Yitzhak ("Antek") Zuckerman (1915–1981)

Yitzhak Zuckerman, nom de guerre Antek, was born to a Jewish family in Vilnius (Vilna), then in Poland, now Lithuania. As a young man, he embraced the causes of socialism and Zionism. He moved to Warsaw in 1938 to work for Hehalutz, the Zionist Youth Movement. When Nazi Germany invaded his country in 1939 at the start of World War II, he went to Soviet-occupied territory in eastern Poland, where he organized clandestine Jewish socialist groups. In 1940, he returned to German-occupied Poland to encourage underground activities. At that time, he met and fell in love with Zivia Lubetkin, a fellow underground leader, whom he later married. When the Nazis began mass executions and deportations of Jews, Zuckerman was among the first to interpret these events as the beginning of a systematic program of annihilation, and he urged armed resistance. In July 1942, he helped establish the Żidowska Organizacja Bojowa or ŻOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) in the Warsaw ghetto, of which he was made a deputy commander. The ZOB started preparing for an armed uprising. He served as a liaison with Polish partisans on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw from which he smuggled guns and ammunition to the ZOB. Near the end of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19-May 16, 1943, he helped lead 75 of the surviving fighters out of the ghetto through the sewer system. He wrote a report about the ZOB that he sent to the Allies in London. He later commanded a group of Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1-October 1, 1944. After the war, Zuckerman and his wife organized transportation for the illegal movement to help Jewish refugees in eastern Europe go to Palestine. In 1947, they immigrated themselves to Palestine, where they helped found Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot (The Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz), north of Haifa, and established its museum, Beit Katznelson. In 1990, he published his memoirs, known in English as A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (original Hebrew title Sheva ha-Shanim ha-Hen: 1939-1946 was also translated as Those Seven Years), a major event in the historiography of the Holocaust.