Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  While it is possible to hold it, I will not give up the faith that Paul is the man I believe him to be and that one day the world will hear that scuffle and that sound of blows and see the slash of honor on his face.

  VII

  My second glimpse of the Communist Party’s interest in me was somewhat more sinister. I glimpsed it at all because the party, using somewhat the same tactic I had used in approaching Paul, tried to reach me through my brother-in-law. He is an attorney in New York City.

  A few days after Paul had made his fruitless trips to Baltimore, there strode into my brother-in-law’s office one morning a rather striking-looking white-haired woman, about fifty years old. She told the receptionist that Miss Grace Hutchins wished to see Mr. Shemitz. Mr. Shemitz was in court. So Miss Hutchins scribbled a note which she left for him. This note which my brother-in-law, with a lawyer’s squirreling instinct, hoarded, unknown to me, over the years, is now in the custody of the F.B.I., and the handwriting has been officially certified as that of Miss Hutchins. In fact, I have never seen the note. My brother-in-law prudently never showed it to me. He turned it over to the F.B.I. during the Hiss Case.

  But I know that the note said something very close to this: “Tell Esther’s husband to contact Steve at once. Very urgent.” Esther is my wife. Steve is Alexander Stevens, alias J. Peters, the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party. My brother-in-law could not possibly have told me to contact “Steve,” because he did not know, and had not known for years, where his sister and I were living. This had been true from the time I went underground.

  Nothing having happened, Miss Hutchins appeared again several mornings later. Again Mr. Shemitz was in court. Miss Hutchins said that she would wait. Perhaps she suspected that Mr. Shemitz was really skulking in his private office. She waited through the morning. She waited austerely through the lunch hour. She waited through the afternoon. As the day passed, the other people in the office became, first vaguely aware, then vaguely uneasy, at the silent presence in their midst. They did not recognize the woman with the magnificent white hair upswept from the high forehead.

  My wife and I would have recognized her, for she had been my wife’s close friend for years and one of the witnesses of our marriage.

  Her classmates at Bryn Mawr would have recognized her, for, like Mrs. Alger Hiss and her friend, Mrs. Carl Binger, the wife of the psychoanalyst in the Hiss trials, Miss Hutchins is a Bryn Mawr alumna.

  Certain social circles in Boston and elsewhere would have recognized her, for she came of an old Back Bay family.

  Certain Christian pacifist circles would have recognized her, for she had once worked for The World Tomorrow, a pacifist magazine, together with my wife and Nevin Sayre, the brother of Francis Sayre, who, as Assistant Secretary of State, had hired Alger Hiss as his assistant.

  Scotland Yard would have recognized her, for when the British police raided the Arcos, the London counterpart of the Amtorg, circa 1927, they found a Russian employe frantically trying to burn documents. Among the names listed in the documents, as a trusted Communist contact in the United States, was Grace Hutchins.

  The Central Committee of the American Communist Party would have recognized her, for she had publicly announced her conversion to Communism, had since served the party loyally, and had been its official candidate in various election campaigns.

  In fact, Grace Hutchins, of Back Bay and Bryn Mawr, had been for years a fanatical Communist, and was, to my personal knowledge, in touch with more than one underground operation. It was she who first told me of a Japanese underground apparatus which was working out of the United States, screening, among other activities, Japanese students in America for Communist work in Japan. I can still see Miss Hutchins, sitting among the handsome old pieces in her Greenwich Village apartment, describing in her cultivated voice how difficult the work was made by the untrustworthiness of the students. “You can’t trust one of them. The only safe way is to regard everyone in advance as a Japanese police spy.” (“Due to Zhitomirsky’s treachery,” says Lenin’s wife indignantly in one of her letters, “Comrade Kamo was arrested with a suitcase full of dynamite.”)

  Later in my experience, I met Miss Hutchins on other underground business. When Robert Gordon Switz, also a member of a good American family, but a Soviet agent (later an anti-Communist), was arrested with other members of his Soviet apparatus in Paris, it was Miss Hutchins who brought me together with Switz’s brother so that I could turn over to him several hundred dollars for Switz’s defense.

