Suffering and Heroism in the Jewish Past in Light of the Present

A hero of Jewish resistance and survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Antek (Yitzhak) Zuckerman was born in Vilna. He was a leader in the Zionist youth movement He-Ḥaluts. When Jews were confined to the Warsaw ghetto, Zuckerman was sent to the “Aryan” sector as a liaison with the Polish underground and smuggled arms to Jewish ghetto fighters. After the death of the ghetto’s leader Mordecai Anielewicz, Zuckerman was appointed commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB). He moved to pre-state Israel in 1947 and was a founder of Kibbutz Lohmei Hageta’ot and the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.

Eliyohu Gutkowski was a teacher and archivist in the Warsaw ghetto. Originally from Kalvarija (now in Lithuania), he was educated in Łódź and later in Warsaw. Gutkowski was active in the Right Po‘ale Tsiyon movement. Along with Antek Zuckerman, he compiled a Yiddish anthology of Jewish history, Payn un gvure, for educating young people clandestinely in the Warsaw ghetto. The anthology included readings from the Jewish past about Jewish courage and Jewish martyrdom and became one of the earliest symbols of cultural resistance in the ghetto. Gutkowski was also on the executive committee of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive. Gutkowski did much important work for the archive, including key studies about economics. He was also a liaison to Zionist youth movements, especially Dror. Gutkowski was killed, together with his wife and son, during the ghetto uprising in 1943.