I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.
—Arthur Koestler
THE GENTLE, ROLLING green hills of the Virginia hunt country preened for Erica Glaser Wallach on a fall afternoon in 1957, as she and her husband drove to Warrenton, Virginia. No sign marked the entrance to “Hopefield,” her new home. Erica and Bob arrived at a winding gravel driveway flanked by time-worn, low stone walls on each side, where cows lazily munched grass in the fading autumn light, a vista of paddocks and fields as far as the eye travels. The sight of the house must have taken the weary traveler’s breath away. Of faded rosy brick, with a white-columned entrance, Hopefield is a place of simple elegance, burnished by the years, and not much altered since the Civil War.
But now Erica’s entire attention was on the two small sentries who stood waiting for their mother, with their aunt and their grandmother, at the front door.
With children who needed their mother, and a husband who had spent the past five years waging a campaign for his wife’s freedom, in a setting of calm and unostentatious beauty, Erica healed. The simple meals served on antique china, polished silver, and crystal glasses, in a dining room hung with family oil portraits dating from the Civil War and earlier, soon blurred her memories of the past terrible decade. She, who had started life in an equally refined setting in her native Germany, thrived in the genteel world of the Virginia hunt country. Walking the dogs across the fallow fields, she inhaled farm smells familiar from her childhood. Hopefield seemed created for this survivor of a lost world. Before long, Erica, Bob, Madeleine, and Bobby had forged a close family. Perhaps because even in the Gulag, under the circumstances, Erica had lived an astonishingly full human existence—interacting with her fellow inmates and jailers, actually forming relationships—her transition to freedom was not particularly traumatic. “She loved America,” Hope Porter, her sister-in-law, recalled. “She thought Communism was a failed system. But she had not a shred of bitterness about what she had been through—not even toward Noel.”
“After just a week at home,” her son Robert Wallach Jr. recalled, “I felt I had my mother back. Some of my friends, however,” he added, “were terrified of her. She’d grab kids by the scruff of the neck and say things like ‘Don’t be an ass!’ which we never heard from grownups. Mother was not a cozy, cuddly sort.”
Erica soon embarked on a new career as a Virginia private school teacher of French and Latin. Her students at the Highland Day School found her blunt style and occasional salty language a thrilling change from other teachers. The story of Mrs. Wallach’s summons to the headmaster’s office for a scolding was school legend. “Goddamnit,” she reportedly answered her frustrated superior, “Why should anybody give a damn if I curse?” Before long the school installed speed bumps on the driveway, in a futile attempt to slow down Mrs. Wallach. Erica was in a hurry. She had been robbed of seven years.
“She had a mischievous gleam in her eye,” recalls Stevenson McIlvaine, whose writer mother, Jane McIlvaine, was one of Erica’s closest friends. “She talked to us children about how she kept her mind alive in captivity. We were spellbound. We had never heard such things! She never patronized us kids. And she was so clearly not of the riding, hunting world of teas and horse shows. Erica—good looking, tall, with a very deep, Marlene Dietrich voice—made you think of cafés, not horse shows. But,” McIlvaine marveled, “somehow, she fit in.”
The children took to her faster than some of their parents. The local gentry was wary of this vivid, outspoken woman in the heart of the tweedy, tradition-bound hunt country. Moreover, in the post-McCarthy era, she was suspected of being slightly “pink.” Then, too, she had a habit of turning down invitations with almost brutal candor. “You have to give an excuse, Erica,” Hope Porter tried to explain. “You can’t just say you don’t feel like going.”
J. Edgar Hoover was not quite done with Erica. During the year following her arrival, twice a week, two of Hoover’s agents called on her. “The same question, the same answers,” she said, “one more time. They were polite and correct, but ignorant of European politics, and I had to spell everything out and explain the simplest things. . . . The day came,” she said, “when they informed me that their investigation was terminated.”
Three years earlier, Erica had turned down the offer of financial compensation for the years stolen from her by the Soviet Union. In 1958, however, she accepted a check from the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I enclose a check in the amount of $31.16 to reimburse you for your expenses in connection with your appearance before this Committee. Signed, Richard Arens, Staff Director.” In her busy new life, she rarely thought and almost never talked about Noel Field. Now she was truly free.
Her niece, Feroline Higginson, recalls only one incident when Erica’s painful past shattered her composure. “In the spring of 1974, Erica came down to Charlottesville,” Feroline recalled. “I was attending the University of Virginia and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was our guest speaker. After the lecture, a few of us attended a reception for him in the UVa Rotunda. Solzhenitsyn had his back to us when Erica addressed him in Russian as ‘Citizen Solzhenitsyn.’ He spun around and said angrily, in Russian, ‘No one addresses someone as “Citizen,” unless speaking to a prisoner.’ Erica, taken aback and quite shaken, replied, ‘That is the capacity in which I was in your country.’ It was the only time I ever saw Erica, a very formidable person, intimidated. They were both shaken. Solzhenitsyn never relaxed after that.” For a brief moment, two former inmates were plunged back in the ice-cold world of the Gulag Archipelago.
Ten years after her ordeal, Erica finally wrote her prison memoir. Characteristically, she flipped Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to a title better suited to her own temperament, Light at Midnight. Plainly written and unheroic, it is, nonetheless, a scorching account of her time in Soviet custody. Erica, however, dwells on the humanity of her fellow inmates, and pities some (not all) of her jailers—themselves victims of the system. Light at Midnight is a powerful indictment of a system based on cruelty and the degradation of the human spirit—which, in her youth, she admired. “There is no doubt in my mind,” she concludes, “that the five years [of prison] added something to my life.”