  When my brother-in-law finally returned from court after four o’clock, Miss Hutchins was still waiting for him. In his private office, she came to the point at once: “If you will agree to turn Chambers over to us,” she said, “the party will guarantee the safety of your sister and the children.” My startled brother-in-law, who, like most Americans, was completely unaware of what Communism is really like (we had never discussed the subject), tried to explain that he did not know even the whereabouts of his sister, her husband or their children. The grand manner is second nature to Miss Hutchins, a fact which has long made her a butt among the more self-consciously proletarian levels of the Communist Party. But it also serves the revolution. She stared at my brother-in-law as if he were engaged in trade. “If he does not show up by (such and such a day),” she said briskly, “he will be killed.” With that she left.

  This interview has always had a special fascination for me. It is almost classically Communist; first, in its simple audacity; second, because, as usual with Communists, the party offers something it has no intention of giving (“the safety of your sister and the children,” who were obviously much safer in any other hands) for something which it wants but cannot get (the custody of Whittaker Chambers). And its bad melodrama is saved by a comedy, at once low and touching, because the emissary, Miss Hutchins, even in the moment of trying to make a deal, cannot quite throw off the traditions of a gentle past which have become a part of her.

  My brother-in-law, as a participant, took a different view. Terrified by the visit and unable to warn us, he was frantic. He rushed to the only two people he could think of who might know where we were: my mother and Miss Grace Lumpkin, the author of To Make My Bread, winner of the Maxim Gorki prize for literature, and long a friend of my wife’s. Neither of them could help him. But I first learned of Grace Hutchins’ mission from Grace Lumpkin when I called on her one day some time later. For Grace Lumpkin, now a devout woman whose days are filled with good works, had been a close fellow-traveler who broke from the Communist movement after me. A member of one of the South’s oldest families, she was the sister of the late Senator Lumpkin of South Carolina, close friend for many years of James F. Byrnes, former Supreme Court Justice, Secretary of State and now Governor of South Carolina. I mention these origins deliberately, as I have dwelt on Grace Hutchins’ antecedents, for the consideration of those people who still say: “But how could a man with Alger Hiss’s background ever have been a Communist?”

  VIII

  I had another curious, and, at the time, much more disturbing brush with the Communist Party. It occurred somewhat later, but it had its beginnings from the very moment that I broke. In those days I kept all my associations carefully sketchy. My rule was to trust no one, even those whom perforce I must trust; for there are always some who must be trusted. Out of this necessity, I dealt with one man with increasing confidence. He was an executive. It lay in his power to give me work. Therefore, he gave me hope.

  Let me call him Noel. Noel was a big, fair, effete, rubbery man, who lolled in his chair or over his desk, collapsed in a kind of hereditary fatigue, or as if he had recently been boned. With me he was so grossly upper class that I suspected him of doing a caricature of the type, and doing it rather amusingly, for he had a catlike grace and craft. He was casually kind and covertly cruel. I think he liked to blend the two. I think that this was one of his chief pleasures in life, in which he felt justified because his kindness usual
ly outweighed his cruelty. A hundred such patrician Noels must have toddled out of the public baths in the warm dusks of dying Rome, with nothing more real on their minds than supper and the vomitorium.

  He drove a glittery convertible. One night, after he had taken me to a thirty-dollar supper at the Chambord (at home my wife and I were eating breakfast food for all meals to conserve our money so that the children could have nourishing food), Noel found his car parked so tightly between two others that there seemed no way to get out. I watched him free himself by driving the beautiful machine, forward and backward, with a crash of fenders and denting of mud-guards (including his own), that could be heard for a block, until he had rammed the obstructing cars away. I watched this splendid destruction with a slightly sick feeling. I felt as if I were caught between the crashing cars, as if Noel were challenging me each time they collided: “You see, the Communists are right about us playboys.”

