COMMUNISTS: A Girl Who Hated Cream Puffs

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It was Saturday. In Israel, the beaches were crowded, food was being cooked, and a modern government transacted business as usual, but in the house of Zvi Rabin-sohn, the Lord’s day was being kept. In a sparsely furnished living room at Mikve Israel (an agricultural school near Tel Aviv), Zvi’s son Solomon was reading aloud from the Bible; Zvi himself, a fragile old man with a flowing white beard, lay on a couch listening. Just then, a U.S. newsman came in to ask some questions about another member of the family.

Solomon reluctantly closed the Bible. “I cannot speak about my sister or our childhood days,” he said. His quiet teacher’s voice—he is a teacher of classical Hebrew at the school—showed neither affection nor dislike. “She is a very important person and I am a very simple man. I do not like to advertise us.”

Solomon’s wife thought that, in justice, her scholarly husband should be considered at least as important as his sister, back home in Rumania. “We could tell a lot if we wanted to,” she said. Her husband silenced her. But old Zvi’s brown eyes flashed at the mention of his daughter. He sat up eagerly, his stocking feet dangling above the floor. “She was a very intelligent girl,” he said. “I brought her up in the strictest Orthodox way.”

The woman of whom they did not quite dare speak was, in fact, the most powerful woman alive, and millions of people as simple as the Rabinsohns depended on her for life, bread and spiritual guidance. She had moved a long way from the grimy Bucharest street where her father had first taught her the stern Old Testament notions of good & evil; she had abandoned the jealous God of her fathers for another faith. She was Ana Rabinsohn Pauker, a Communist, and a key figure in the struggle for the world.

The Woman Who Talks to Stalin. Now she is fat and ugly; but once she was slim and (her friends remember) beautiful. Once she was warmhearted, shy and full of pity for the oppressed, of whom she was one. Now she is cold as the frozen Danube, bold as a boyar on his own rich land and pitiless as a scythe in the Moldavian grain.

She spent nearly all her life in mean dwellings and six years of it in Rumanian jails. Now she lives in three great houses, moving almost every night because she fears assassins. (Scores of other Rumanians shift their sleeping quarters from night to night because they fear Ana’s secret police.) One of her houses belonged to Prince Brancoveanu. One belonged to Nicolae Malaxa, big industrialist and speculator. And one belonged to red-haired Magda Lupescu, ex-King Carol’s mistress and now his wife.

Ana has replaced them all. The power of the aristocrats, the industrialists, the royal playboys and the royal concubines has passed into her hands. She runs Rumania. Her title is Foreign Minister, but her job is that of Stalin’s proconsul. Of the seven telephones on her office desk one is said to be a direct line to the Kremlin. Asked if she had permission to call Stalin at any hour, Ana answered: “When the occasion arises, I can reach him.”

The Women Who Hate & Follow. She did not attain her power as Lupescu did, nor in the way the suffragettes dreamed of in Ana’s youth. She came up through 30 fighting years in the Communist Party, to which she contributed great courage and a good, if not brilliant mind. Her chief offering, however, was a blind loyalty which stood every test, including the party’s purge of her husband.

She belongs to that extraordinary band of Red Amazons who serve the top Red bosses. They are great followers, great haters, qualities the party prizes more & more. Some of Ana’s fellow Amazons:

¶ Spain’s Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria (now living in France), a miner’s daughter and a miner’s wife, whose Communism rose from the pits. She grew up amid strikes, riots, unemployment, sudden death. She has two children whom she mentioned in her fiery Civil War speeches urging Spain’s women to put the cause above husbands and children (“it is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a miserable coward”).

¶ France’s Jeannette Vermeersch, who started as a mill hand in Lille, lived for years with Maurice Thorez, eventually married him. She has the reputation of being a hard, intelligent party worker. Rank & filers like her for being a roughhewn, no-nonsense kind of a wife to Thorez (and to Communism), who can talk about the price of butter.

¶ Finland’s Hertta Kuusinen, a smooth intellectual, now Minister Without Portfolio, and wife of Communist Yrjo Leino, whom she dominates. Hertta got her Communism from her father Otto Kuusinen, a party veteran.

