Bierut spent the rest of 1939, 1940 and the first part of 1941 in the Soviet Union, in Kiev and Moscow, working, making efforts to clear his communist record and searching for Fornalska, whom he met in Moscow in July 1940 and again in May 1941 in Białystok, where she had moved with Aleksandra. The mother and daughter were evacuated into the Soviet Union after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, but Bierut ended up in Minsk. From November 1941, he was employed there by the German occupation authorities as a manager in trade and food distribution department of the city government. In the summer of 1943, Bierut arrived in occupied Poland, likely dispatched there as a trusted Soviet operative. He came to join the leadership of the Polish Workers' Party (PPR), a new communist party in existence for a year and a half. He may have been recommended for the job by Fornalska; parachuted into the General Government in the spring of 1942, she was in charge of the PPR's radio communications with Moscow.