Born in Luck, a town in Western Ukraine, Pinkus Kartin was a member of the Communist Party from his adolescent years onward.
As a result, he spent several years in jail , before the War, in Poland. A volunteer in the Dombrowski Brigade in Spain, he fought with the Republicans. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, he took refuge in France, where he was active in the Communist Party. A volunteer
in the French army, he was made prisoner by the Germans, and exchanged to the Soviets.
In Moscow, he joined the Polish immigration circles and attended the Party's activist classes. He was parachuted into Poland from Moscow
in 1941, with the first group of emmisairies,
to reactivate the Communist Party. Owing to his distinctive Jewish features, he hid out a long time in the apartment of a Polish shoe-maker. Then he was sent into the Ghetto to organize
a branch of the Communist Party. He arrived there under the name of Andrej Schmidt,
and was among the creators of the Antifascist Bloc. Pinkus Kartin is described as a man of great charisma; he was also a soldier with combat experience. He was arrested with
