I would not realize until thirty years later . . . how wonderfully mirrorlike the reflection of paranoia was on the other side of the world.
—Arthur Miller
Have you no sense of decency, sir?
—Joseph N. Welch to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
ON OCTOBER 26, 1955, Erica’s taxi circled around the Brandenburg Gate, the great demarcation between East and West. Crossing the Tiergarten—ablaze with fall colors—she arrived at the place where she had started her journey, five years and two months earlier. The recent inmate of Vorkuta’s twilight world was blinded by the bright lights of the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s showiest boulevard. Where were the haunted, hungry Berliners she remembered from 1950? Well-dressed, well-fed people now idled in the cafés along the Ku’damm. Sleek glass and steel buildings had sprung up in place of the mountains of rubble. But Erica, age thirty-two, emerged from the Gulag steady on her feet, and with the vitality to restart her interrupted life. Every ounce of her remarkable spirit would be required for the road back.
Appraising her out-of-fashion summer suit and frayed pumps—the outfit in which she had been arrested in East Berlin—her battered suitcase by her side, the manager of Berlin’s opulent Kempinski Hotel did not deem her a suitable guest. So Erica dragged her bag to the less-desirable hotel from where she left on that long-ago August day, the Hotel am Zoo. There, she was reunited with her mother. Two resilient German women who had suffered the century’s harshest blows now wept tears of joy mixed with sadness. Of the Glaser family of Pomerania, neither Erica’s father nor brother were alive to share the family reunion.
Almost immediately, a bellman delivered an impressive bouquet of flowers to Erica’s room. “Welcome back,” the accompanying note said. It was signed “R. Hill.” The mysterious Mr. Hill himself soon arrived and identified himself as the CIA’s Berlin station chief. So, after the brief reunion with her mother, “Mr. Hill”—for that was not his real name—drove Erica to a safe house in Dahlem, Berlin’s leafy diplomatic district. And so began days of debriefing—a milder form of interrogation—but covering every detail of her arrest, trial, and imprisonment. The names of your interrogating officers? The exact location of those prisons? And always: to the best of your knowledge, was Noel Field a Russian spy? The setting was comfortable and Mr. Hill was polite—courtly, even—but there was no doubt in Erica’s mind that in the CIA’s eyes, she had to prove her innocence. This was not the long-dreamed-of homecoming. “When will I see my husband and children?” Erica kept asking. “As soon as we are through,” Mr. Hill assured her, “you may leave.”
A far tougher interrogator named Sig Hoechster, whom Erica remembered from the OSS, soon replaced “Mr. Hill.” “His tone,” she recalled, “his threats, everything about him reminded me of my interrogation by Russian officers. Two and a half years of it. It all came back. And I surprised myself with the same reaction I had shown then: stubbornness and a will to fight back.” “What makes you think you can intimidate me?” Erica asked the CIA agent. “I’ve had far too much experience in Soviet prisons,” she assured him. “Those methods will not work with me.”
Back at her hotel, Erica cabled her husband, asking him to come to Berlin as her own departure had been delayed. Bob cabled back, “Permission Berlin unlikely.” Following Erica’s abduction, Bob’s passport had been invalidated—for his own safety, he was told. In protest, Erica staged a strike of her own. She refused to answer any more questions unless her husband was allowed to join her.
“Two days later,” she recalled, “Bob arrived . . . mystified at all those changes in plans. I had not been allowed to tell him about any CIA involvement . . . and he had imagined all sorts of crazy reasons for my refusal to come to England [where he had awaited her]. Perhaps I did not want to see him at all? Perhaps I was too ill? Perhaps there was another man to hold me back?” She promised him, “ ‘No more mysteries’ . . . and for the next few hours we frantically tried to catch up with our different pasts. So much to tell, so many questions. . . . How can you make up for five years? But it was wonderful to be together, to share,” she said. “I wanted it to last forever.”
Erica was a stranger to her children. “I was only six months old,” Robert Wallach Jr. recalled, “when she disappeared. The only picture we had of her looked like some sort of a mug shot. My first memory of her is in Europe when my father and sister and I visited her for a few days while she was waiting for her U.S. visa.” Their reunion was inauspicious. “I was six years old,” Robert said. “We went to some sort of a beach resort which turned out to be a nudist colony. No clothes were allowed! It was very cold, and people wore sweaters—but nothing below the sweaters. So this experience just reinforced in my mind the image of a strange foreigner—my mother.”
An entirely unexpected hurdle now blocked Erica’s passage to a new life in the country where her husband and children lived. In 1955, the United States was an anxious and suspicious place, rich soil for the Wisconsin demagogue Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. His party, out of power for twenty years, soon managed to conflate FDR’s New Deal with Communism. Someone had to be held to account for the Cold War and Soviet “penetration.” Richard M. Nixon—a more subtle and intelligent politician than Joe McCarthy—skillfully exploited the climate of suspicion. Fear always spreads faster than good sense, and soon even war hero and Secretary of State George C. Marshall was suspect.