¶ China’s Ting Ling, a romantic neurotic. Her grandfather was a high official under the Manchus, her father a playboy who spent most of his money before he died. Her widowed mother taught school and, embittered, drifted into the Party. Giving her own reasons for following her mother, Ting said: “I was afraid of party discipline. My main motive was to be a heroine and famous all over the world.”

¶ The U.S.’s. Ella Reeve (“Mother”) Bloor, an idealist rebel. She came from a fine old colonial family. When she was 14, she demanded that her name be taken off the rolls of the Presbyterian Church in Bridgeton, N.J., because she did not think it fair for some people to be destined for hell and others for heaven. She was, successively, a suffragette, Prohibitionist, Ethical Culturist, Single Taxer, a partisan of William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair. When the Russian Revolution came along, she found the spiritual home for which she had searched so long.

The Embattled Bulwarks. Far more powerful than any of these is Ana. Her sway extends beyond Rumania’s 92,000 square miles and its 16.5 million people. She is the leading Communist in the band of states running from the Baltic to the Adriatic, where over 100 million people serve as Russia’s shield against attack and Russia’s springboard for aggression. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania are the satellites of a power which intends to make the world its satellite.

The Cominform, founded last year in Poland, is the Communist instrument to bind the satellites to Russia. Ana, through her unswerving loyalty to Stalin, has risen in the Cominform. Now, Andrei Zhdanov, once its guiding spirit, is dead. Tito, once its most powerful member, is in disgrace. (The seat of the Cominform, has been formally transferred from Belgrade to Bucharest.) Poland’s Wladyslaw Gomulka, co-chairman with Zhdanov of the first Cominform meeting, has just been demoted after a row with Moscow (see below). Albania has been cut off by Tito’s defection. Communist power in Czechoslovakia is not yet consolidated.

Thus, Ana, reliable and ruthless, has come to the fore; there is a new cutting edge on the old party battle-ax. She is quoted much more often and more reverently in the satellite press than other non-Russian Communists. At the Danube conference, Russia’s Andrei Vishinsky made a point of turning to her for advice while ignoring the other Red delegates. He takes pains to give her pointers on conference technique. Obviously she is being groomed for a bigger international role.

The Squashed Beetles. Ana Paukerwas born (1893) in Bucharest, where her father Zvi Rabinsohn was a shohet, i.e., the man who kills animals in accordance with Jewish rules. Rumania in those days was not a pleasant place, particularly not for Jews.The peasants, working Europe’s richest soil for their boyar masters, were taught to blame all their misfortune on the Jews. Persecutions were frequent.

Ana went to the Jewish School on Anton Pan Street. She was good in her studies and loved poetry. She had few friends; one of them was a girl named Mitzi, who loved cream puffs. One night Mitzi took Ana to a pastry shop with her. Ana stared at the cream puffs. “They look like squashed beetles,” she said. Ana’s impact on others was strong even then; the aftertaste of the simile made Mitzi give up cream puffs for years.

Soon Ana broke away from her family. She would go out with friends in the evening or sneak off to the theater. Old Zvi objected at first, then gave up. At 17, she met a young Socialist lawyer named Steinberg and fell in love with him. He gave her Socialist tracts and took her to May Day celebrations in the forest near Bucharest. After four years, they quarreled. Steinberg married Ana’s friend Mitzi. (He has since died and Mitzi has gone to Tel Aviv. She said last week that she still keeps letters from Ana, which speak tenderly of the departed Steinberg.)

Young Ana got a job teaching Hebrew at Temply Coral Synagogue school. She was a slender young girl with even features; one of her students remembers her as gentle and kind, with unruly brown hair which she kept tossing off her forehead.

The Steinberg Tradition. Ana studied medicine at Bucharest University and later in Zurich. There she met and married Marcel Pauker, a short, mustachioed Rumanian student of a good bourgeois family. In the Steinberg tradition, she gave him pamphlets to read and converted him to Marxism. Ana quit medicine, devoted herself entirely to healing mankind in other ways.

In 1921, she joined Rumania’s tiny Communist Party, which had less than 100 members at the time. A year later, she was on its central committee. She was arrested several times.

Like most Communists, she got around; her name popped up in Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Paris. She learned seven languages. In Paris, she met handsome Maurice Thorez, with whom her friendship was more than political. In 1933, together with fellow Communists George Gheorghiu-Dej and Constantin Doncea, Pauker organized the Bucharest railway strike which ended in bloody fighting between the barricaded workers and government troops.

