Erika Glaser Wallach (adopted)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1993/12/24/teacher-eri...

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/12/obituaries/erica-wallach-71-a-pri...

Erica Glaser Wallach, who spent five years in Communist prisons at the height of the cold war on espionage charges that the Soviet authorities later said were false, died on Dec. 22 in Fauquier Hospital in Warrenton, Va. She was 71.

She died of cancer, said Renee Glaser, a cousin.

In 1950, Mrs. Wallach was arrested in what was then East Berlin, where she had gone to seek information about Noel H. and Herta Field, an American couple who had reared Mrs. Wallach and who had been arrested in Prague. The arrests focused worldwide attention on Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.

At the time of her arrest, Mrs. Wallach was married to Robert R. Wallach, a captain in the United States Army, and was living with him and their two children in Paris. Death Sentence Commuted

Mrs. Wallach was held in East Berlin, then in Moscow, where she was tried for espionage, found guilty and given a death sentence that was later commuted to 15 years in prison. In 1954 the Fields were released from prison in Hungary. At the same time, Mr. Field's brother, Hermann, who had been held in Czechoslokavia on espionage charges, was also released.

Mrs. Wallach was released from a Siberian labor camp in 1955 when the Soviet authorities declared that she was innocent of the charges against her. They never explained their change of mind.

Ms. Glaser said Mrs. Wallach had been trapped in a series of intrigues complicated by the fact that she had once worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, and later had briefly been a member of the Communist Party.

"The Soviets thought she was an American spy, while the Western authorities believed she was working for the Communists, and she was caught in the middle of conflicting political forces in postwar Europe," Ms. Glaser said.

After rejoining her family in Warrenton, Mrs. Wallach taught French and Latin at the Highland School for 18 years.

She is survived by a son, Robert, of Burke, Va., and a daughter, Madeleine W. de Heller of Bougy-Villars, Switzerland.

Photo: Erica Glaser Wallach (Frederick Nunn, 1967)