The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  The prospects for the future of the Holy Land are one colossal nightmare. Perpetual insecurity is ruining the country's economy; fear and hatred grow daily as murders and vendettas link up into an endless chain. The implacable savagery of this petty guerilla war threatens to destroy slowly but surely a historically unprecedented experiment. Britain must act, and act quickly. This is an S.O.S for Palestine. (An S.O.S. for Palestine', News Chronicle, 15.12.1937)

  In 1937 partition could have been carried out with relatively little trouble and less bloodshed. The representative Jewish bodies were prepared to accept it. The moderate Arab leaders would have yielded to diplomatic pressure. The most influential among them, King Abdullah of Transjordan (whom I revisited in Amman during a lull in the riots) gave me an interview which, in somewhat veiled terms, amounted to an acceptance of partition. The Government of Neville Chamberlain, however, refused to implement the Royal Commission's plan, and for the next ten years British policy in Palestine was plunged into a dark night of indecision, error and prejudice. Partition was finally endorsed, after a decade of needless torment and bloodshed, by the United Nations, and implemented by force of arms in the Arab Jewish war.

  From 1942, when the mass-extermination of European Jews began, until the consolidation of the Jewish State in 1948, Palestine became once more my main preoccupation. I spent during this period altogether a year and a half in that country, wrote two books (Thieves in the Night and Promise and Fulfilment), several pamphlets, countless articles, made speeches, and sat on committees--all the time pleading the case of partition, as the only means to end the horror and save those who could still be saved. Of the various crusades in which I had been engaged this was the most harrowing and painful, a penance for the political vagaries of the past. It involved me in an acute conflict between conviction and inclination, for I have had my fill of terror and violence, and was yet compelled to explain and defend the cause of the Jewish terrorists. During these long sojourns in Palestine, the poisoned atmosphere of the country, the bombings, the hangings, the all-pervading savagery and hatred were active fuel for my anxiety neurosis, and for a while alcohol was the only remedy.

  When the war against Hitler was at long last won, I had meant to settle down to a stable and peaceful existence. I had made England my permanent home, wrote in English, thought in English, and had become attached to the country and the people; with approaching middle age, I watched with satisfaction the branching out of my roots. I had applied for British citizenship, and was awaiting the day when I would again have a nationality, a country and a passport. The most wretched moment in this conflict-torn period came when my application was on the point of being granted, yet I felt unable to take the oath of allegiance at a time when Englishmen and Jews were virtually at war. This, too, was part of the penance, but it had its reward. When, at the end of 1948, the State of Israel was safely establishedand the agony and conflict had come to an end, it gave me much satisfactiem to know that my becoming a British citizen was the result of a free choice, aud the end of a long and difficult journey. ( In 1951, British and American newspapers erroneously reported that I had become by Act of Congress an American citizen. The fact is that I have never been given, and have nevcr applied for American citizenship. The misunderstanding arose during a two years' stay in the U.S.A., which was made possible by an Act of Congress. The Act in question exemptcd me from the provisions of the McCarran Law (which denies access to U.S.A. territory to former Communists) and gave me the right of residence, but had no bearing on the question of nationality.)

  I have not revisited Israel since 1948. But I felt an equally deep satisfaction when it was reported to me that several members of the United Nations Commission of 1947, which made the historic Recommendation for the establishment of a Jewish State, had gone to the trouble of reading Thieves in the Night and that this book had had some influence on them. It is the most satisfactory reward that a writer can hope for, and represents (together with a second incident to be reported later) my main solace when, in hours of depression, I ask myself whether in forty-eight years full of sound and fury, I have achieved anything worth while.

  XXXVI. `What is this Thou hast done unto Me?'

  THE story of my final break with the Communist Party is a story of last-minute hesitations and confusions, which I find difficult to get into focus.

  In the beginning of 1938, after my return from Palestine, I made a four weeks' lecture tour through England for the Left Book Club which at the time was at the peak of its popularity.

  The Club's monthly `choices' were selected by a three-man jury: Victor Gollancz, Harold Laski and John Strachey. The majority of the Club's sixty­five thousand subscribers sympathised with the C.P., but they were English in the first, Communists in the second place, and I found it difficult to take them seriously. Their meetings, compared with those on the Continent, were like tea parties in the vicarage; they put decency before dialectics and, even more bewilderingly, they tended to indulge in humour and eccentricity-­both of which were dangerous diversions from the class struggle. After two or three weeks of lecturing up and down the country, from Newcastle to Bournemouth, from Liverpool to Cheltenham, I came to the tentative conclusion that the majority of English Communists were not revolutionaries but cranks and eccentrics, and that they were certainly closer to the Pickwick Club than to the Comintern. I was constantly reminded of a famous story about Lenin. He was shown a newspaper-cutting referring to a strike in England, which said that police and strikers had played a soccer match that the strikers had won. Lenin promptly declared that the English would never make a revolution, and cut the subsidy of the British C.P.

