Cristina Luca Boico

Cristina Luca Boico (8 August 1916 – 16 April 2002) was a Romanian communist activist.

After going into exile in France, she joined the French Resistance and worked in the intelligence service.

Bianca Marcusohn was born on 8 August 1916 in Botoșani, Romania to Luisa (née Segal) and Isidor Marcusohn.

Her family, which included an older sister, Hermina, belonged to the assimilated Jewish middle-class.

Both she and her sister were deeply attached to Romanian culture and literature.

The Kingdom of Romania was a deeply Francophile country as Romanian intellectuals embraced the idea of modelling the newly independent kingdom after France, Romania's "big Latin sister".

Marcushon and her sister grew up reading French literature.

After completing her secondary education at Carmen Sylva High School in Botoșani, Marcusohn moved to Bucharest to undertake medical studies.

She later recalled about the Carmen Sylva school: "It was the nom de plume of Romania’s first queen, Elisabeth, the wife of Carol I. The school had an excellent national reputation. Teachers were selected among the very best, the discipline was severe. But it was in this high school that I had my first direct encounters with anti-Semitism... At the school, our teachers would have never made discriminatory or offensive statements-regardless of what they may have thought privately-but some girls with that family background maintained a certain distance from us".

As an young woman, she was greatly influenced by the writings of the Romanian socialist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea.

She joined the Students' Democratic Front, an organization aligned with the Romanian Communist Party and wrote articles for journals on the international anti-fascist movement.

As a university student, she spent much at time at the Schuller, the dormitory set aside for Jewish students that was often attacked by anti-Semitic students.

One student at the University of Bucharest remembered that many students spent "their time and energy in the absence of university sports on Jew-baiting or actual Jew-beating".

In common with many other Jewish intellectuals in Eastern Europe, she was attracted to Communism because it promised to dissolve nationalities, religions and ethnicities, thereby rendering the "Jewish Question" moot as she recalled: "Communism promised a better world for all and, thereby, the genuine liberation of the Jewish people, allowing for a complete flourishing of its potential. Communism was supposed to bring about a democratic solution to the question of nationalities. Hardly anyone can imagine what it meant for us, young high school girls and boys".

The Schuller was the center of much intellectual debate and discussion with the Jewish students mostly divided between the Communists who argued that only Communism could end antisemitism in Romania vs. the Zionists who argued that Romanian Jews should all leave for Palestine to establish a Jewish state there under the grounds there was no future for Jews in Romania.

In 1931, the ACSE (Asociațiile Generale ale Studeților Evrei-General Union of Jewish Students), which managed the Schuller, was taken over by members of the illegal Union of Communist Youth, and thereafter, the Communist tendency at the Schuller tended to dominate at the expense of the Zionists.

She was a friend of Lucien Goldmann and was influenced by his ideas.

Like Goldmann, she favored staying in Romania and supported the Communists against the Zionists.

Goldmann often took part in the debates at the Schuller, taking a Marxist line while also venturing into more esoteric topics such as the impact of the theories of Einstein and Freud for Marxism and the understanding of human sexuality.

Goldmann's theories, which were regarded as eccentric, brought him into conflict with the Stalinist Union of Communist Youth, which accused him of Trotskyism.

In 1937, after being expelled for her political activities, Marcusohn left Romania to continue her studies at the Sorbonne.

On 28 December 1937, King Carol II of Romania appointed Octavian Goga of the extreme right-wing National Christian Party as prime minister.

During Goga's short period in office, he passed a flood of anti-Semitic laws, one of which was to strip Romanian Jews of their Romanian citizenship.

At the approach of the Nazis, the university was closed and per a posted notice, she was allowed to graduate by taking her final tests at any university offering them.

Marcusohn made her way to Toulouse, where she completed her examinations and received her certificate in Natural Sciences in June 1940.

Marcusohn began working in the marine biology laboratory of Édouard Chatton in Banyuls-sur-Mer, but by September had decided to return to Paris.

Once there, she contacted the Romanian affiliates of the French Communist Party and reconnected with the communist movement.

Taking in mathematics students, she worked as a tutor and was eventually offered a post with Georges Tessier to translate journal articles to French for researchers at the Caisse nationale de la recherche scientifique, forerunner to the French National Center for Scientific Research.

She participated in the 1940 demonstrations to protest the arrest of Paul Langevin and was arrested but quickly released.

The anti-Semitic laws threatened the Jewish community in France with destitution, and the burden of poverty fell especially hard on women, and the all more so on immigrant Jewish women.

In France, there were two terms for Jews; namely the les Israélites to describe Jews who had embraced the French language and culture, which was a respectful and polite term, and les Juifs for those Jews who were seen as having failed to properly embrace the French language and culture, which had derogatory connotations.

French Jews were usually described politely as Israélites while the more derogatory term les Juifs was reserved for Jewish immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe.

The popular image in France at the time of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe was of a mass of illegal immigrants who lived in poverty, refused to assimilate and engaged in criminality; the fact that the number of Eastern European immigrants, and even more so of illegal immigrants was greatly exaggerated led to the perception that this was a major social problem.

Marcusohn spoke fluent French, but as a stateless Jew from Romania, she was considered to be more of a Juif than an Israélite

In 1941, Marcusohn joined the Organisation Spéciale—Main-d'Œuvre Immigrée (OS-MOI), the armed group of the Immigrant Labor Force, using the name Monique as a disguise.

She was recruited into underground work by Boris Holban.

At the end of the war, she returned to Romania and worked as the director of the Ministry of Education and numerous other governmental posts, until she was purged in 1952.

Working as an editor for the Scientific Publishing House she later taught at the Politehnica University of Bucharest.

In 1987, she left Romania to visit her children in Paris, refusing to return.

For the remainder of her life, she gave lectures and published memoirs about the evolution of communism.