SITTING IN HIS ISOLATION CELL, what Koestler needed at all costs to conceal from his captors was his status as an agent of the Comintern. Koestler had joined the Communist Party in 1931, when he was twenty-six years old. He had been born in to what he described as a “Continental middle-middle class family” but the advent of the First World War led to the collapse of his father’s business, and they left Budapest for Vienna.1 His father worked in textiles before the war, but in the following years he failed at a number of business ventures, eventually losing what remained of his savings in the Austrian hyperinflation of 1922. Koestler became the sole provider for his family, resentful of the way the fluctuations of capitalism ruined his comfortable life. All around him the “pauperized bourgeois” were becoming “rebels of the Right or Left.”2 Koestler, by then a respected journalist with the influential Ullstein newspaper group in Berlin, turned to the left. He read Marx, Feuerbach, Engels, and Lenin, triggering a “mental explosion”: “the new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke.”3
In 1931, Koestler joined the German Communist Party. One of his new comrades instructed this fervent convert to meet an official whom he only later discovered to be Ernst Schneller, head of “Agitprop” in Germany and a member of the intelligence “Apparat,” run by a combination of the German Communist Party and the NKVD. Schneller was a skinny, shabby-looking individual who claimed to survive on raw vegetables, and Koestler was impressed by his ascetic mien. Schneller instructed Koestler to keep his new Party membership secret (within the Party Koestler was to be known as Ivan Steinberg) and to stay in his job at Ullstein, where he could be useful. All went smoothly for Koestler as he passed on political gossip to his contacts until he recruited a younger colleague. This young man, after a bout of initial enthusiasm, was overcome by guilt at betraying his coworkers at Ullstein and gave Koestler an ultimatum: the two of them had to either confess or he would be forced to kill himself. The truth came out, and Ullstein fired Koestler.
Over the following years he threw himself into life as a Party activist, canvassing door to door: “We sold the World Revolution like vacuum cleaners.”4 He learned to follow the Party line even when it seemed patently self-defeating—including the way the Party attacked the more moderate socialists, helping facilitate the rise of the National Socialists—and became wary of “Trotskyist” infiltration. In 1932, he traveled to the Soviet Union for eighteen months on the understanding that afterward he would write a book celebrating how his journey broke down his bourgeois skepticism. The trip transformed him from a relatively obscure journalist into a financially secure author, as he received an advance for not only the Russian and German editions but also for the Armenian, Georgian, and Ukrainian rights (only the German edition, Von Weissen Nächten und Roten Tagen, was actually published, in 1934). He traveled extensively and saw firsthand the skeletal victims of the Holodomor, the enforced famine in Ukraine in which more than five million are estimated to have died, but he allowed officials to explain it away (“these were kulaks who had resisted collectivization of the land”).5 He allowed himself to believe in the necessity of wildly deceitful propaganda about the West, about the need to “liquidate” opposition groups, and to control all published material. At times his faith was shaken but it held.
At the end of his travels Koestler, both Jewish and Communist, could not return to Berlin with Hitler in power, so he made his way to Paris to join up with fellow exiled Party members. Living on the Left Bank, Koestler worked for the indefatigable Willi Münzenberg, head of Agitprop for the Comintern in Western Europe. Since the declaration of the Popular Front policy at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in December 1935, Münzenberg had relentlessly established front organizations in the anti-fascist cause. Koestler threw himself into this work. When Franco staged his coup, Koestler went straight to Münzenberg and asked for help in getting to Spain to fight. Münzenberg had a different idea. He devised a plan for Koestler to pose as a right-wing journalist in order to gather evidence of German and Italian involvement. Otto Katz, Münzenberg’s deputy, had contacts at the News Chronicle, which had taken an anti-Franco position, and Koestler had easily secured accreditation as cover. Koestler was given cash and booked on a boat to Lisbon. As he’d crossed the border from Portugal to Spain, entering Nationalist territory, he wondered what would happen to him if he were caught. “I was certainly a paid agent, travelling under false pretenses,” he wrote; “on the other hand, I was not working for any military organisation, merely for a propaganda department, albeit the Comintern’s.”6
Koestler’s mission in Seville had been a success, and his reports about German pilots secretly flying missions in Spain made the front page of the News Chronicle. That he had almost been caught added to the frisson. In October 1936, the Comintern sent him back to Spain on another “special assignment.” This time his destination had been Madrid, a city under siege. Several right-wing politicians had fled the city in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, leaving behind paperwork that might demonstrate Nazi involvement in planning the coup. It had been Koestler’s job to sift through these archives for anything incriminating. He had to tread carefully to negotiate the various feuding factions—Anarchists, Communists, Socialists—behind the Republican lines. He was in Madrid for four weeks and, to his embarrassment, ferried around in an Isotta Fraschini, an ostentatious Italian luxury car. “Never had a smaller man,” Koestler wrote, “travelled in a bigger car.”7
He had worked fast. Franco’s forces were closing on Madrid, and few believed the city could long withstand a siege, including the government who had fled for Valencia. Koestler decided to flee too. He met pilots from the Escuadrilla España, the squadron of mercenaries and volunteers assembled by the French novelist André Malraux, who offered him a ride to Valencia, where they were due to collect their newly arrived planes. Accepting the offer, Koestler brought with him two suitcases of documents from fascist sympathizers. Although the Comintern was delighted by the papers Koestler had managed to smuggle out, he was ashamed for having fled Madrid with the cowardly politicians while the Republican soldiers and International Brigade volunteers had stayed behind and halted Franco’s advance. Perhaps it was his shame about running that led him to stubbornly refuse to leave Malaga, landing him in an isolation cell.
