The Hunting Dog Finds a Scent

Gottwald and Slansky

If in my last blog, I was rushing down one blind alley after another, now I have found which scent to follow. Several questions have answers; I know that both Alice’s sister and her mother survived the war, I still don’t know how.

Much more interestingly, as a result of switching my researches from Ancestry to Geni, I now have information about Alice’s involvement in the Czech Communist party after the war and about her subsequent arrest. Thanks to suggestions from others on Geni, I have books that refer to Alice directly.

Noel Field was central to the events that unfolded. Alice was one of several people described by Karel Kaplan in his book, Report on the Murder of the General Secretary, as “Czechoslovak officials” who recommended that Field be granted a residence permit in Czechoslovakia. This request, rather than providing him with asylum, alerted the security authorities to Field and they decided to put him under surveillance. The job was given, again, according to Kaplan, to Alice Kohnova. This raises as many questions as it answers; if Alice wanted to help Field escape from the USA, how did she feel about ‘spying’ on him? What exactly was her role in the Communist Party and her relationship with the government?

More information comes in another book: Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Easter Europe 1948-1954, by George H. Hodos. For those unfamiliar (as I was until a few weeks ago) with the Slansky Trials, they were Czechoslovakia’s version of the Stalinist Show Trials, which were named after Rudolf Slansky, who first participated in the Stalinist purges and later fell victim to them himself. It seems that Alice appeared in one of the earliest trials, due to her connection with Noel Field, but also because she ticked every box that made Stalinist authorities suspicious; she was an intellectual, she had lived in America, her husband was an American living in Switzerland, she had been a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War and she was Jewish.

The events leading to her arrest begin with the arrest and torture of Geyza and Charlotte Pavlik by the Hungarian authorities; they were accused of being “members of a Trotskyist group in Switzerland and agents of the American spy Noel Field”. After four weeks of “incessant torture”, “Soviet and Hungarian security officers extorted from the Pavliks a full confession and the names of sixty prominent Czechoslovak communists who allegedly were participants in a Tito-ist imperialist plot.” When they were returned to Czechoslovakia, the Pavliks retracted their confession, but the retraction was rejected. Instead, their testimony, exacted under torture, proved to be the impetus for Czechoslovakia to start purges of its own.

Gottwald (Chairman of the Czech Communist Party) and Slansky, on advice from Soviet General Byelkin, arrested Pavlik’s “accomplices”. These included, “Rudolf Feigl, a high official in the Ministry of Information, and his common-law-wife Vlasta Vesela, who had served on a medical team with the International Brigade in Spain, Alice Kohnova, also a ‘Spaniard’; Kare Markus, section chief in the Ministry of Foreign Trade; Milan Reiman, department chief in the office of the prime minister.” These came to be known as the “Field group” and Gottwald claimed that the purge of spies had been completed. In fact, it was just the beginning.

Alice may have been in quite elevated company, but she was in a great deal of trouble. By the time the group came to trial, several months later, two of the defendants had committed suicide (or were said to have committed suicide) in prison. The trial was held in secret and all were “found guilty of espionage, treason, and conspiracy.” They all received long prison terms, apart from Pavlik himself, who was sentenced to life imprisonment.

When I began researching Alice, I knew she had been a communist and had been imprisoned, but the details that I am now starting to discover make me realise that she had a far more influential role than I had imagined. I am just uncovering the tip of an iceberg. And the more I learn about Alice, the more I wonder about Erwin. How much did he know? How did he feel about what was happening to her? While he was walking through the ordered gardens of Parc de la Grange in Geneva, pushing me in my pram, Alice was in a prison cell.