Abraham (Abram) Leon (1918–1944) (born Abraham Wejnstok), was a Belgian Jewish Trotskyist party leader and theorist, who was murdered in 1944 by the Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp. Biography Leon was born in Warsaw in 1918. His parents, adherents of "official petit-bourgeois Zionism", left Poland to pursue the Zionist dream in Palestine; the family quickly re-emigrated in 1926 to Belgium. Leon became a member and then leader of the Belgian branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a left wing Zionist youth movement. In 1936, after hearing speeches of the Trotskyist leader of the to militant Belgian coal miners, Leon was won over politically from Stalinism to Trotskyism. Between 1936 and 1940 Leon slowly and methodically made his political transition from the Hashomer Hatzair to revolutionary Trotskyism. When the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, threw Dauge's Belgian Trotskyists (and Dauge himself) and the Belgian Communist Party into deep demoralization, it was Leon who was instrumental in keeping the flame of revolutionary Marxism alive in Belgium. According to Ernest Mandel, "[c]orrectly establishing the reasons which we had for hope, Leon noted that the workers’ movement in Europe had already reached the lowest point of its ebb. It was now necessary to count upon a new rise. It was necessary not to await it passively but to prepare for it, preparing for it the cadres and insofar as possible the masses. [...] When, on August 20, 1940 we were overwhelmed by the tragic news of the assassination of L.D. Trotsky, Leon immediately wrote the first illegal pamphlet of the Belgian Trotskyist movement. He established contact with several former regional leaders of the party in Brussels. The first leadership began to take form. The illegal Trotskyist organization was born on the day following the death of its spiritual father. [...] From this moment on, the story of Leon was linked with the history of the Trotskyist movement in Belgium." At some point, Leon shared an apartment with fellow trotskyist and resistance leader, the German Martin Monath, to whom he tasked on making work within the Wehrmacht in occupied France. Mandel credits Leon with being 'the principal inspirer of the [Belgian Trotskyist] party". He states that Leon "served as political secretary from the time the first executive committee was set up" and that Leon served as the editor-in-chief of the illegal Belgian Trotskyist newspaper La Voie de Lénine (The Road of Lenin); he also wrote many of