Icchak Cukierman

Who was Icchak Cukierman?

Icchak Cukierman, also known by his nom de guerre "Antek", or by the anglicised spelling Yitzhak Zuckerman, was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943 and fighter of Warsaw Uprising 1944 both heroic struggle against Nazi German terror during World War II.

Cukierman was born in Vilnius, partioned Poland 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 active part in 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 Hechaluc youth movement, along with his future wife Zivia Lubetkin.

In 1941 he became the deputy commander of the 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. Cukierman was wounded and narrowly escaped, and his two comrades were tracked down and killed.