  The lectures were on the political and military situation in Spain. About my personal experiences I did not speak--the hours by the window were not a proper subject for the Left Book Club. Questions were asked, but there was rarely any proper discussion. The eagerness and innocence of the audiences was very moving. The Spanish Loyalist Army had come to be regarded as the rearguard of European democracy, and commanded the passionate sympathy of all. At nearly every meeting I was asked whether I had happened to come across comrade so-and-so, a relation or friend of the questioner who was fighting with the International Brigades. The exploitation of the war by Moscow for its own purposes, the activities of the G.P.U. and SIM behind the front-lines, did not enter the picture. Any mention of these subjects would have met with incredulity and indignation.

  At almost every meeting there was for me one critical moment. It came when somebody in the audience asked a question about the POUM.

  The Partido Obrero Un ficado Marxista was a small Leftist splinter group which, in the tradition of such dissident sects, called itself grandiosely the united Marxist workers' party. Because of its Trotskyist leanings, the POUM. was at the time treated by the Communists as enemy number one, and its members were fair prey for the G.P.U. in Spain. It had been made the scapegoat for the anarchist rising in Barcelona. Its leader, Andres Nin, formerly Minister of Justice in the Caballero government, had been denounced as an agent of Franco and arrested, together with a group of his associates. Nin had once been a leading member of the Comintern, but had sided with Trotsky against Stalin; the Spanish war had provided the G.P.U. with an opportunity to settle his, and a few hundred similar accounts. One day Nin and several other P.O.U.M. leaders were fetched out of prison by an unidentified group of men, taken for a ride towards Madrid, and shot without trial and ceremony. Officially their bodies were only found when a British parliamentary delegation came to Spain to investigate the circumstances of their disappearance.

  At the time of the lecture-tour, Nin and his comrades were already in prison, but had not yet been assassinated. The men of the P.O.U.M. had fought with great bravery and self-sacrifice at the front in Aragon (George Orwell had been wounded while serving as a volunteer in their ranks), and there was no doubt in my mind that the accusations against them were absurd and perfidious. But for a Party member to say this in public meant expul
sion, with the inevitable sequel of being himself denounced as a Trotskyist agent of Franco or the Gestapo. That is why questions referring to P.O.U.M. put me in a critical position.

  The first time it was asked, the question took me unawares. It had not occurred to me that it would be asked; among German or French Communists this would have been unthinkable. For a moment, my mind was a blank. The correct fine to be applied to this and similar cases was that any fraction or group that caused a split in revolutionary unity played into the enemy's hands, and that accordingly Nin (or Trotsky, or Zinoviev, or Radek, as the case may be) must objectively be regarded as an agent of Franco (or Hitlcr, or the British Intelligence Service), whereas the subjective motives of his actions were historically irrelevant. This answer was part of the catechism for the advanced classes, and I had used it ad nauseam in arguments with others and myself. But at that moment my mind remained a blank, and the familiar answer just did not occur to me. Then, without conscious reflection, I took a plunge and said what I really thought. I said that I disagreed with the policy of the P.O.U.M. for a number of reasons which I would be glad to explain, but that in my opinion Andres Nin and his comrades had been acting in good faith, and to call them traitors was both stupid and a desecration of their dead. I was listening to my own voice with curiosity, as if it had been a stranger's.

  There was a short, embarrassed silence. A single voice, probably a Trotskyist or member of the I.L.P., said: `Hear, hear'. Then the chairman asked for the next question. After the meeting one or two Party members mildly reproved me in private for what they called my exaggerated leniency toward the P.O.U.M. We argued for a while, then changed the subject; and that was all. It was the same at the other twenty or more meetings. Every time the question cropped up I gave the same answer, and every time it was received with the same embarrassed silence, which I could only interpret as tacit consent. Those who disagreed, in public or private, did it half-heartedly, on the grounds that civil wars and revolutions follow their own laws. At this point their thinking apparently stopped; the rumours and whisperings about the unmentionable aspects of Spain that had reached them were as thoroughly repressed and relegated to the unconscious as are the Facts of Life by the clergyman's daughter.

  To my great surprise, there were no consequences for me. Even among the lotus-eaters of the British C.P. there must have been some who wrote reports to higher quarters; yet I was not called to account. It had been an abortive suicide, or series of suicides. At every meeting I pressed a figurative revolver to my head, pulled the trigger, heard a faint click, and found to my astonishment that I was still alive and a valued comrade of the Communist Party.

  I felt both disappointed and relieved. I lived through my last months as a member of the Party like a person who knows that there is a painful and critical operation waiting for him which is being postponed from week to week. The less one thinks about it the better. And, strangely enough, during this last period I did not give much conscious thought to the matter. I have already said that I had ceased to be a Communist long before I knew it. Now the inner change that had taken place in Cell No. 40 was gradually percolating through to the surface. I no longer needed to worry about my attitude to the Party; it was taking care of itself.

