420 The Later Years
operator at the Comintern. She lived in the Hotel Lux, as he did. Their rela-
tionship was a short one, because Tito left Moscow three days after the wed-
ding and did not return until the middle of 1938. In September 1937, when he
commuted between Zagreb and Paris, the NKVD accused the young woman
of being a Gestapo spy and, according to one version of the story, executed her
the following December.^146 According to another, she escaped this fate and
lived in Moscow until the end of the century, at one point having been given a
generous amount of money by Tito.^147 From the four extant letters that he sent
to Lucia, it seems that their relationship was not without strong sentimental
and sexual involvement. According to the testimony of Zdenka Kidrič, the
“German girl” suffered a lot because she rarely heard from her husband, so much
so that in a fit of jealousy and wrath she scratched his eyes out of a photo-
graph.^148 When Broz was informed about her arrest, he immediately distanced
himself from her. In order to explain his connection to her, he said he had
married her to provide a surrogate mother for his son Žarko.^149 In any case,
Tito engaged in his obligatory self-criticism: “I guess that, in this case, I was
not prudent enough. It is a big stain on my career.”^150 He was once again
saved from the situation by his old friend Kopinič, who called the attention of
the inquisitors to how reliable Elsa had seemed, since she lived for a long time
under the same roof as many high Cominform officials and was never sus-
pected of treason.^151
Herta Haas and “Zdenka”Tito’s third partner was Herta Haas, a student of economics originally from
Maribor who was born in 1914. She was the daughter of a well-off Austrian
lawyer and was therefore seen as bourgeois by the Slovenian “comrades.” She
was an attractive young lady, intelligent and elegant, with an irreproachable
dedication to the party. The photos of her in her youth show a happy smiling
girl with wonderful eyes à la Bette Davis.^152 Since her mother tongue was Ger-
man, and she was fluent in other languages, she was used before the war as an
international courier for important party missions. “I was a master in clandes-
tine work and in camouflage,” she recalled.^153 After the war, during which her
relationship with Tito had come to an end, she lived in Belgrade, where she
married and had two children. She maintained a detached but respectful atti-
tude toward Tito, without forgetting that he was father to her first-born son,
Aleksandar, better known as Miša.^154
The break between Herta and Tito, which began in 1941, was final by 1943.
Before the beginning of the war a Serbian student, Davorjanka Paunović,
appeared in Zagreb. She was called “Zdenka,” a typically Croatian nickname,