Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  In his office The Doctor had no assistant. No sound of drilling ever came from beyond his ground-glass doors. Sometimes for half an hour there might be heard faintly the sound of voices within, rising and falling in Russian cadences. There was nothing odd about that since The Doctor himself was born in Russia, and spoke English with a soft Russian intonation.

  I have often sat in The Doctor’s office with half a dozen other patients while he tended an earlier arrival inside. The Doctor’s patients were a miscellaneous lot, though all of them seemed to be Europeans. I noticed that most of them shared one peculiar habit. Most patients enter a waiting room, look a little dismayed at those ahead of them, pick up a magazine, sit down, riffle through it, put it down and take up another. The Doctor’s patients almost always entered the waiting room without glancing at anybody. They went directly to the magazine pile, picked up a magazine and buried themselves so deeply in it that sometimes it was almost impossible to see their faces.

  The Doctor, too, had a peculiar habit. When the door from his office opened, he always leaned out before the patient he had been treating. He would look around at the faces in the waiting room and only after he had done that would the patient emerge and walk straight out, glancing neither to right or left.

  Sometimes, I saw Ulrich walk out after a long professional treatment. Sometimes, I saw Maria. I merely glanced at them without any sign of recognition, and they, of course, gave no sign that they recognized me. Once a hard-faced man walked rapidly out of The Doctor’s office. I went in next. “Do you know who that was?” The Doctor asked me. Then he answered his own question: “That was Tim Buck.” Tim Buck was the secretary of the Communist Party of Canada. For The Doctor had a failing, a little streak of vanity: he liked his friends to know that he played an important part in certain cryptic affairs. He did play an important part and he had played it for a long time. For in the operations of the Fourth Section of the Soviet Military Intelligence, The Doctor’s office was an all but permanent yafka.

  The word is one that he taught me himself, first asking me if I knew its meaning, for he liked to ask questions, especially if he thought that he, and not the person asked, knew the answer. He never asked or answered arrogantly, for he was a very soft-spoken man. Yafka, he told me, is the Russian word for roof. It is the underground term for the one absolutely safe place where underground people, especially strangers in a city, can go for aid, direction, contacts and comfort. I do not know how many people came to Dr. Rosenbliett’s yafka for such treatment. But I suspect that if somebody who was not nashe (one of ours) could have sat undetected in The Doctor’s waiting room between 1930 and 1935, he would have gained a startling and inclusive insight into the activities and personnel of the Soviet Military Intelligence in the United States—and even into such apparently unrelated organizations as the Irish Republican Army.

  But when I first visited The Doctor, I supposed that he was simply another Communist dentist, who was sufficiently trusted so that underground workers could go to him to have their teeth tinkered. That was why Ulrich had sent me to The Doctor in the first place. One of my upper incisors was missing. It had been broken off when I was a boy. Three pivots had been put in its place and each had been broken off in turn. At last I gave it up. That gap-tooth effect worried Ulrich (as it was later to worry Alger Hiss). One day he gave me The Doctor’s name and address. “I want you to go to see him today,” he said. “That is a military command.”

  I had to sit a while in the waiting room. Then The Doctor peered out of his door and permitted a patient to slip past him. He beckoned to me. “Well, Bob,” he said, studying me carefully. He seated me in the dentist chair and peered into my mouth with his very gentle, observant brown eyes. “You should have been dead years ago,” he said. I asked why. “You have no bite,” said The Doctor. “How do you eat?” He took from his assortment of instruments some tool that he held out of sight and stood staring at me for a while. “Do I know who you are going to have supper with tonight?” he asked quietly. I said that I did not know myself. In fact, I did not know. Ulrich had merely told me that he was taking me to dinner with someone. “I do know,” said The Doctor. “You are going to have supper with Dr. Isaac Katz (not the man’s real name). He is a chemist at the Picatinny Arsenal.”

  For ten or fifteen minutes, I sat in the dentist’s chair and The Doctor stood, rocking back and forth gently on his feet, talking to me quietly chiefly about his daughter whom he dearly loved and who was dying of an incurable ailment.

