Nowotko, Marceli

Born Aug. 8, 1893, in Warsaw; died there Nov. 28, 1942. Leader in the Polish workers’ movement. Son of a farm worker.

Nowotko joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 1916 and the Polish Communist Party in 1918. He worked for the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Poland in 1920 and served as chairman of the revolutionary committee in Lapy in western Byelorussia. On party instructions he worked in the Dąbrowa Basin, in Kielce, Łódź, and Poznań województwo, and in the Western Ukraine. Nowotko was a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Polish Communist Party in 1927. He was imprisoned in Rawicz from 1935 to September 1939 (altogether he spent ten years in prison). Nowotko lived in the USSR from 1939 to 1941, returning to Poland in December 1941. He helped found the Polish Workers’ Party and became secretary of its central committee in January 1942. He was killed by an agent provocateur.