Page 29 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - October 19

A BRIEF HISTORY FROM THE
HERITAGE OF DROR…
REPRINTED FROM WIKIPEDIA
Yitzhak Zuckerman (December 13, 1915 –
June 17, 1981), also known by his nom de
guerre "Antek", was one of the leaders of
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943
against Nazi Germany during World War II.
Zuckerman was born in Vilnius, partitioned
Poland (then part of the Russian Empire, now
the capital of Lithuania) into a Jewish family. As
a young man he embraced the concepts
of socialism and Zionism.
After the German and Soviet invasion of
Poland in 1939 he was in the area overrun by
the Red Army and initially stayed in the Soviet
zone of occupation, where he took an active part
in the creation of various Jewish underground
socialist organisations. In the spring of 1940 he
moved to Warsaw, where he became a leader of
the leaders of the Dror Hechalutz youth
movement, along with his future wife Zivia
Lubetkin.
In 1941 he became the deputy commander of the
Jewish Fighting Organization. (Zydowska
Organizacja Bojowa) ŻOB resistance
organisation. In this capacity, he served mainly
as the envoy between the commander of ŻOB
and the commanders of the Polish resistance
organizations of Armia Krajowa and Armia
Ludowa. On December 22, 1942, he and two
accomplices attacked a café in Kraków that was
being used by the SS and Gestapo. Zuckerman
was wounded and narrowly escaped, and his two
comrades were tracked down and killed.
In 1943, he was working on the "Aryan" side
of Warsaw to procure guns and ammunition
when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising erupted.
Unable to enter the ghetto to join his comrades
29
in battle, he nonetheless proved a crucial link
between resistance forces within the ghetto and
the Home Army on the "Aryan" side. Along
with Simcha "Kazik" Rotem, he organized the
escape of the surviving ZOB fighters through the
sewers to safety. During the later Warsaw
Uprising of 1944, he led a small troop of 322
survivors of the Ghetto Uprising as they fought
the Germans in the ranks of the Home Army.
After the war he worked as part of
the Bricha network, whose operatives smuggled
Jewish refugees out of Eastern and Central
Europe to Mandate Palestine. In 1947 he himself
made that journey, settling in what would soon
be Israel. There he and his wife Zivia, along with
other veterans of the ghetto undergrounds and
former partisans, were among the founding
members of Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot and
the Ghetto Fighters' House (GFH) museum
located on its grounds, commemorating those
who struggled against the Nazis. GFH has a
study center named for Zivia and Yitzhak
Zuckerman.
In 1961 he appeared as a witness at the trial of
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel. He
died in 1981, in the kibbutz he had founded.
A record of a lengthy interview he gave in 1976
was expanded into the book Sheva ha-Shanim
ha-Hen: 1939-1946 [Hebrew: Those Seven
Years] published in Israel in 1991, later
translated into English and published as A
Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising.
His granddaughter Roni Zuckerman became
the Israeli Air Force's first female fighter pilot.