  At last he said that he must call in the next “patient.” He showed me to the door, opened it, and made me wait until he had looked out. He guided me past him with one hand. Even then—though I was puzzled, I did not realize that the “dental work” for which I had come to The Doctor was merely a pretext—to give him a chance to look me over. Neither on that first occasion, or at any later time, did Dr. Rosenbliett ever do any work on my teeth.

  XVIII

  Vacations for party members were not well thought of among Communists. But Max Bedacht announced one day that he felt need of a rest and change of scene. He would introduce me to a substitute who would act as contact with the apparatus during Max’s vacation. His replacement turned out to be my old acquaintance of Daily Worker days, J. Peters. Comrade Peters was no longer with the Hungarian Communist weekly. He had become head of the entire underground section of the American Communist Party. As such, he was one of the two or three most powerful men in the party. He was also a lurking figure of fate in the lives of millions of Americans who did not dream that he existed.

  Peters, of course, never sat down and disclosed to me the exact dimensions or the complex detail of his invisible empire. But I could gain some idea of its scope from the practical questions that from time to time he raised with me. They ranged from personnel problems involving men who were highly placed in the State and Treasury Departments to a problem of spontaneous sabotage by the Communist secret cell in the airplane propeller-casting room of an aluminum company.14 He was in touch with Communists in the Naragansett Torpedo Base, in the Electric Boat Company (submarines for the U.S. Navy) in the Department of Justice and in Hollywood, whose thriving underground made him ecstatic. He was also in direct touch with a number of separate Soviet underground apparatuses. For he operated a special apparatus of his own for the wholesale procurement of birth certificates and naturalization papers, and for tampering with official records—all a part of the important business of securing fraudulent passports.

  Unlike Bedacht, Peters was eager to co-operate with Ulrich’s underground. For a time, I continued to deal separately with both men. Tactically, this was advantageous, for it tended to develop a “socialist competition” between them. Organizationally, it was undesirable because it doubled the risks of meeting, and all other risks. At last I gave Ulrich my opinion of Bedacht and Peters and asked him which I should retain as the contact. “There is a Turkish proverb,” said Ulrich. “It says: if you must choose between two wolves, a wolf that has eaten and a wolf that is hungry, choose the wolf that has eaten.” Bedacht was the wolf that had eaten. But he had eaten too well. In the end, I retained Peters. Bedacht was never officially dropped. I simply ceased to see him. Peters became the exclusive contact with the Soviet underground.

  XIX

  Periodically, the underground reshuffled its quarters. The Gallery had been abandoned. I was told not to go there again. If the handful of Communists who moved in and out of it infrequently had ever been noticed by the neighbors, they were soon forgotten. The group (minus Charlie ), which had disappeared from Gay Street, re-emerged in The Office.

  The Office was the big living room of an apartment on the edge of Brooklyn’s Brownsville section. I had taught myself the habit of “not seeing” so well that I visited The Office many times, but I never learned the name of the street or the number of the house where it was located.

  I no longer did any technical work. No technical equipment was kept at The Office. It would be more than a dec
ade before I would discover that, unsuspected by me, the apparatus had a photographic workshop a floor or two above The Office. The photographer who worked in it was no longer Charlie. Though the new photographer and I must have circled around each other in those days, I had no way of recognizing him or knowing that he worked in the same underground. Nor could he recognize me. He was Robert Gordon Switz, who, in 1935, was tried in Paris with the Soviet espionage group of which Paula Levine (of The Gallery) was a member. In 1949 he was able to corroborate important parts of my testimony.

  The Office was chiefly a meeting place. Maria typed there on her Russian typewriter. If there was any other activity, it was out of my range of vision.

  The apartment that included The Office was the home of a studious-looking young man and his pretty wife and baby. For some time, I knew them only as Yosha and Rose. I do not know why Yosha decided to tell me who he was. But, one night, he suddenly said to me: “You don’t know me, Bob. But I know a lot about you. You used to work with my brother on the Daily Worker.” Yosha was Joshua Tamer. His brother was Harry Tamer, the consumptive-looking young man who used to glance up from the ads he was setting and peer at me through thick-lensed glasses. Both were brothers-in-law of Sam Shoyet, the slant-eyed assistant foreman of the Daily Worker composing room, who had once told me about his work in Paris and Tokyo. The past had caught up with the present. The pieces fell into place, and I could see from the Tamers how the underground coiled in and out of the open Communist Party, like a snake in a tree.

