Princess Ileana On Communist Techniques

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28434, 14 November 1957, Page 11

Princess Ileana On Communist Techniques

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

(Rec. 10 p.m.) LONDON. Nov. 13. Princess Ileana of Rumania, addressing a meeting of the Eng-lish-Speaking Union in London, has told of her experiences of Communist techniques for breaking down personal integrity and indoctrinating children with communism. The Princess, who is 48, is a daughter of the late Queen Marie of Rumania, and a great granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was mar.’ied in 1931 to the Archduke Anton of Austria, but she returned to Rumania with her six children and established a hospital after the Russians entered the country in 1944. She left Rumania in 1948 and has since become an American citizen. Behind the Iron Curtain, she said, there was no choice or only a choice of two evils. She recalled a conversation in which Mrs Anna Pauker, in her view the most intelligent of the Communist leaders, had spoken of indoctrinating children while terrorising the older generation into silence. Children in primary school had been shut up for three days without food to prove that God did not give them their daily bread.

Then the teacher would say: "You see. children, God does not bring your daily bread, but if you write to father Stalin he will give you your daily bread.’’ The bread would then arrive. Older children were ordered to

burn their history books with a promise that they would make history themselves.

The Princess said that Communists used laws against vagabondage and debt to give workers dismissed from State industries or property owners unable to meet their taxes prison records so that “the moment they move they’ve got them.” Her son had been spied on by another boy at school who was threatened with dismissal and the arrest of his father, a factory worker.