Hermann and Kate Field, two little-known but quintessential twentieth-century figures, addressed a small gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the other night. The occasion was a belated promotion for Hermann Field’s memoir, Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family. Those in attendance were mainly investigators of communism and its depredations against the democracies — a sprinkling of retired CIA officers, prominent historians such as John Earl Haynes and Ronald Radosh, experts on Soviet control of the American Communist movement, and a handful of Eastern European intellectuals.
Hermann Field, remarkably spry at 90, is the brother of Noel Field, a Soviet secret police agent and distant colleague in that work of Alger Hiss. Noel served in the State Department, for the League of Nations, and as a relief worker with antifascist refugees in Europe. In 1948, Noel Field, whose name had surfaced in the U.S. investigation of Hiss’s espionage activities, fled to Eastern Europe to avoid a federal subpoena.
There, he was caught up in the postwar machinations of the Russians, who were combing their clandestine networks, motivated by their habitual paranoia, looking for suspects to eliminate. Noel Field filled the bill: He had spied for the USSR in the United States and Europe during the murderous purge of the Soviet intelligence services in the late 1930s, and he had worked with Western intelligence authorities in the Second World War.
Noel Field disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, followed by his wife, Herta. Hermann, then a professor of architecture at Western Reserve University, received a letter from Herta in 1949 and went east in an attempt to locate his brother. He was kidnapped by Polish secret police officers at the Warsaw airport. When he asked his captors the reason for his arrest, they simply answered, over and over, “You know.”
As a Soviet spy, Noel Field must have had some idea of what was going on in his case from the beginning. Hermann, however, was no more than a sincere antifascist liberal, and was horrified by his experience. His wife, Kate, who was in London, was soon flabbergasted at the news that Noel had been cited as a witness in the show trials of Lazlo Rajk in Budapest and Rudolf Slansky in Prague. The latter were loyal and even extreme Stalinist party chiefs selected for trial and execution as a preventive measure against the spread of Tito-style restlessness in the Soviet satellites.
Meanwhile, Hermann Field was transported to the cellar of a farmhouse in the Polish countryside, where for five years he was subjected to the classic torments of KGB interrogation. He never saw the outside of the building in which he was held, and never saw natural light. A single bulb burned through the night in his cell.
He became disoriented — which was, of course, the purpose of the torture. “I experienced a horrible world of sounds,” he recalled before his spellbound Washington audience. Fellow prisoners were dragged up the stairs of the crude prison, beaten, and then chased down the stairs to further blows.
At first he thought he had been arrested for taking photographs. His captors laughed at that. He thought that if he cited the names of prominent Communists whose lives he had helped save from Hitler he would be released. Instead, those he named were charged as his alleged accomplices. He believed the other prisoners in the lockup were real Nazi war criminals, and envied them for, as he imagined, actually having something to confess. “There was nothing to grab onto in my mind,” he remembered. Wakened night after night for continuous interrogations, he became semi-delirious.
Finally, he signed a confession admitting he was a Western spy, but his interrogators left for the weekend, and after a brief rest, he regained his composure. Incredibly, he repudiated his confession. Another prisoner was then put in his cell, a minor Polish functionary named Stanislaw Mierzenski.
The two men kept their sanity by lecturing each other on subjects they knew — in Field’s case, architecture. Then they made up stories and, finally, books. Field realized that his captors were afraid he might die, so he used hunger strikes to get books and writing materials. But mainly, the prisoners waited. And waited.
And then Joseph Stalin died. The insanity that had led these two to their dank, stinking cellar abated, and in 1954 Hermann Field was informed that he had been the victim of irregularities in the Polish legal system and would be freed. Kate, still in London, learned the news from Reuters.
But Hermann created a problem for himself. He refused to leave Polish custody until he could be assured that his cellmate would also be released. The Poles argued and argued with him, and finally allowed him to meet with Mierzenski, who eventually was freed. Field returned to America, and later he and Mierzenski published one of the books they had written together, Angry Harvest, a novel about a Pole sheltering a Jew during World War II.
As if this record of sacrifice and generosity weren’t enough, Hermann Field also refused to lie about his brother Noel, who in turn was released after Stalin’s demise and died in Hungary in 1970, having declined to return to the United States. Questioned at his lecture about Noel’s espionage activities — evidence of which Hiss apologists still reject as lies extorted by KGB interrogators — Hermann Field answered forthrightly. His brother had told the truth when he said he was a spy and identified Hiss as one. Noel’s “final statements in prison, when he thought he was close to death,” Hermann said, “reflected his need to leave a factual account of his life — he produced a true testament.” It is Hermann, however, who, in the spirit of his Quaker faith, found the courage to tell the truth publicly, before his countrymen.
Stephen Schwartz is the author of Intellectuals and Assassins, a collection of essays on Stalinism, just published in London.