Democrats—tarred with having been soft on Communism and gulled by Stalin under Roosevelt—spent the next decades proving their anti-Communist zeal. Forgotten suddenly was America’s wartime alliance with the Soviets in the common campaign against Hitler. Forgotten, too, was that the German Communist Party was licensed and approved by the American military government, and recognized by them as one of the four postwar democratic parties.
Erica and her family were among those caught in Senator McCarthy’s poisonous wake. America was not the land to open its arms to a self-confessed former Communist—no matter the ordeal she had barely survived. As a former member of the German Communist Party (from 1946 to 1948) Erica was now prevented from entering the United States, under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which barred Communists and other “undesirables.” The only way Erica could gain entry was by providing evidence of five years of “anti-Communist activity.” For a woman who had spent the preceding five years as a Soviet inmate, that condition seemed preposterous, to put it mildly.
But such were the times that three powerful institutions—the CIA, the State Department, and the Justice Department—all seemed determined to prevent Erica from joining her family. Now, every detail of the thirty-two-year-old woman’s life was minutely scrutinized, combed for signs that she might represent a danger to the country, for any evidence that five years of hard labor in the Gulag had not cured her of her former Communist sympathies.
Erica, biding her time in West Germany, put on a brave face. “She pulls herself together,” her mother wrote Bob on December 1, 1956, “but she hides a fearful mind. Sometimes she looks very sad and worn out. I know day and night she worries about the future. She wishes to be with her children, to do things for them, then there she is, waiting.”
Erica’s total cooperation with the CIA in Berlin proved insufficient evidence of good faith. It did not help her case that she was prone to bluntness and chemically incapable of pretense. She refused to be a tool of Capitol Hill propagandists who wanted her to shout her anti-Communism from the rooftops. “I cannot understand,” she said, “that it should be so difficult to comprehend my desire for peace, and my dislike for exhibitionism and sensation. What I went through . . . is too serious and too complicated a matter for me to talk about superficially in public.”
Her former association with Noel Field was the greatest barrier to Erica’s US entry. “If Noel does want to help Erica,” Bob wrote Kate Field in December 1954, “it is obvious that her future life in the West would be a lot easier if he behaved in a manner less likely to be criticized in this country.” After Noel announced his plan to stay in the East, Bob was far more blunt. “I’m tempted to insist,” he wrote Elsie Field on November 30, 1955, “you tell Noel to stop bothering my wife.”
But Noel did not see his interests in Erica’s reunion with her American family. He still hoped she would join him in the East, and continued to cast a giant shadow over Erica’s hopes for a new beginning. His pro-Soviet interviews in the French Communist Libération prompted her to write Elsie, “Every time he opens his mouth I have to pay for it.” She did not often mention Noel to her children, and rarely criticized him in public. But in her letters to Noel’s siblings, she expressed her anger. His siblings, however, continued to give their brother every benefit of the doubt. On February 14, 1956, Elsie wrote Erica: “We cannot actually know . . . what his real feelings are, nor how much is written for a possible censor at the one or the other end. Moreover though we expect him to understand, we have to remember that he has been out of touch with the West for a long time now and that he understands things from one side only. . . . From none of his letters have I ever felt that he appreciated what a provocative act his asylum decision was. One can only hope that there will be a time in the future when all this will be cleared up.” That day would never arrive.
Six months after her release, Erica was still barred from entering the United States. “I am writing more or less in desperation,” Bob Wallach wrote a “Mr. Valenza” of the State Department’s visa division on April 17, 1956. “As you know, [my wife] was released from 5 years of imprisonment by the Russians early last Fall and during the intervening six months has been under examination by various authorities. She now has no place to live and is forced to wander across Europe, with no idea of what is to happen to her.” He was near the end of his patience. “After all she has been through I very truthfully say that I believe her nerves are incapable much longer of withstanding the uncertainty, fear and delay with respect to her future.”
Mr. Valenza was unmoved and silent. On June 11, 1956, Bob again wrote to him that “I have heard unofficially that your office has decided to recommend to the Consul General in London that my wife’s visa application be disapproved. As it would be too expensive for me to go to England,” the desperate man added, “I wonder if you would be good enough to tell me here and now the reasons for the recommendation.” Valenza did not answer this plea either.
In October 1956—the month revolution flared in Hungary—Erica, still barred from the United States, visited Noel’s sister Elsie in Geneva. “In no time,” Elsie wrote her brother Hermann, “she was part of our family, the children hanging on to her with very real affection. She may belittle her maternal instincts, but she has a wonderful rapport with children. We certainly managed little sleep while she was here. She seemed glad to be able to talk about her five years’ experiences. What that girl went through! And with what courage she stood up to her tormentors. Of course, we discussed her future at length and it looks gloomy. This kind of aimless and rootless life is absolutely no good for her. Unless Bob’s present efforts through a lawyer produce speedy results he had better plan to make his home in Europe or he is likely to lose her. . . . Money is also fast running out. . . . She cannot face starting life anew in a strange place without her friends, without something which she can call home, without Bob to help with the children and without absolute assurance that it will be permanent.”
