Paweł Finder

Paweł Finder

Paweł Finder (actually: Pinkus Finder) (born September 19, 1904 in Leszczyny (Ger. Nussdorf), today a district of Bielsko-Biała ; † July 26, 1944 in Warsaw ) was a Polish communist activist.

Finder, who came from a Jewish shopkeeper family in the then Austrian, Silesian-Galician twin cities of Bielitz and Biala, was enthusiastic about Zionism in his youth and visited Palestine . He discovered communism while studying chemistry in Vienna , Mulhouse and Paris . From 1922 to 1924 he was a member of the Communist Party of Austria , from 1924 to 1928 of the Communist Party of France . During his time in France he worked a. a. as assistant to Frédéric Joliot-Curie , was expelled from the country in 1928 because of communist activities. He returned to Poland and from then on was active in the Communist Party of Poland . In 1934 he was arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison. This period of imprisonment probably saved his life because the leadership of the KPP was lured to Moscow at Stalin's behest in 1938 , where some were murdered and some were handed over to the Nazis in 1939. Finder left Rawicz prison in September 1939 and fled to the Soviet Union . On December 27, 1941, he returned to the Polish underground with a parachute dropped from an airplane. As a member of the leadership troika of the new Polish Workers' Party , he served as its deputy chairman until November 1942. After the murder of Marceli Nowotko and the execution of his fellow board member Bolesław Mołojec , he became party leader. On November 14, 1943, he and Małgorzata Fornalska , then Bolesław Bierut's wife , were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Pawiak prison in Warsaw . When it was dissolved in July 1944, he was shot.

Finder was one of the heroic figures of communist propaganda in the People's Republic of Poland . Schools, streets and ships were named after him.

literature

• Stefania Topol: Paweł Finder 1904–1944: życie i działalność . Śląski Instytut Naukowy w Katowicach, Warsaw 1978.