Yitzhak Zuckerman

Icchak Cukierman (also known by the internationalised spelling Yitzhak Zuckerman; 1915 – 1981), who used the alias "Antek", was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the commander of a small Jewish troop fighting in the Warsaw Uprising during World War II.

Cukierman was born in Vilna to 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 overrun by the Red Army and initially stayed in the Soviet zone of occupation, where he took active part in creation of various Jewish underground socialist organisations. In the spring of 1940 he moved to Warsaw, where he became one of the leaders of the Dror Hechaluc youth movement and eventually the deputy commander of the ŻOB resistance organisation. Since then he served mainly as the envoy between the commander of ŻOB and the commanders of the Armia Krajowa and Armia Ludowa resistance organisations. On December 22, 1942, he and two accomplices attacked a café in Cracow that was being used by the SS and Gestapo. Cukierman was wounded and narrowly escaped, and his two friends were tracked down and killed.

In 1943 he commanded one of the three sectors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and led the survivors through the sewers to safety. During the later Warsaw Uprising of 1944 he led a small troop of 22 survivors of the Ghetto Uprising fighting in the ranks of the Armia Ludowa organisation.

After the war he worked as part of a Berihah network that smuggled Jewish refugees out of occupied Europe to Palestine. In 1947 he made the same journey, settling in what would soon be Israel. There he founded the Ghetto Fighters' Museum in Tel Aviv, commemorating those who struggled against the Nazis. He also became the founder of a kibbutz of the same name.

In 1961 he appeared as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel. He died in 1981, in the kibbutz he had founded.

A record of an lengthy interview he gave in 1976 was published in Israel in 1991 as a book A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Bibliography

• Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993. ISBN 0520078411