Before the First World War Stefan Pal had owned a small chemical factory in Vienna which prospered as a supplier of shoe polish for the Austro-Hungarian Army, while Therese Deutsch was known for her beauty and appeared in several silent films produced in Berlin.

Following the war and the decay of Austria-Hungary, Pal senior moved his family to Poland, where he opened a new factory of chemical products called "Purus" near Kraków in 1921.

Stefan Pal's business slowly deteriorated until 1929, when he, just before the Great Depression, sold his factory and moved back to Vienna to live in three-bedroom apartment with his sons.

Meanwhile, Pal's mother's acting career in Berlin stalled as she failed to make a successful transition to talkies, and returned to Vienna.

Pal graduated from high school in 1940, and that same year he enrolled at the Study of Architecture in Belgrade, but because of the numerus clausus he was sent on hold.

Pal's mother was arrested in Nova Gradiška by the Croatian police, and was then taken by Ustaše to concentration camp in Đakovo where she had survived typhus.

After the 1943 capitulation of Italy and the liberation of the camp, Pal joined the Yugoslav Partisans as the member of the Jewish Rab battalion.

[5] After the war, Pal returned to Vukovar to find out that all members of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, except his cousin Heda Sinberger who survived Auschwitz.

In 1945 Pal moved to Zagreb, where he became the technical editor at the Ilustrirani Vjesnik weekly, and was one of the founders of the satirical newspaper Kerempuh, in 1945.

Upon his release he returned to Zagreb, where he started working at various publishers, translating books from German and editing graphic design.

Nevertheless, Pal continued to suffer discrimination, as he was denied travel documents and was kept under surveillance by the Yugoslav secret police UDBA.

Pal was also a long time member of the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts (ULUPUH) and one of the initiators and founders of Zgraf, a prestigious exhibition of graphic design established in 1975 and held every three years in Zagreb.