  For he knew that I was an ex-Communist and liked to twit me about it. I took this twitting to be part of the price a workingman pays for his job, and merely endured or parried it. I recognized that in Noel’s circles Communism was an amusing foible. The friend who had introduced me to Noel had assured me that he was a political blank. There was only one disturbing fact about him. One of his close friends was a man whom I suspected of being a Communist.

  But Noel was so far from anything that resembled Communism that at last even I was almost completely off guard. To simplify our business relations, I gave Noel my address, and, when I acquired a telephone, my number.

  One day he called me up long distance. He said he must see me at once. He would not tell me why. I had five dollars, which, with the gas that was in the car, was just enough to enable me to drive to New York from Baltimore, provided nothing untoward happened. I hoped, somewhat breathlessly, that his call meant a job.

  I walked into Noel’s office. It was a long room, thick-carpeted, with paneled ceiling or walls. Noel’s desk was at the far end. As usual he was lolling half across it. He first glanced up when I was directly in front of the desk. He stared at me a moment, and then, without greeting me, said, “Ulrich is looking for you.” Ulrich was the pseudonym of a Russian in the Soviet underground apparatus into which I was first recruited.

  “Who is Ulrich?” I asked.

  “O-o-o-h, you know,” he answered, “Ulrich from Berlin.”

  Ulrich had worked underground in Berlin.

  “How do you know Ulrich?” I asked.

  “Because,” said Noel, “when I was in Berlin, I joined the Communist Party.”

  “Then why are you warning me?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, “I admire what you have done, but I do not have the courage to do it myself.”

  He then pulled out the right-hand top drawer of his desk and took from it a number of his commercial products which he piled in front of him. He ripped them open and out slid little heaps of Communist Party propaganda in a foreign language, some of which he handed silently to me. He explained that he was smuggling the leaflets abroad, in which operation he was working with V. J. Jerome. I had known Jerome in the open Communist Party in which he was the Agit-Prop (director of agitation and propaganda).

  Noel told me that, a night or two before, he had had supper with Ulrich, who was hunting me and had asked Noel to bring him together with me.

  Then Noel began to reminisce. He told me that he had made two trips into Nazi Germany at the Communist Party’s orders. On the first trip, he was carrying “material,” which in Communist language may mean anything from secret communications to microfilm. While he was passing through Belgium, an underground Communist agent had boarded the train at a way station and warned Noel that the Germans suspected him and were waiting to search him at the frontier. The agent took away the material. Noel went on to Aachen, the first German passport and customs post, where he was taken off the train, stripped and searched thoroughly.

  On the second later trip, Noel was sent to contact two men: a Communist Party member who was working secretly in the top grouping of the Gestapo, and Ernst Torgler, a former member of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, one of the defendants at the Reichstag fire trial, then in a concentration camp.

  The day Noel arrived in Berlin, he found red placards posted on the walls, announcing that the Communists in the Gestapo had been beheaded. Noel described to me how the shock of this news was followed by a feeling of hopelessness and lassitude, so that all his strength seemed to be draining out of him. He went down to a little restaurant on one of the lakes, which he had frequented in earlier times, and simply sat there all day, staring at the water and drinking. He told me this quietly, without any histrionics, in a tone which I find it incredible that any man could have counterfeited who had not suffered the experience. Noel was not able to contact Torgler, either. But he managed to catch a glimpse of him, from a distance, walking with some other prisoners, and thus learned that Torgler was still alive.

  I saw Noel only a few times afterwards, and only at his office. I would never again have gone to a restaurant with him, or to his house, as I had previously done, for despite his good intentions, Communists are subject to compulsions that he might not have been able to withstand. I heard about Noel from time to time from mutual acquaintances, whose various accounts, when their differences are duly allowed for, seem to add up to this: in 1939 Noel himself broke with the Communist Party.

