Pawel Finder (19 September 1904 – 26 July 1944) was First Secretary of the Polish Workers' Party from 1943 to 1944.
Biography[]
Pawel Finder was born in Bielsko-Biala, Austria-Hungary on 19 September 1904 to an affluent family of Jewish shopkeepers. Finder became a chemical engineer, and he joined the Communist Party of Austria in 1922, later joining the French Communist Party in 1924 and serving on its Central Committee until his 1928 expulsion from France for communist activity. Finder was active in the underground Communist Party of Poland until his arrest in 1934, and he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He fled Rawicz prison during the 1939 invasion of Poland, and he fled to the Soviet Union, becoming the chairman of the Bialystok planning commission during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. He became a founder of the Polish Workers' Party alongside Boleslaw Molojec and Marceli Nowotko, but he was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1943 and was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944.