Alan Williams was the most excitable person I have ever known. Communism excited him particularly, all the more so because it was almost impossible to travel in the communist world before 1956.
I first saw Alan at a Labour Club meeting at Cambridge in October 1954. In bomber jacket and flying boots and designer stubble – at least a decade ahead of his time – he described dramatically being arrested by the Volkspolizei on a day trip to East Berlin for carrying a copy of Die Welt.
I next met him by chance on the train to Warsaw in July 1955 for the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS), the only way for us to see communism up close. We were in the group that smuggled Stash Pruszyński out of Poland on the return journey.
A year later I attended an economics conference in Sofia, again to get entry to the Soviet bloc, en route to Jerusalem by car. I was not greatly surprised when the first person I met there was Alan. Three months later he famously swapped his Cambridge tutorials for a basement in a besieged Budapest.
In August 1957 two of my closest friends were returning by train with the British delegation from the Sixth WFYS in Moscow. At the stop in Warsaw they were approached by Alan, who asked them to smuggle two Czech dissidents to Berlin.
It was pure luck that he had chosen them rather than one of the earnest young communists who made up the majority of the delegation. They knew the Pruszyński story and agreed, keeping the Czechs hidden until East Berlin. There was no publicity. Alan’s successful smuggling career was to be crowned with his solo effort – the manuscript of Cancer Ward.
