dynamic line." Personal life and family Foriș's lover, Victoria Sârbu, was born in Soroca, Bessarabia in 1909. Though she is often depicted as a Bessarabian Jew, she was in fact of Serbian Romanian and Romanian Bessarabian heritage; while her father had taken to Bolshevism, one of her brothers, Iulian Sârbu, sympathized with the Iron Guard. As an unemployed graduate of the University of Iași's Faculty of Natural Science, Victoria worked as a courier for the Red Aid, before joining PCR defense teams for indicted party members. During the 1930s, she organized communist cells on the Prahova Valley, where both her brothers worked as teachers. Victoria carried out her activities as a party leader during the war, though there is disagreement regarding her membership status: while some sources suggest that she had not joined the party throughout most of her underground career, her grandson, Ștefan Sîrbu, regards her as an early inductee. At one point, her sister, Elena Pavel, was unsuccessfully courted by Gheorghiu-Dej. She engaged in political agitation alongside Ștefan Pavel, who became her husband. He was eventually notorious as Foriș's political enemy, serving as Minister of the Interior in the 1950s. Among the charges brought against Foriș was his alleged attempt to seduce Constanța Crăciun, a prominent PCR activist who supported Gheorghiu-Dej; he was accused of having pressured her to become his mistress at the time when she was already in a relationship with Vincze, and of having thus caused her a nervous breakdown which had facilitated her capture by authorities. Under pressure from her interrogators, Sârbu partly confirmed the rumor, stating that she had become Foriș's partner soon after the incident. At the time of her lover's kidnapping, Victoria was heavily pregnant. After being held in a cellar in Floreasca during the early months of April 1945, she gave birth to a daughter, Vera-Victoria Foriș, whom the couple named in celebration of victory over fascism. Following Foriș's disappearance, his mother repeatedly petitioned authorities to answer as to his whereabouts. The standard account is that, in 1947, a group of secret policemen allegedly acting on the orders of Gheorghiu-Dej, and supervised by Alexandru Nicolschi, kidnapped her from her residence in Oradea. They then tied rocks to her neck and drowned her in the Crișul Repede. During his hearing of 1967, Nicolschi indicated that Gavrilă Birtaș, who had become one of his subordinates in Oradea, had taken the initiative: "Comrade