  In The Office, too, I sometimes met Yosha’s mother, a merry old Jewish woman, who looked like hundreds of others who can be seen, shopping and gossiping, any morning in Brooklyn. I always called her Babushka. She had taken some small part in the 1905 revolution in Russia. It was in her apartment, upstairs, that the photographic workshop was located.

  But I remember The Office chiefly for two other reasons in which certain special tensions of the underground came to light. In The Office I really entered the heart of the underground. Until then, I had been on probation, never overt, but detectable in small ways. In The Office, I passed a test that sealed my place as a member of the group, though it unsettled my friendship with Maria.

  I do not know just why Ulrich decided at that time to probe what, if anything, lay behind my natural quietness. Perhaps, without realizing it, I had dropped some unorthodox remark about the party line. During that period, I was often in disagreement with Communist policy, which had turned Germany over to Hitler and led to the physical extinction of the second most powerful party in the International. Perhaps I had merely smiled slightly at the wrong time, or my comrades had inferred from my silences that I held heretical views. For they were extremely acute observers. The slightest gesture, hesitation, emphasis, change of intonation seldom escaped them, though they sometimes took pains to conceal the fact that they had noticed anything. In the underground, all of us lived constantly under one another’s minute surveillance.

  Ulrich set out to probe my thoughts in the oldest, simplest way. We had just moved to The Office. Maria proposed that we should celebrate with a party. I do not like parties. I tried to make excuses and beg off. Ulrich insisted and at last told me that it was “a command.”

  We ate around a big table. Babushka was present. Her grinning face was one of the last things I remembered of that night. For Joshua Tamer had brought a bottle of go proof alcohol from his place of business. With it he filled my glass and tinctured the alcohol with slivovitz (plum brandy) or vishniak (cherry brandy). I had not drunk for years. By the third glass, I no longer knew what I was saying, and soon I did not know what I was doing. They began to question me about my views on the German crisis.

  When I came to, it was morning. Maria, disheveled and haggard, was sitting on a couch. Ulrich had rolled himself up in a rug on the floor. Maria would not speak to me. Ulrich asked coldly: “Do you know what you did last night? You denounced the party, and, when Maria defended it, you knocked her down. You also knocked me down.”

  Everybody was silent. I had a ferocious hangover. I wondered what they would do with me next. Ulrich in the same grim voice then told me that he had purposely got me drunk to find out what I really thought. “You said,” he said, “that the Soviet Government had betrayed the German Communist Party for the sake of its own foreign policy. You said: because of you Russians, they are murdering the German comrades in the Moabit (a Berlin prison). You kept repeating it. You cried. It was disgusting.”

  In the Communist Party, statements such as I had made were grounds for instant expulsion. In the underground, they were high treason. Through my splitting headache, I wondered, without caring very much, whether they would send me to prison in Russia or find ways of dealing with me on the spot.

  Ulrich had got up. He walked over and dropped his hand on my shoulder. “Bob,” he said: “You’re all right. You’re the real thing.” He began to smile. I realized slowly that my heresies did not interest him. He was concerned only with the force with which I held them, for that showed him the force of my Communist faith. That was what he wanted to know.

  Maria was more personal. I apologized for knocking her down. “No,” she said. “I believe in the saying, in vino veritas. If you really liked me, you would not have knocked me down.” I pointed out that I had also knocked Ulrich down. Maria never wholly trusted me again. Once or twice afterwards, she told me stories, in a carefully casual way, about Communists who secretly hated the party, and had betrayed their hatred in little ways that nobody noticed at the time, and which perhaps they were not even conscious of themselves. Later on, they had broken with the party. At that time, I thought how much wiser Ulrich was than Maria. I have been less sure since.

  The other incident at The Office concerned “Herman.”