  Our mutual acquaintances always laugh at Noel’s tale of Communist Party membership and his experiences as an underground courier. They insist that he is an incurable romantic. It is possible that Noel may have colored some of his exploits. But three things I find it impossible to believe. I find it impossible to believe that any man, romantic or merely cruel, or both, would bring another troubled man two hundred miles for the purpose of watching his reaction to a hoax. I find it impossible to believe that any man could have told me, so quietly and circumstantially, the story of Noel’s trip to Berlin without its having happened. And I find it impossible to believe that one man would say to another: “I admire what you have done, but I do not have the courage to do it myself” unless he means it. For it is my experience that men’s invention does not take that turn.

  Moreover, some hard facts are involved. One, Ulrich was a pseudonym known only to a few members of the Soviet underground; few even of Ulrich’s American Communist connections knew him by that name; they knew him as “Walter.” Noel could not have known that name unless he knew Ulrich well or had deep underground connections. Two, an official (repeat official) record exists in which, while Noel fails to remember our conversation about his other underground activities, he remembers quite clearly that he pulled out his desk drawer, and showed me the concealed propaganda.

  Regardless of the truth or falsity of Noel’s warning about Ulrich, its impact on me was brutal. Even if it was intended merely as a move in the Communist war of nerves against me, it backfired badly. It failed to terrify me, but it did give me a feeling of desperation. It made me feel with fresh acuteness that I was at grips with an implacable enemy at which I must strike before it struck at me. It stirred in me a slow and deep anger whose roots lay at the point where the threat against me touched my wife and children. It faced me clearly with a question that I had been brooding on since my break: what must I do against the Communist Party? It hardened my purpose to take the offensive and attack the underground myself—as I shall presently describe—using my own methods and means. “Denn wir haben eine Krise der Verzweiflung erreicht—for we have reached a crisis of desperation,” I wrote a friend at the time. This sentence from a letter which still exists (in the custody of the United States Government) suggests better than any effort of memory to recapture it the mood of those days and nights.

  IX

  This was not my only mood or my dominant mood. It was an undertone in our lives, like surf heard, continuously but unconsciously, far off at night, which only an episode such as that with Noel brought into full play.
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  I had prepared my break from the Communist Party with careful guile. But through Noel the shadow of the party and its secret apparatuses had fallen on me. It had been lifted from me by no talent of mine, no conspiratorial skill or alertness. Noel, like Paul, had not chosen to do me harm. Something in me which he called courage, something insubstantial, a mere quality, without material form, having nothing to do with intelligence or shrewdness, had touched something in him to which he gave no name; had fortified his weakness and moved his natural goodness.

  In short, all my precautions had not saved me. I had been saved. It occurred to me: “How silly to suppose that any man by his own efforts can ever save himself.”

  I have one of those curious minds in which strong feeling almost always summons up involuntarily some passage of music or verse that has the same emotional quality. And since my memory for rhythm is better than my memory for words or notes, the rhythm of such passages sometimes pulsates for days at the back of my mind before I can recall what goes with it. That happened now. As I went over and over in my mind the meaning of the strange experience with Noel, I felt a premonitory rhythm, but I could not recapture the words. One day they burst the surface of my mind:There is a Power whose care

  Teaches thy path along that coast—

  The desert and illimitable air—

  Lone, wandering, but not lost.

  I had memorized the stanza as a boy, and for more than twenty years I had not thought of it.

  X

  There was one comparatively bright month for us in this somewhat overcast period. During the 20’s and 30’s I had translated a dozen books from German and French, including the best-selling Bambi, but none had ever meant so much to me as the translation by which I was now earning my way to freedom. In our crowded quarters, it was difficult to work on the book even in the quiet nights. Our rooms were uncomfortable, our nerves were so raw that the sense of freedom, like a rebirth, that had possessed us when I broke with the Communist Party was wearing thin in furtive isolation. All of us needed a complete change. Tactically, too, perhaps, this was the moment to leave Baltimore and emerge somewhere else. It must be some miscellaneous place, where new arrivals make no stir. The only place of the kind I could think of was Florida. “Why not go there?” I thought. It was between the seasons and would probably be inexpensive. If I could find a library nearby, I could do whatever research was necessary for the translation. I told my wife: “We are going to Florida,” and explained why. She smiled for the first time in weeks and the children caught her excitement.