Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family

This remarkable document is a moving love story, a tale of sinister international intrigue and a revealing probe of Cold War politics. In 1949, American journalist Noel Field vanished in Prague. His brother, architect Hermann Field, traveled to Europe searching for Noel--and he too disappeared without a trace from the airport in Warsaw. The Field family's Kafkaesque ordeal got worse: when Noel's wife, Herta, went looking for him in 1949, she too disappeared; then Noel and Herta's foster daughter were arrested by East German secret police and spent five years in German and Soviet prisons. These disappearances behind the Iron Curtain made front-page headlines when Noel, a State Department worker during the 1930s, was named as a friend and associate of Alger Hiss in Hiss's 1950 perjury trials. Most likely arrested (it's still unclear) for being imperialist agents, the brothers were held incommunicado without trials, tortured and put in solitary confinement in Eastern European prisons until 1954, when they were exonerated and released. In this book, Hermann, who endured psychological torture, endless interrogations and a straitjacket and survived by dint of his iron will, subversive wit and Quaker pacifist faith, describes his experience. His courageous narrative (reminiscent of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon) is told in counterpoint to chapters written by his devoted English wife, Kate. One of the ironies of the story is that the Field brothers, reviled by their communist captors and used as props in a wave of purges and show trials, were both communist sympathizers (and Noel may have served as a communist agent) who had aided antifascist refugees escaped from Eastern Europe during WWII. B&w photos. (Mar.)