  XX

  When Ulrich first introduced me to Herman, the little Russian studied me briefly and asked in German: “What nationality is he?” “He speaks German too,” said Ulrich hastily. “He’s Irish.” “I’ve shot a lot of Irishmen,” said Herman and turned his back on me. The introduction took place in The Office. When, by request, I had left the two men alone, I felt that I had met what is much more unusual in life than a thoroughly good man—a thoroughly bad one. I was not yet mature enough to detect that there was in Herman a pathos that lay between what was able and what was vicious in him. Nor could I foresee how soon both qualities would leave him beaten and dying in a New York gutter.

  Imagine a short, sturdy figure confined in a tight-fitting, rumpled suit and elevated on high-heeled German shoes. That was Herman. Soft, brown, pitiless eyes stared out of a soft, chalky face that suggested corruption. Above that face, a stubble of hair stood up stiff and uneven as if it had been cut by a sickle. From that short figure came a bass voice of startling resonance. But what I remember best about Herman was his habit, wherever he might be, of taking from each trouser pocket a fat roll of bills which he weighed lovingly in each hand. Before the Russian Revolution, Maria told me, Herman had been a janitor’s son in Petrograd.

  This odd Communist had, among others, three particular passions—intrigue, the piano (which, others who knew him tell me, he took up late in life and learned to play quickly and brilliantly) and Germany. He was a professional Germanophile in the way that certain Americans are professional Anglophiles. From him I first learned to my surprise that there was a large group in the Nazi party to which Communists felt extremely close.

  The next time I met Ulrich, he asked me: “Do you know what sookin sin is?” I said that it sounded like a province in China. “It means son of a dog,” he said, “and if you repeat what I am going to tell you, I will shoot you.” He told me that Herman had arrived without any credentials and simply announced that he had been sent to take charge of the whole underground. Ulrich had refused to recognize his authority or to take his orders. They were waiting for Moscow to decide the dispute. Ulrich did not explain how Herman had got in touch with the apparatus. Apparently, he had been in the United States som
e time before I met him.

  Herman had at once begun making trouble. He had taken out Charlie and got him drunk. Charlie had an old grudge against Ulrich. He poured out to Herman a tale of personal grievance and conspiratorial mismanagement, some of it true. Herman had at once filed a report to Moscow. Among other things, he charged that the underground was so badly organized that its headquarters were in “a little village near New York, called Brooklyn.”

  “He can’t speak English,” said Ulrich, “but he insists on being given work to do. You speak German and you are the only man I can trust. You must work with him.”

  Herman scheduled his first meeting alone with me in Central Park at nine or ten o’clock at night. I suggested that that was a poor meeting place. “Unsinn!” he said. “Nonsense I” When we met, a light rain was falling. Again, I said that if we walked around in the rain at that hour the police might pick us up. Again, Herman brushed me aside.

  This time Herman did not talk about shooting Irishmen. Instead, he took my arm cozily and asked: “What’s doing in Washington?” I said that I had no idea. “Bob,” he said, standing in front of me and grasping both my arms, “du hast eine grosse Kariere vor dir—you have a great career ahead of you.” It was the first time that I had ever heard a Communist use the word “career.” For a Communist, career does not exist. Historical necessity exists. I asked what the great career might be. Herman said that it was to go to Washington and build the apparatus there. In Washington, he said, there were “kolossale Möglichkeiten—colossal opportunities.” “All this here,” he added sweepingly, “is just childishness.”

  I did not know that he could see my face in the dark, for I did not yet appreciate how sensitive and animal-alert he was. “Warum lächelst du?—Why are you smiling?” he asked angrily. With that he broke off our meeting. I knew he thought that he was dealing with a fool. His conspiratorial experience, and, above all, his conspiratorial imagination, were years ahead of mine. Beside him, I was a child. It is an irony that in large part I was to carry out what Herman had imagined. But, in fact, I was not smiling in the dark at Herman’s project. I was smiling at the incredible performance of one Communist trying to bribe another with the word “career.” I did not know then that Ulrich was a type of the past, and that Herman was the Stalinist of the future. Nor was I mature enough to know that, under his talk of career, Herman’s Communist faith was quite as firm as mine, and more realistic.