Another Witness

AMERICAN COMMISSAR (477 pp.)--Sandor Voros--Chilton ($4.95).

Many men with natural distinction of mind--Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Whittaker Chambers and Gustav Regler --have tried to read the Marxist riddle. By what stages does the self-sacrificing zeal of the idealist recruit to Communism become converted into the coldly inhuman amorality of the full-fledged apparatus man in the party's higher echelons? What turns the Utopian dream of universal brotherhood into the nightmare reality of the police state?

Sandor Voros, a Hungarian-born, American ex-Communist, adds nothing but corroboration to their impressive testimony; indeed, if his book has a place in anti-Communist literature, it comes from the fact that basically he was a very ordinary fellow. Not philosophical revulsion or a moral crisis, but outraged innocence was his ticket of leave from the party, and he writes in appropriate style, rather like an Eagle Scout who discovered that the fix was on at national headquarters.

Red Decade. As autobiography, Voros' story is as boring as the next man's; he lacks the artist's power of making others listen to his own troubles. Yet it is true and a convincing book, and one of a growing number of documents necessary for those who wish to understand the schisms of the 20th century.

Voros was the son of a prosperous. Hungarian, middle-class Jewish family, old enough to have briefly worn a uniform in World War I. An immigrant to the U.S. at 21, he worked in sweatshops as a furrier. He prospered ($100 a week was money in those far-off days), but sympathy for the anti-Horthy movement in Hungary brought him into touch with the Communists who were running it. He seems to have drifted into Communism through loneliness, general muddle, and a real sympathy that made him unhappy when other people had no money for food or rent. He doesn't even seem to have thought about it much. That, in fact, is the menacing doctrine of his book. If "conditions" are right, Voros implies, Communism in the U.S. would again do quite as nicely as it did in the Red decade.

Party Post. Voros was never a party bigwig, although he rose to be appointed to the patsy post of campaign manager for Earl Browder in the 1936 presidential elections; it suited Voros, who at his intellectual best was very woolly on Marxist theory. This philosophical fuzziness saved him; he stubbornly remained human. Ordered to Spain in 1937, he was promoted to chief of the Anglo-American section of the historical section of the International Brigade. It seems to have been one of the party's mistakes. Voros did not have it in him to be an executioner. He was shocked at the spectacle of an American comrade reveling in his role as a rear echelon judge-executioner; at the party's callousness to the common claims of humanity; e.g., mail from the American survivors of the Aragon rout of 1938 was left piled up in the party's Paris office because a comrade had swiped the stamp money. Also, he came to know that of the millions collected by the party for "Spanish aid," 99-c- out of every dollar stuck to the party's pocket.

It is always some little thing that makes for a change of faith. In Voros' case, it seems to have been that stamp money. He stirred up a row about the mail and finally said: "I believe you, comrade, individually you are not responsible. But collectively, every single son-of-a-bitch of us is."

Out of Silence. To think like this, and worse, to think it aloud, is no longer to think as a Communist. Back in the U.S., Voros learned with a sense of horror that he had become one of the party's chosen people, with jobs, adulation, power and prestige at his command. But he opted out to go into mute retirement, chew the cud of experience and try, with his faithful wife, who had followed him in and out of the party, to acquire the anonymity that is the most merciful fate in store for the ex-party man.

Voros today is bitterly aware that an ex-Communist is doubly an outcast. Those who are unforgiving toward the vocal ex-Communist should be aware that nothing could please the party more. The sermons of renegade Communist votaries may be a bore, but then so are most other kinds of salutary advice. Those who affect to believe that all ex-Communists write books about their partygoing days might ponder the statistic Voros offers--that a million living Americans have passed through the Marxist mill and have been brainwashed into silence. Voros has had the courage to digest his experience and try to tell what it was all about. He is one of a handful.

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