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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.