KOESTLER SPENT FOUR TRAUMATIC DAYS in Malaga prison. Every moment he feared he was to be executed, but if his captors discovered that he was a Comintern agent, he would be tortured first. He tried to distract himself by scratching mathematical formulae on the wall and making plans to learn a new language, but the sound of screams followed by shots followed by silence swiftly eroded his resolve. He stopped eating and drinking, crumbling bread down the toilet and pouring away his coffee, hoping that he would thereby faint more quickly if tortured. He soon came up with a more radical plan: suicide. He planned to hang himself with his tie, but the only hook in the room was too low to the ground. He discovered a shard of glass in the window and resolved to slit his wrists instead. No longer worried about torture, he ate corned beef and bread and sought comfort in a straw mattress that had been brought to his cell. That night, the guards threw another man into his prison. Koestler knew something was gravely wrong with his new blood-drenched cellmate but could not put his finger on it. He eventually realized that his jaw was dislocated from its socket. He could not speak or eat. Shortly before he was taken out and shot, the man gave Koestler his last two cigarette stumps. Faced with the man’s suffering and overcome by a wave of apathy, Koestler abandoned his plan to kill himself.
That he had survived the first round of mass executions seemed a promising sign. Nearly four thousand Republicans had been shot in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Malaga, and Koestler estimated that six hundred had been killed in his prison alone.8 He hoped that his status as an accredited journalist for a British newspaper was protecting him; he did not know that he had already been sentenced to death in absentia by a court-martial in Malaga. On day four of his incarceration, Civil Guards with bayonets on their rifles entered his cell. Once more he feared his time had come, only to be overcome with relief when he was placed in handcuffs; those they planned to shoot were bound with cord.
The guards led Koestler out of the prison and the fresh air made him lightheaded. They loaded him into the back of a heavy truck with about forty other prisoners, their hands all tied with cord. He asked where he was being taken. The answer: Seville—Queipo de Llano’s Seville. It had been only six months since he had tricked his way into that city, written a nasty profile of Queipo de Llano, and escaped arrest. This news gave him a “feeling akin to that of a roamer in the jungle who has inadvertently trodden on the tail of a tiger.”9
After a long train journey Koestler arrived in Seville late at night. As he was driven through the city he noticed the Hotel Cristina, where he had seen the German pilots and been recognized by Strindberg. After brief stop at the police station, he was taken to the Seville prison, which had been built in 1931. Everything was made of steel; Koestler thought it looked “like the engine room of a warship.”10 On being locked in his cell he could not believe his luck: running water! A functioning toilet! A woolen blanket! A window he could look out of! He fell asleep and woke to the sound not of gunfire but of prisoners playing football in the courtyard. After four days amid the stench of blood and shit of Malaga prison, this felt to Koestler like a “luxury hotel.”11 A few days later, the guards granted him a visit from a barber.