Ana was arrested, escaped, arrested again. Premier George Tatarescu brought her to trial; Juliu Maniu, leader of the Peasant Party, helped her and publicly defended her right to free speech. She was sentenced to ten years in jail. There Ana, who had always hated sewing, became expert at embroidery, sold her own work and that of other women prisoners. During Spain’s Civil War Ana, jailed in Bucharest, embroidered a scarf for La Pasionaria.

Homecoming. In 1940, the Rumanian government exchanged her for a Rumanian nationalist politician whom the Russians had taken prisoner in Bessarabia. Ana went to Moscow, where she found that her husband Marcel had got himself into Trotzkyite trouble; he was shot (according to one version) in a telephone booth. Some say that Ana gave evidence against him. Without flinching over Marcel’s fate, Ana became a member of the Comintern Executive. She was one of the signatories of the protocol “dissolving” the Third International. One day at a meeting she attracted the attention of Andrei Vishinsky for her brisk delivery of a report. Vishinsky took her to see Stalin.

She organized Rumanian prisoners of war into the Red army’s Tudor Vladimires-cu division—named for a fierce 19th Century Rumanian peasant leader who rebelled against the boyars. His outlook and literary style was much like that of a modern Communist. Sample: “No laws can prevent you from returning evil for evil. If a serpent crosses your path, hit it and kill it.”

When Rumania was “liberated” by the Red army, Colonel Ana Pauker returned with her regiment to the country from whose squalor and jails she had risen. She proceeded to return evil for evil—and, in true Communist fashion, evil for good. Because she wanted to play along with his Liberal Party for a while, she left Tata-rescu, who had jailed her, in the Foreign Ministry for two years; but Maniu, who had helped her, she clapped into prison. Said she: “In his old age, Maniu has earned his rest.” Maniu is now dying, still behind bars.

Friendship Week. Stalin’s problem—and Ana’s—was how to bind Rumania to Moscow by means more subtle and less costly than the Red army. Complicating factors were the anti-Communist and anti-Russian feelings, of the Rumanian people. One day in 1945 Ana Pauker’s great & good friend Vishinsky flew to Bucharest. He insisted that Pietru Groza be made Premier.

Groza is a wealthy egomaniac who considers himself the greatest tennis player since Tilden, the greatest lover since Casanova and the finest figure of a man since Lionel Strongfort. At 64 he runs three miles before breakfast every day. He likes to have his bodyguard, who always carries a Luger, referee his tennis matches. Groza cheats, and his opponents rarely argue. Nevertheless, Groza is putty in Ana’s hands. He goes to Mme. Pauker before leaving official functions and asks: “Do you still need me?”

Vishinsky observed Ana’s hold on Groza. When he left Rumania, Vishinsky said: “I feel very lighthearted.”

One of King Michael’s last major acts before he abdicated, 2½ years later, was to swear in Zvi Rabinsohn’s daughter as his Foreign Minister. That was during Soviet-Rumanian Friendship Week.

Pawnshop City. Today, there are less than 50,000 Red army soldiers in Rumania but, stationed at key points throughout the country, they are enough. Also, Moscow has settled about 20,000 Russian families around Constanta on the strategic Black Sea coast. Through seven huge “Sovroms” (Soviet-Rumanian combines), the Russians almost completely control transport, oil, timber, banking, and everything else they can lay their hands on, even including Rumania’s tiny motion picture industry. A Rumanian proverb covers the situation: “When the Russians help us, they always take something away.”

Peasants are forced to give up a fixed quota of their crops even if the harvest is bad and they have not enough left for themselves; recently, peasants in the Banat burned their crops in protest against the system. A recent visitor described Bucharest as a “city with the air of a pawnshop.” The only way the Rumanian middle class can keep alive is by slowly selling its possessions. The few men who still run their businesses actually hope for nationalization. New laws covering “economic sabotage” may land a businessman in jail for carrying out any simple deal. As one Rumanian businessman put it: “We walk around with 25 years’ hard labor in our pockets.”

