I feel like a hunting dog, pursuing scents with excitement and yet with so many possibilities not knowing which to follow. I rush down some avenues and find them to be blind alleys or the scent just peters out. There are so many places to start: Alice’s history in Czechoslovakia, in America, her imprisonment, the Communist Party, her time in Spain, people named as her associates. I haven’t even discovered whether any of her family survived the holocaust.
The most productive trail so far has come from the one article I have which mentions Alice; it is written in Czech and entitled:
Politické procesy v ČSR v 50. letech
Politické procesy v sovětských satelitech – Maďarsko – Noel Field
Luckily the person who sent it to me explained the main points- Alice helped arrange for Noel Field to go to Czechoslovakia. I had not heard of Noel Field, but a little research shows him to have been an American who spied for the communists. In 1947 he was denounced as a spy and went to Prague. It was this journey of escape from the reach of the American authorities, when HUAC was rooting out what it saw as the communist threat, that was when Alice intervened on his behalf. Soon after arriving in Prague, Field was arrested, taken to Hungary, tried and imprisoned.
Alice too was arrested, but I don’t know how soon after this. Nor do I know whether she was aware that Field would be in as much danger in Czechoslovakia as he was in America, more so, as in a choice between imprisonments, America may have been preferable. She must have known he was spying for the USSR, or maybe she just knew he was sympathetic to the cause. I need to find out more about Noel Field, and Kati Marton’s book about him, True Believer, Stalin’s Last American Spy (reviewed last year in The Guardian) is my starting point. Kati Marton’s parents were journalists in Hungary in the post-war period and were imprisoned themselves, so her account of their story Enemies of the People, is also one I shall read.
I am trying to triangulate people whom Alice would have known; a combination of her membership of the Czech Communist Party and her work in New York with the International Workers Order, would have put her at the centre of much that was going on in the world of the Eastern European Jews sympathetic to communist ideals. Noel Field also spent WW2 in America and worked as the European Director the Unitarian Service Committee. After the war, my father’s first job was as the Executive Director of the Unitarian Service Committee’s Medical Teaching Mission to Austria in the summer of 1947. I don’t know how well, if at all, they would have known each other, but they must have been aware of the other’s existence. I can’t interpret all these links at the moment, but I am beginning to see how many there are going to be.
Going through my father’s deposition, I am listing all the names he mentions as being associated with Alice, three of whom: Helen Vrabel, Michael Saunders and Charles Musil I have found in the HUAC records. Alice worked as Helen Vrabel’s secretary. This must have placed her in a vulnerable position, or maybe at this time, she was not sufficiently active to be viewed as a threat.
Investigating the records of the Unitarian Service Committee and, of course, the International Workers’ Order is high on the “to do” list.
References:
http://spartacus-educational.com/Noel_Field.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/30/true-believer-kati-marton-noel-field-stalin-spy
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=etcJAAAAIAAJ&pg=PR8&lpg=PR8&dq=Helen+Vrabel+Saunders&source=bl&ots=oQU2eLjiG7&sig=QxqER4Ocuv54l5dGQ3q5vrV9hvM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjK4-mj95LWAhVLKsAKHcvtBK0Q6AEIPDAH#v=onepage&q=Helen%20Vrabel%20Saunders&f=false
Looking for Alice 