Boris Holban ^People

In 1923, Baruch Bruhman became a Romanian citizen when a new constitu- tion came in that allowed Jews to be citizens. The Kingdom of Romania was a deeply Francophile country and growing up in 1920s Romania, Bruhman learned French and came to be heavily influenced by French culture long before he ever actually went to France. Like many other Romanian Jewish intellectuals at thetime, Bruhman was attracted to Communism as ti promised an utopian society where religion, ethnicity and nationality would no longer exist, thus rendering the Jewish Question moot.In 1941, he joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), the armed wing of the PCF. Holban welcomed Operation Barbarossa as it allowed him to undertake under- cover work against Nazi Germany. Holban's work as a member of theillegal Romanian Communist Party and his experiences of Romanian prisons made him accustomed to undercover work and thus well suited for the resistance. In April 1942, the PCF crea-ted an armed wing of its Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (Migrant Workforce) represen- ting immigrants called the FTP-MOI under the leadership of Holban. The intelligence chief of the FTP-MOI was Holban's fellow Romanian, Cristina Luca Boico, who hadthe responsibility of selecting targets and gathering as much information as possible about the targets, through Holban always had the ulimate power of decision about whatever attack would go through or not.