Something was amiss, however. Koestler importuned the inmates in the yard for a cigarette, but despite his shouts, everyone ignored him. After some time, he noticed a faded white line painted on the floor of the courtyard between his cell window and where the other prisoners gathered. Nobody crossed it. The cells on his side of the line were clearly off-limits. “And now at last,” Koestler wrote, “I admitted to myself what had gradually been dawning on me from the start. I had been put into one of the condemned cells.”12 The hotel seemed a lot less luxurious. The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling burned all night, although this at least spared him from waking from his nightmares into the dark. He tried to stay sane by scratching diary entries onto the wall with a wire he snapped off the bed frame, crossing out the entries after he had written them.
On February 19, ten days after his arrest in Malaga, Koestler received his first official deputation. At 5 P.M. the door to his cell unexpectedly opened, and in strode three Falangists in full uniform. Leading this delegation was a woman who introduced herself as Helena. She had a slight American accent and said she was a correspondent for the Hearst Press.
“Are you Koestler?”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak English?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a Communist?”
“No.”
“But you are a red, aren’t you?”
“I am in sympathy with the Valencia government but do not belong to any party.”
“Do you know the consequences of your activities?”
“No, I do not.”
“Well, it means death.”
“Why?”
“Because you are suspected of being a spy.”
Koestler denied it. He asked what kind of spy put his byline to articles attacking one side in a war only to walk into their territory carrying his passport. Helena said the authorities would look into this. She told him that both the News Chronicle and William Randolph Hearst himself had intervened on his behalf with General Franco. He “might possibly” get a commutation. In light of this, Helena asked, would Koestler consider making a statement? Koestler said something to the effect that General Franco seemed a man of “humanitarian outlook” whom he could “trust implicitly.” Helena wrote it all down and gave him the statement to sign. “I realized,” Koestler wrote, “that I was about to sign my own moral death sentence, and that this sentence no one could commute.” He crossed out what Helena had written and instead wrote that were Franco to commute his sentence that he “could only suppose that it is mainly out of political considerations.”13 The interview did not last much longer. As she left, Helena told Koestler that she was a colleague of Bolín’s, that Madrid was about to fall, and that she would try to get him moved to a better prison. When she left the room all that remained was the scent of her perfume.
In the following days those two words—“might possibly”—began to obsess Koestler. “Doubt is a bacillus that eats slowly but surely into the brain; the patient positively feels the dirty little beast grazing on his grey matter.”14 Nothing happened, and the days resolved into monotony. Koestler could feel himself atrophying: “my brain was drained and the few drops of thought that I squeezed out of it were pale, like thrice-brewed tea.”15 He stared at the arms of his watch going around until his eyes watered.
As the hours turned into days and the days into weeks, Koestler prized anything that broke the tedium. He managed to get a copy of the Spanish translation of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography from the prison librarian, and more books followed thereafter. He made demands that were ignored until he forced the issue by going on a hunger strike. Once given a pencil and paper, he began to record a diary as well as reconstructing the circumstances of his arrest. He noticed in himself a growing feeling of inferiority regarding his captors. “I had never believed the saying that a dictatorship or a single person or a minority can maintain its ascendancy by the sword alone,” he wrote. “But I had not known how living and real were those atavistic forces that paralyze the majority from within.”16 With these thoughts a heresy was germinating. At one stage a guard, Don Ramon, asked him how an intelligent man like himself had got mixed up with the Communists. Koestler told the guard he was no longer “a rojo.” Reflecting on this moment later, Koestler believed he “had spoken the truth with the intention of telling a lie. Inwardly, I was no longer a Communist, but the break was neither conscious nor definite; and my intention in uttering that phrase was, of course, that Don Ramon should report it.”17
It was not until March 27, more than six weeks since his arrest, that Koestler received his first word from the outside world, when a letter arrived from his wife, Dorothy. The contents were general and vague, clearly designed to get past the censor but the last sentence was telling: she asked him to respond in his own handwriting. She clearly did not know if he was alive or dead and wanted proof. The letter did not answer many of his questions, but it did include one hundred pesetas, allowing him to buy better food rations, wine, and cigarettes. He lurched between happiness and apathy. At the beginning of April, he decided he must do something. Repeated requests to see the British consul had got him nowhere. He began secretly starving himself, hoping to make himself weak and increase his heart rate. He then faked a heart attack, hoping that his captors would be forced to do something, perhaps move him to a hospital. The prison doctor counseled rest. After a week without food he was reading a Spanish translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace when he came to the passage about the shooting of the Russian prisoners after Moscow had fallen to Napoleon. He vomited into the toilet but all he could bring up was bile. He had brought himself dangerously close to death.