  After the lecture-tour I went back to Paris. A couple of months passed. In March the trial of the so-called 'Anti-Soviet Block of Rights and Trotskyists' took place in Moscow. It surpassed in wild absurdity and horror everything that had gone before. The defendants were: Nikolai Bukharin, whom Lenin had called `the darling of the Party', President of the Communist International in succession to Zinoviev who had been shot two years earlier; Christian Rakovsky, former head of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, former Soviet Ambassador to England and France; Nikolai Krestinsky, predecessor of Stalin as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, former Minister of Finance and Ambassador to Germany; Alexei Rykov, successor of Lenin as President of the Council of People's Commissars. Finally Yagoda, organiser of the previous Moscow trials, People's Commissar of the Interior, Head of the G.P.U. in succession to Medjinsky whom he confessed to have poisoned together with Maxim Gorky, the author. (Yagoda's successor Yeshov was liquidated as a saboteur of Soviet justice in 1939; Yeshov's successor, Beria, was liquidated as a degenerate saboteur of Soviet justice in 1953. Thus all the heads of the Russian State Police during the last twenty-five years happened to be poisoners, spies and traitors.)

  To fathom the depths of absurdity reached in this trial one should bear in mind that it made the Purge and the preceding trials appear as the work of a poisoner and degenerate; that all the traitors had been appointed to their key positions in the Soviet State by the wise and vigilant Stalin; and that the Communist International was, during the first fifteen years of its existence, headed by agents of the German and British Intelligence Service.

  At about the same time as these major events, a minor scandal was brewing in our writers' circle in Paris. Most of us had for many years known a girl comrade of Anglo-German origin called Judy. She was an attractive girl with an upper-class English background who talked German working-class slang, and was engaged to marry a German Communist serving a five-year sentence of hard labour. In the spring of 1938, the fiance, Hans, arrived in Paris, having completed his sentence and then illegally crossed the frontier. A few days later, the photographs of Hans and Judy appeared on the front page of the German Communist Party's weekly paper in France, with a caption that denounced them both as Gestapo spies.

  I knew that Judy was no more a spy than I, or my brother-in-law Ernie, or Alex and Eva. Hans had worked, until he was arrested, directly under Kippenberger, head of the German C.P.'s military intelligence branch. While Hans was serving his prison term, Kippenberger had been recalled to Moscow and shot in the purge. (The reason for Kippenberger's liquidation was apparently his refusal to get rid of deviationists in the underground German party by the customary G.P.U. method of denouncing them to the Gestapo. See Erich Wollenberg, 'Der Apparat: Stalin's Fuenfte Kolonne', Ostprobleme, May, 1951.) When Hans arrived in Paris, he did not 'know about this--nor did Judy, unversed as she was in apparat matters. He asked the Party to be put in touch with Kippenberger, and when told that the latter was `not available', he named two other leaders of his outfit who had shared the same fate--as Hans himself would have done, had he not been in a German prison. Hence the notice in the paper.

  Hans appealed to the Party, demanding that his case should be investigated by the Central Committee. He received no answer. He and Judy were boycotted by all their friends--Hans by that time half-crazed, and Judy on the verge of a breakdown. Egon and Giesl Kisch had been like second parents to Judy during Hans' imprisonment; now they too turned their backs on her. I wrote a letter to the Central Committee protesting against the public denunciation of two comrades without giving them a hearing, and stating my conviction that they were innocent. I received, of course, no answer, but the Party took no further action against them, nor against me. In the end Hans and Judy managed to get emigration visas to a British dominion, where they were married and have started a new life under a different name.

  My siding with the alleged Gestapo agents had been another suicidal gesture that had gone off at half-cock. While I had been in jail, Communist propaganda had used me as a martyr, and some months must be allowed to lapse before I too could be denounced as an agent of Franco or the Mikado. The logical course would have been simply to resign from the Party. But this idea did not occur to me for quite a while. I knew that sooner or later I would be expelled, and this was to me the only conceivable manner of leaving the Party; to take the initiative myself seemed unimaginable. One may cease being a practising Catholic, but one does not send a letter of resignation to the Church.

  A short while after this, Eva Weissberg suddenly arrived in London. She had been expelled from Russia after eighteen months in the Lubyanka prison. From her I heard the first authentic details, based on her own experience, of the G.P.U.'s methods of obtainin
g confessions.

  Eva, it will be remembered, was a ceramist by profession. She had been arrested in April 1936. The charges against her were that she had inserted a concealed swastika pattern into her designs for mass-produced tea-cups, and that in addition she had hidden under her bed two pistols with the intent of killing Comrade Stalin at the next Party Congress. During her year and a half in the Lubyanka, the G.P.U. had tried to brief her for the part of a repentant sinner in the forthcoming Bukharin trial. She had tried to commit suicide by cutting her veins, was saved, and ultimately released and expelled from the country, thanks to the extraordinary exertions of the Austrian Consul. Her experiences provided me with part of the background material for Darkness at Noon.

  I had known Eva since I was five. We had been to the same Kindergarten, and had in later years remained close friends in Paris, Berlin, and Kharkov. Now she had been rescued from a Communist, I from a Fascist prison. We had been pacing up and down our respective cells in Moscow and Seville at the same time, and at the same rate of four miles an hour. So we could exchange some modern traveller's tales.

  Eva was safe. But Alex, who had been arrested a few months after her, was not. I shall return to his story later.