Housecleaning. A woman’s work (and a Communist’s) is never done. Ana has a lot of new worries. One is what Rumania’s former masters, the Turks, called baksheesh. Said one Rumanian when the Reds took power: “The only honest government Rumania can have is one that has been in power long enough to give everyone a chance to fill his pockets. It’s only after a Rumanian official has made enough money through graft to buy a house, educate his children, and keep a mistress or two, that he feels he can afford to be honest. The Reds are starting from scratch, and have a long way to go.”

The Communist Party, less than 2,000 strong before the war, has swelled to 500,000. Many of the nouveau Reds simply wanted their go at baksheesh. Until recently the new regime sold exit visas for $5,000 to $10,000. Officials and just plain Communists crowded the mountain resorts, gambling millions of lei at the casinos.

Ana Pauker, personally incorruptible, started sweeping the day she became Foreign Minister. For two days, her ministry was surrounded by troops while the housecleaning was in progress; she even purged three elevator men. In recent weeks, Communist big shots have toppled into jail like so many drunks on Saturday night; Ana has had to transform two theaters into prisons. Among those arrested: beautiful Florica Bagdasar, Minister of Public Health; General Michael Lascar of Pauker’s own Tudor Vladimirescu division; General Constantin Ionescu, chief of the General Staff; Constantin Doncea, deputy mayor of Bucharest, colonel in the Red army, member of the Communist Central Committee, and Pauker’s old comrade. Said she: “Doncea fell into petty bourgeois habits … I advise all Communists not to sleep on their glory, and take heed from this lesson . . .”

Ana can be prim these days. Last June, in a discussion of plans for receiving Hungary’s Premier Lajos Dinnyes, Ana said: “I’ve heard Dinnyes likes to have girls presented to him. This won’t happen in Bucharest; I don’t approve of official assignations.” Hungarian Communists, hurt by Ana’s attitude, say that Comrade Dinnyes found his own girls without any help from Comrade Pauker.

Supper for the Kids. Ana faces a bigger problem than personal morals among Balkan Reds. Many of her Rumanian party colleagues are tainted with the “nationalist” heresy.

Oldtime Party Leader Lucretiu Patra-scanu was ousted from the Ministry of Justice and jailed, along with his wife, a few months ago. There is no question of baksheesh in his case. His sin is in wanting a Communist Rumania for the Rumanian, rather than the Russian, Communists.

All the Balkans are seething with the battle between Ana and the “nationalists.” A Rumanian who lives in a town near the frontier told an American: “This is the damndest clearing station you ever saw. Every night it’s full of anti-Pauker Communists escaping into Yugoslavia and anti-Tito Communists running the other direction into Rumania.”

Meanwhile, amid these half-hidden battles, life has some compensations for Ana. Her two daughters Marie and Tania (both in their early 20s) are with her. She is very proud of Marie, who was educated in France under Maurice Thorez’ care. Her son Vladimir is a lieutenant in the Rumanian army. Sometimes Ana leaves a meeting saying: “I must go now to get supper for my children.”

Communist agents and diplomats returning from the West always remember to bring Ana presents. Nylons are especially welcome; like many fat women, she has shapely ankles. Ana lives well and loves good food—although she scorns the luxury of most Rumanian Communists. Sometimes after a late meeting the comrades drop around to her house, and she thuds about the kitchen, throwing together a snack; she makes a wonderful omelet.

Flight from the Heathen. Old Zvi, her father, would not live in the land Ana rules. Two years ago Zvi came to Ana asking her help for a group of Rumanian Jews. She received him amiably on a Saturday afternoon. Coffee and cake was brought in. Old Zvi exploded: “How dare you offer me hot coffee on a Sabbath! Have you gone mad?” Ana, trying to calm her father, led him to the kitchen and showed him the electric percolator. She explained that, since no one needed to strike a match, no religious law was being violated, but he called the percolator a wicked machine and stalked out.

Soon afterwards he declared that he would no longer live among these “heathen,” and went to Palestine. Ana Pauker provided him with an escort to the border.

Last Saturday, in the living room at Mikve Israel, Zvi mentioned the fact that Ana had given up her religion. But he was her father, and defended her. “Every person has a right to their own life,” he said. “She is a grown woman now.” He thought for a while. “She was a good daughter,” he said, moving his left hand up & down for emphasis. “She was a good girl.”

Zvi was not talking of the great and grisly Ana Pauker, but of a brown-haired girl who was gentle with little children and who hated cream puffs.