On April 12 a young Falangist came to his cell and stuck a gun under his nose. The man informed Koestler he would be shot, only to then spend two hours in the cell talking away. After the initial shock, it slowly dawned on Koestler what this young fascist was telling him: his solitary confinement was over. He would be allowed to exercise in the yard and write letters. When he stepped outside the following afternoon, he took a huge gulp of fresh air and promptly fainted. Everything seemed to be getting better. Koestler could talk to the other three inmates from the condemned wing during their time in the yard and, with pen and ink, he began to write letters.
Then they started shooting the prisoners again. April 17 was the anniversary of the declaration of the Republic, and in celebration the Nationalists began another round of executions. For five nights in a row at 10 P.M. the phone rang in the warder’s office, a sound that resonated around the prison. A list of names was communicated. Then the night bell rung, the signal that the firing squad was on its way to gather its victims, a priest leading the procession. One night the priest fumbled with the lock on Koestler’s door but was instructed to go on. He had the wrong cell. By this stage, Koestler was suffering from nervous trembling in his sleep, the whole bed shaking. Listening to the executions took Koestler to the brink. In desperation he cut his gums and asked for cotton wool to stanch the bleeding, using it instead to block up his ears at night. By his calculation forty-seven men were shot that week. Koestler, though, survived.
Three things happened in quick succession: first, a letter from the British Consul in which he wrote that he was trying to visit; second, another letter from Dorothy in which she told him a major campaign was being run in Britain for his release; third, a visit from the Consul himself, bearing good news. Koestler’s case had provoked questions in the House of Commons, he was told. His advocates had framed it as an issue of press freedom. The Foreign Office had written to Franco and different options were being pursued, the most promising of which was a potential prisoner exchange. By this stage, Koestler’s covert fasting had taken its toll. He struggled to get out of bed on some days and when he was inspected by the prison doctor he was asked to undress. He was shocked by his own emaciation: he looked like “a walking skeleton from a Walt Disney cartoon.”18
On May 8, he was taken before a military examiner and questioned for two hours, finding most of the questions idiotic as the examiner seemed preoccupied with proving that the News Chronicle was a Communist newspaper. To Koestler’s relief, he saw in his file that he was no longer charged with being a spy but rather with aiding the Republican militia, making it much more likely the Francoists would agree to a prisoner exchange. His membership in the Comintern remained a secret. His optimism was short-lived, though. The consul grimly told him negotiations were getting nowhere. “There is nothing in the tenet of even the gloomiest monastic order,” he wrote, “which condemns a man to endure purgatory, and then, when it is all over, sends him back to hell.”19 He became convinced, again, that he would be executed.
Four days later, on May 12, “between the siesta and the evening meal the cell door flew open and freedom was thrown at me like a club.”20 He was taken from his cell, which by now he shared with Carlos, an Italian prisoner, to the prison warden’s office. Sitting in the warden’s chair was a stranger in a black shirt and no tie. The stranger bowed with exaggerated formality and told Koestler he was going to take him away. Koestler returned to his cell, shook Carlos by the hand, and departed, the door slamming shut behind him. As they walked down the corridor, Koestler’s diary fell out of his pocket and the leaves of paper scattered on the floor. “What have you got there?” the stranger asked. “Private letters,” Koestler answered. The stranger helped him gather them up. Back in the warden’s office, Koestler signed a document declaring that he would no longer meddle in Spanish affairs. Before he could prepare himself, he was led out of the front gate and was stunned by the simple sights of the outside world: a donkey cart creaking by, a man reading a newspaper, a child eating grapes, local girls flirting with the prison guards.
There was time for one last scare. Koestler was ushered into a car, in the back of which sat two police officers. He was told they were driving “to another town” but when the car stopped, Koestler panicked. The car idled by an empty field. To his relief, he heard the approaching sound of an engine and a monoplane, a tiny Baby Douglas, appeared from behind a thicket. They were on the outskirts of an airfield. The stranger in the black shirt was one of the Nationalist’s finest pilots and his wife, held hostage by Republican forces, was being exchanged for Koestler. The flight was bumpy, and the pilot shouted Francoist propaganda at Koestler the whole way. They landed at La Linea, on the border with Gibraltar, where Koestler was held for forty-eight hours. On May 14 he crossed the border and set foot on the safety of British soil. He was a free man again. He was also a changed man. He had gone into a prison a fervent Communist, but he came out with his faith in the cause shaken. The prison diary, clutched in his hand, was testament to that.