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" ................... Site Index Synopsis Introduction Index of People Index by Profession Extracts From The Book: Princess Marthe Bibesco Ana Blandiana Smaranda Braescu Madelene “Madi” Cancicov Nina Cassian Elena Ceausescu Ioana Celibidache Queen Elisabeth of Romania Princess Gregoire Ghica Princess Ileana of Romania Dora D’Istria Monica Lovinescu Ileana Malancioiu Queen Marie of Romania Dr. Agnes Kelly Murgoci Mabel Nandris Countess Anna de Noailles Ana Novac Oana Orlea Ana Pauker Marta Petreu Elisabeta Rizea of Nucsoara Sanda Stolojan Leontina Vaduva Anca Visdei Sabina Wurmbrand |
"Blouse Roumaine" - Extracts from the Book .................................................................................................. selected and introduced by Constantin Roman. Ana Pauker (Hannah Rabinsohn) (2) .................................................................................................. (b. 1893, Codaesti, Co. Vaslui – d. Bucharest, 1960) Exile in the Soviet Union, Returnee, Communist Party Polit Bureau Member, Foreign Minister, 356. Pauker, Ana: Last, but certainly not least was Ana Pauker. A big, stout woman, with short, untidy grey hair, fierce blue eyes, under lowering eyebrows, and a fascinating smile which was not spoiled by the fact that her upper lip hung over her lower one, she made one know that here was a real personality. I have always felt when I was with her that she was like a boa constrictor which has just been fed, and therefor is not going to eat you – at the moment! Heavy and sluggish as she seemed, she had all that is repellent and yet horridly fascinating in a snake. I could well imagine, simply for watching her, that she had denounced her own husband, who in consequence was shot; and my further acquiantance with her showed me the cold and dehumanized brilliance by which she had reached the powerful position she occupied.” (Princess Ileana of Romania (1909-1991) “I live Again”, Golancz, London 1952) 226. Interogators: "You take a person, you arrest him, you call him an agent, you [subject him to] methods that, in all my life, with all the prisons and [interwar Romanian secret service] Siguranta stations, I'd never encountered...you throw mud at him, you jeer him, you throw his kids out of their houses, you take his books, and you don't even say 'I'm sorry,' as any person would if he stepped on someone's foot." (quoted to have told her investigators, in : Levi’s Biography of Ana Pauker) -------------------------- Biography:  Born in a small Moldavian village, the grand daughter of a Jewish orthodox rabbi, Hannah Robinson (Ana Pauker by her married name) joined the ranks of the Romanian Communist Party before WWII, then fled across the border to the Soviet Union, where Stalin was nurturing all the foreign Communist hopefuls in readiness for exporting his Revolution to Europe and the rest of the world. Her husband Marcel Pauker, also a Communist exile was going to die in Stalin’s goulags and Ana Pauker’s involvement in his denunciation is a matter of controversy amongst her hagiographers. Returning to Romania in 1944, on the back of the Soviet tanks, together with other exile Communists (like Vasile Luca, Teohari Georgescu, Walter Roman, etc) Ana Pauker becomes the member of the Soviet-imposed Romanian Government and a Foreign Minister in 1947. In 1948 she is in charge of Agriculture during a period of forced collectivisation and victimization of the peasantry, forced to give up its land to the Soviet-style co-operatives. Again, Ana Pauker biographers (q.v. Levi) disagree about her role in this abject period of enforced Stalinism in Romania. What cannot be denied is that Ana Pauker will be for ever associated with the darkest times of Romanian Stalinist excesses. She will carry on being perceived as an instrument of Soviet imperialism in a democratic Monarchy and a top official of the Party ready to put the doctrinal interests of Communism above the interests of the people. Indeed, in Romania, she is perceived half a century after her demise, as a perpetrator of evil, regardless of the finer points which academics will raise in their scholarly disquisitions, whilst they remain completely removed from any personal experience in the Stalinist purges. Looking in retrospect at Ana Pauker’s life on the political board of snakes and ladders one can discern how the tool of evil becomes herself the object of the purge of 1952, just before Stalin’s death. For the internecine battles of the Communist party required political scape goats to make room for the new coming home-bred Communist Gheorghiu-Dej: Ana Pauker becomes good material for a Slansky-type trial in Romania, accused of “Deviationism and Cosmopolitanism” . All in all a masquerade of a family-affair, but not as acerbate as those political trials instigated by Pauker and her fellow-travellers against the Romanian peasantry, intellectuals and politicians who perished in the Communist jails. For Ana Pauker was lucky – she was demoted, but not emprisoned or shot – she was retired on a pension and died in her own bed in Bucharest. During her political retirement from 1953 to 1960, Pauker was allowed to work as a translator from French and German, for the Editura Politica, under the supervison of two former Spanish Civil War veterans Walter Roman (father of the PM Petre Roman) and that of Leonte Tismaneanu, then a director of the Romanian Communist Party Publishing House and father of Vladimir Tismaneanu, the distinguished American-Romanian academic (q.v.), The quotation chose in the text (q.v. Interogators) does not lack a certain piquantery thinking of the comparison which Pauker makes, during her trial of her own party’s tactics compared to those of Romania’s Secret Police before WWII. Sadly Pauker’s conversion about the true colours of communist practice surfaced too late in her life, and only after being treated harshly herself, otherwise Romania might have become a better country to live in.. Bibliography: Levy, “Ana Pauker – a Biography”, 2001 |
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