Communist Organizer
Joseph Epstein was born in Zamość, Congress Poland. He studied law at Warsaw University. There he became aware of the Polish Communist Party, and later he joined it.
In 1931, he was arrested by the police after speaking at a communist rally, but he was released after a few weeks. He fled to Czechoslovakia, where he sought asylum, but his plea was rejected. Epstein returned to Poland, only long enough to be deported by the authorities.
In Tours (France), where he organized immigrant laborers, Epstein met and married Paula Grynfeld, a Jewish pharmacy student from the city of Lodz in Poland. When the French police were informed by the Polish consulate about his participation in the Communist Party, Epstein was arrested and forced to leave Tours. He and his wife traveled to Bordeaux, where they continued their studies. He organized students into a collective, and he was appointed to the regional committee of the French Communist Party.
In 1933, they moved to Paris. The following year, Epstein passed his final examination, and he completed his law degree; however, he was barred from practicing law because he was not French.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Epstein (French Resistance Leader)
Famous quotes containing the word communist:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)