Career
Working as a docker in Gdańsk, he rose through the ranks of the trade union movement to become a key figure in the Communist Party of Poland. In 1925, he left the party in the face of what he saw as an increasingly Stalinist ideological outlook. He became a leading Polish Trotskyist, founding the International Revolutionary Current, an informal network of various anti-Stalinist, Trotskyist and other Marxist organisations.
He was able to survive all of the Nazi"s concentration camps, only to be imprisoned by Stalin again the early 1950s and again from 1962-1964.
He was a keen Esperantist and strongly promoted the Esperanto language as part of the Trotskyist movement. He died in 1990, living his later years paralysed and unable to communicate.