State in 1964–68. In 1965–68 he also chaired the Front of National Unity. Edward Ochab resigned all of his party and state offices, and withdrew from politics in 1968, in protest of the anti-Semitic campaign conducted by factions within the communist party with First Secretary Gomułka as its head. In his retirement he remained a dedicated hardline communist, but also a vocal critic of the policies pursued by the regimes of his successors. Early life and career Edward Ochab was born in Kraków on 16 August 1906. His father was a clerical official at the central offices of Kraków police. In Kraków Edward completed elementary and in 1925 secondary (the Trade Academy) education. In 1926–27 he attended and graduated from a higher course in cooperative science at the Agricultural Department of the Jagiellonian University. From September 1925, he was employed in a cooperative rural association in Wieliczka. In 1928 became manager in a cooperative enterprise in Radom. Ochab was drafted and in June 1928 sent to a military school, but was judged there to be of a subversive attitude, apparently a declared communist, permanently employed in worker cooperatives. The school released him in October. Ochab returned to manage his Radom cooperative until February 1930. Activist in the Communist Party of Poland Ochab became a member of the Communist Party of Poland in the summer of 1929. In the next ten years he was arrested five times and spent six and a half years as a political prisoner in Sanation prisons, intermittently released for health reasons (suffered from tuberculosis). When not in prison, he worked in the party executive in Radom, Kraków, Katowice, Warsaw, Łódź, Toruń, Gdynia and Włocławek, frequently relocating or in hiding. Ochab was among the organizers of the miner strikes in Zagłębie Krakowskie (1932), in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie (1935) and the textile worker general strike in Łódź (1936). Ochab married a fellow communist activist, Rachela Silbiger, a nurse from a "poor and simple" Jewish family. They had four daughters, born in the 1930s and 1940s. On 7 September 1939, the German forces were approaching Warsaw and the guards in the Warsaw prison where Ochab was held fled. Released by fellow inmates he traveled toward Garwolin, but having found out about Warsaw's defense preparations returned to the capital to participate. On 11 September Ochab joined a workers' defense regiment and fought in the poorly armed unit until the city's capitulation.