Not even the publication of her memoir was free from intrigue, however. In those precomputer days, her publisher had only one copy of Erica’s finished manuscript. One day, the book disappeared from Doubleday’s New York offices. In panic, her editor searched for the missing tome, sending the editorial staff into a tailspin. Fortunately, Erica had made a copy of her unedited manuscript, and the editing process could restart. Several months later, at a Washington garden party, Erica had a chance encounter with the man whose name had been intertwined with Noel Field’s and her own. A smiling Allen W. Dulles, head of the CIA, approached her, cocktail in hand. “How is your book coming, Erica?” Dulles asked. Surprised he knew about her memoir, Erica answered that it was soon to be published. “I’m glad,” Dulles answered, “I told them it was good, and that it should be published.” She asked, “You’ve read it?” The master spy had given himself away. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that,” he answered sheepishly. “Made a mistake. Never mind. I really did enjoy it, and I’m glad it’s being published.”
For Noel Field, reading Erica’s book was a more painful experience. Even this practiced denier of reality could not deny that he was the cause of her ordeal. On February 2, 1968, a full year after she sent him her book, he finally wrote to her. “There are passages which I find debatable,” he wrote, in a lawyerlike, detached tone. “Not so much as regards the facts, as from the political point of view, I mean the wisdom of publishing them at this time (or at all). I have in mind notably your—to my mind exaggerated—comments on the East German regime and its representatives.”
Then, having fulfilled his role as party propagandist, Noel’s letter reveals genuine emotion. What follows is the most revealing account of Field’s own life in solitary confinement.
“The thing that overwhelms us is your detailed memory of those five years,” he wrote Erica. “In our case—especially in mine—most of the details have—purposely no doubt—become submerged in the subconscious, and only return in sudden disconnected flashes, for instance, when we talk with friends who went through the same experiences, and now, in reading your book. There are numerous paragraphs—whole pages indeed—which I might have written myself with just a few words changed. . . . I could practically repeat every line.” Field admits for the first time his own nightmare as Soviet prisoner. “I also played chess against myself, but only in imagination. And I developed a whole system of thought mathematics, including the square and ambic roots of all numbers up to a thousand. I not merely listened to symphonies, but conducted them too. My great annoyance in this connection was that, in the Beethoven symphonies, I know all the movements, but in the case of the scherzos was uncertain which belonged to which symphony!
“A vital difference,” Noel wrote Erica, “was your contact by tapping. Neither Herta nor I had any part in it—again because we did not know a word of Hungarian,” again underscoring just how isolated he and Herta were in their Budapest prisons, and then adding bizarrely, “In looking back, I’m glad our five years of solitary were uninterrupted by this kind of ‘conversation.’ In this way, I remained ignorant of Herta’s presence, only three cells from mine. I would have gone mad if I’d known it,” Noel admits. “Like you, both of us sought to forget the existence, the very names of those we loved,” adding the most devastating indictment of an inhuman system. “Once—it must have been in the third year—I heard Herta sneeze. I spent the rest of my stay convincing myself that of course it wasn’t she: it was simply the first woman’s voice I had heard in three years, so I had jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that it was Herta’s!” Indeed, it was Herta’s, three cells away.
Within days of receiving Noel’s letter, Erica fired off her reply. Hers is as revealing of her passionate humanity as his of his effort to sublimate his. “Thank you for your letter, Noel,” she wrote. “I had sort of given up. It had been almost a year since I sent you the book and I assumed that was that. But as far as East Germany is concerned . . . if you think I exaggerated, let me tell you, on the contrary, I toned it down. In fact, I cut out entire passages that made the Germans look a lot worse. And all of it was the exact truth. . . . Debatable as to the wisdom of publication?” she asks. “Surely, it is always debatable, at any period in history. Silence is also debatable,” she pointedly concludes. “It has enabled many crimes.”
Despite Noel’s determined efforts to erase the past, Erica’s prison memories summoned his own and he kept returning to her memoir. “In glancing through your book again,” in a later, undated letter, Noel wrote, “I was struck by another amusing parallel. I, too, spent my time [in prison] listing the (at the time) 48 States of the Union. For weeks, I tried to systematize them—up and down—I mean North and South, South to North—and left and right—East and West; right of the Mississippi and left of it; etc. Then, for weeks—maybe months—I ‘amused’ myself by trying to list the capitals and principal cities of each State. Again and again,” he relates, “I switched town from one State to another. As I recall, I was completely stumped by North and South Dakota. The closest I came to providing a capital for either one of them was ‘Tapioca’!” America, it seems, was still deeply embedded in Noel Field’s DNA.
In 1993, Erica was unable to deliver her annual witty Christmas toast to a festive gathering of friends and neighbors at Hopefield. She lay ill with cancer in a nearby hospital. Characteristically, she insisted the party proceed. From her sickbed in Warrenton’s Fauquier Hospital, she dictated words her son, Robert, read on her behalf. Erica was saying good-bye.
“It took me ten years to get to this country,” her son said, reading his mother’s words, “and when I came, I came from a totally different world. From the moment I stepped into Hopefield, with Grandma standing at the front door with open arms, and welcoming me home, it has been the most incredible miracle for me. I didn’t realize I was walking into the most wonderful family, who gave me loyalty, support, friendship and love. I’ve had the most wonderful, happy thirty-six years of my life. And I want to especially mention my children, who, by all the laws of psychology, should be the most miserable creatures, but have been my greatest joy, help and love, and I thank them for everything they have done.”
Erica Glaser Wallach, age seventy-one, valiant survivor of the terrible past century, died the next day.