed-from-prison parents’ faces.) “Ruszkik Haza!” “Russians Go Home!” read the graffiti on every factory wall. The revolution’s newly appointed prime minister, Imre Nagy, tried his best to keep up with the population’s spiraling demands for free elections, for multiparty rule, free press, and, of course, for “Ruszkik Haza.” Schools were closed, workers laid down their tools, and my parents covered the story of their lives.
(I have an unforgettable personal memory of the man who would soon become the revolution’s martyred leader. My mother—recently freed from prison, my father still an inmate—and my sister and I had climbed aboard a Budapest streetcar. Nagy, a very ordinary-looking man, balding, with a brush mustache, in a raincoat and holding an umbrella, rose from his seat and signaled for my mother to take it. “What happened to you,” Nagy said to my mother as she sat down, taking me on her lap, “it should never have happened.” My mother, visibly moved, smiled in silent acknowledgment. Later, she told us who the gentleman was.)
Noel Field missed the moment. As Budapest steelworkers, miners, and, soon, Hungarian soldiers joined demonstrators in spontaneous countrywide rallies, Field was in a hospital being treated for a bleeding ulcer.
The “free world” missed it too. Great Britain, France, and Israel launched a war against Egypt during that same week. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was campaigning for reelection.
At daybreak, November 4—Election Day in the United States—Soviet tanks and armored battalions poured into Hungary from points north, south, and east. “My little family must have been a pathetic sight,” my father said, recalling that dawn, “doddering about in pajamas. It was dark outside, the streets around the house were empty and peaceful but the sound of tank fire came from all directions. I switched on the radio. It played the anthem and then Nagy’s familiar voice, now tinged with heartache. ‘Today at daybreak,’ Nagy told his countrymen, ‘Soviet troops attacked our capital with the intention of overthrowing the legal Hungarian democratic government. Our troops are in combat. The government is at its post.’ ”
My father pounded out the heartbreaking story of the Soviets’ return. Looking up from his typewriter, he noticed my sister and me, “like two little soldiers, waiting for orders. What should the orders be?” My parents decided we had to move fast. Soon we were speeding across the Danube in our Volkswagen Beetle—one step ahead of Soviet tanks, which occupied the bridges minutes later. We requested and were granted sanctuary at the American embassy.
It took heavily armed Soviet forces a mere seventy-two hours to extinguish the uprising. The ragtag army of students, workers, and soldiers kept up a hopeless guerrilla war for weeks, however. More than twenty thousand Hungarians died fighting for their country’s independence, and another two hundred thousand fled across the suddenly opened Iron Curtain.
In the long run, the victor lost more than the vanquished. It would take three more decades for the bankrupt system to collapse under its own weight. Budapest, the first battle in a long war, had become a twentieth-century David that tried and failed to defeat the Soviet Goliath. After the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, even most of its loyal adherents realized that Soviet power was based not on ideas but on tanks and troops.
The following year, Noel Field visited Tonia Lechtman in Warsaw. “I don’t want to hear this!” Field said, trying to silence Tonia when she condemned Soviet brutality in Budapest. Noel was also upset by the sight of candles on Warsaw’s streets lit in memory of the Hungarian freedom fighters.
During the chaos of the revolution, my parents located the Fields’ closely guarded address. On a bone-chilling December evening, in the gloomy winter of 1956, with Soviet troops patrolling the city, my mother and father arrived unannounced at the Fields’ villa. Why did Noel and Herta open the door to them? After all, though Hungarian nationals, my parents were employed by the enemy, correspondents of the Associated Press and the United Press, and had repeatedly tried and failed to interview the Fields—before and after their own jailing—for nearly two years in my father’s case, shy of a year in my mother’s.
Curiosity, on the Fields’ part, was my mother’s explanation for why they scored the only interview the Fields ever granted Western press. The two couples had shared a similar fate as inmates of the Fő Utca Prison. For a while Field and my father were both “Prisoner 410,” inmates of the same corner cell, Noel until October 1954, my father until August 1955. And in yet another bizarre coincidence, Major Arpad Kretschmer, in charge of Field’s “rehabilitation” prior to release, had been my father’s interrogator. “It was easy to make Kretschmer talk,” my father said, “with unmistakable pride about the role he played in the ‘rehabilitation’ process of Noel Field.” Thus, my father learned from Kretschmer the outlines of Field’s strange trajectory, his early conversion to Communism, and his friend Alger Hiss’s attempt to recruit him into Soviet military espionage when Noel was already spying for the KGB.
During the revolution’s fevered early days, vigilantes dispensed mob “justice,” capturing and lynching agents of the reviled AVO. Kretschmer feared for his life and sought shelter in our apartment. My father—appalled to see the popular uprising descend into mob rule—allowed his former interrogator to stay until the violence subsided. Major Kretschmer, according to my father, was “a simple, but friendly little man, with thin, reddish hair and pale blue eyes, who looked uncomfortable on the rare occasions when he wore his uniform, which hung on his frame in a rather unmilitary fashion.” The major had shown my father compassion when Papa was at his lowest point as an inmate.
“What happened to the little girls?” was Herta’s first question to my mother. My sister and I had been part of the news coverage of our parents’ arrest. The New York Times featured a photograph of our family in its front-page coverage of my parents’ conviction for espionage, on January 15, 1956. The two couples who faced each other were a study in contrasts. I can picture my stylish mother, carefully coiffed, wearing one of her signature silk scarves, fascinated by this austere American couple who had chosen to live in the country we were desperately trying to escape. My father wore his tweed sports coat, crisp shirt, and silk tie, his dark hair—threaded with gray since prison—brushed straight back. The Fields, according to my father’s description, wore matching dark blue overalls. “He looks like an old man now,” my father said of Noel. “He still has a dignity,” he added, “and seems a gentle, quiet man, very cultured and well read. . . . He said he wanted to watch how it would develop after the Stalin Era.” Of the newly empowered Soviet puppet, János Kádár, who betrayed the revolution, Field said, ‘He saved Hungary from ‘White Terror.’ ” When my father protested that Field was in a hospital during the Revolution’s duration, how could he judge its character, Noel answered, “Oh, even there I felt it . . . and my wife told me so.” Then, to my parents’ astonishment, Field said, “Any plans I had of returning to the United States are now farther off than ever, because life is exciting here after the Hungarian Revolution.”
The couples exchanged prison anecdotes, such as the fact that all four had read Anthony Adverse, a twelve-hundred-page potboiler found in the prison library, which, my mother told them, she had used to “press” her blouse. My father asked Noel about Erica, but Field seemed reluctant to talk about the disappointing foster daughter who had chosen West over East. My parents felt that of the two, Herta was the stronger, more determined personality at this stage. Prison had been a slightly less brutal experience for her. She told my parents that she spent many hours making elaborate figurines out of bread, which she then painted—something her jailers encouraged her to do. Field, my father said, “seemed to believe what he said about Communism—as the wave of the future.”
Despite this seemingly pleasant visit, in a letter to Alger Hiss dated July 21, 1957, Field (who, of course, writes for many eyes on both sides of the divide) savages my father. “Marton,” Field fumes, “did not have the decency to arrange for an interview in advance,” he wrote Hiss, “but broke in on Herta and myself unannounced one evening.” He also calls my father a “barefaced liar” for reporting that Field was a Communist—something Noel had still not officially acknowledged at that point.