Erica even offered to divorce Bob so that he and the children could get on with their lives, while she waited in agonizing limbo for her American visa. But Bob—who had waited so long and fought so hard for Erica—would hear none of this. “As you can see,” Elsie wrote Hermann on February 5, 1957, “it’s really a ghastly situation. I wish Erica could consider other possibilities, even emigrating to New Zealand or Australia.”
After two years of futile and frustrating effort, the Wallachs finally engaged a prominent immigration attorney, Martin J. McNamara Jr., to cut through the thicket of legal obstacles with which the Immigration and Naturalization Service continued to bar her entry.
“Ever since 1950, after my arrest,” Erica wrote her new lawyer on March 18, 1957, “until this very day, I have continuously been humiliated: first by the East Germans and Russians, now by the American authorities. I am not blaming them. . . . I am just trying to explain why I resent so deeply every attempt to deprive me of the last little bit of dignity and self-respect that has been left to me. I am not asking the US authorities for any favors. If they consider that I am a danger to US security, it is their right to keep me out. The only thing I do believe to be entitled to is to be told about it openly and at once. . . . I consider it cruel not to have told me so from the very beginning.”
In her effort to “prove” to Washington what she suffered in captivity, and because she despised exploiting her personal ordeal, Erica tracked down a former cellmate in an East German prison, and asked her to submit an affidavit to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington. On January 10, 1956, Helga Taunzer submitted this testimony of routine Soviet brutality. “About the middle of April 1951, Erica Wallach came into the cell which I shared with a Ukrainian,” her cellmate wrote. “Mrs. Wallach . . . looked very bad. She told me that she had come from a punishment cell where there was only a wooden cot, the window pane broken and no mattress or blanket were given her. In addition, she had been questioned night after night from 10pm to 6am—exactly during the sleeping hours—and had not been allowed to sleep during the beginning of July 1951. The Soviet authorities demanded of her exact information on the alleged espionage activities of her foster father Noel Field and herself. Since she refused to admit things which were not true, the methods of interrogation became increasingly severe. . . . Mrs. Wallach had been beaten black and blue, her face badly swollen. In addition, she was completely filthy, not having been allowed to wash for sixteen days. Her wrists were badly swollen from handcuffs.”
Not even this heartbreaking description moved bureaucrats who continued to refuse her visa request. In their way, these “public servants” were as unworthy of that title as the American consular officers who regarded the sea of human misery flooding their Marseille office in the 1940s as a nuisance.
In the soul-crushing jargon that should be prohibited between human beings, US Frankfurt vice consul Lois Unger wrote Erica on July 31, 1957, “This office has been instructed that your application for admission to the United States under Section 212 (a) (28) (9ii) of the Immigration and Nationality Act has been denied. It has been held that you have failed to establish that you have been actively opposed to the doctrine, program, principles and ideology of the Communist cause and that you have, in fact, failed to establish that you have terminated your affiliation with the Communist cause for at least five years.”
Instead of recognition as a living symbol of Soviet cruelty, Erica was considered a security threat to the United States. “Never in my life,” Erica wrote her husband on March 17, 1957, “have I encountered so much ill will. That is, I have: when I was a prisoner of the Russians. But then one accepts it more easily and naturally to be considered an enemy than when one is called a ‘free person.’ ”
Erica closed her letter with a note of bitter irony: “If the intentions of the US authorities were to force me back into the arms of the Communists, they could not have acted more consistently.”
She was ready to quit, but her lawyer had one more card to play: Allen W. Dulles, director of Central Intelligence, the man with whom Erica and Noel Field were linked in show trials across the Soviet empire. “As your office may be aware,” McNamara wrote Dulles on August 21, 1957, “Mrs. Wallach has been encountering difficulty in obtaining a visa. . . . She believes she has extended the utmost courtesy and cooperation to your agents and would appreciate reciprocal assistance in her case with the Immigration authorities. . . . Mrs. Wallach has two small American children born of her marriage to Mr. Wallach, a native-born American and Army veteran. She has been separated from her husband and children for over seven years. Certainly it would appear that such a person, whose presence in the United States represents no threat to the security of the nation, should not be denied admittance.”
Whether it was at Dulles’s behest or something else, Erica’s case suddenly became an urgent matter for Congress. Gwendolyn Lewis, an aide on the House Un-American Activities Committee, made Erica’s case her own, and moved to end the family’s two-year ordeal. Gwen, as Erica was soon calling her new friend, flew to Frankfurt and within days had tape-recorded Erica’s entire story. “She understood what I was saying,” Erica recalled, “and she had a human attitude that had been utterly lacking in all the bureaucrats I had dealt with before.”
On October 8, 1957, Congressman Francis E. Walter, sponsor of the McCarran-Walter Act that had barred her entry, wrote to General Joseph M. Swing, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Between the mind-numbing, jargon-filled lines is an indictment of the absurd machinations of a cruel system during a shameful period in American democracy. “That Erica Wallach would not make dramatic speeches or lead some organized movement against the Communists in the course of the last several years is attributed directly to the shocking experiences which she endured at their hand,” Walter said. “I earnestly request that the waiver on Mrs. Wallach’s case be granted as soon as possible.”
In America—even in the worst of times—constitutional safeguards eventually limit the human damage. But these were truly the worst of times.