Zuckerman was born on December 13, 1915, in
Vilnius, then part of the
Russian Empire. After
World War I Vilnius became part of the recreated
Polish state. As a young man, he embraced the concepts of
Labor Zionism. He graduated from a religious elementary school associated with the
Mizrachi Zionist movement, followed by a Hebrew gymnasium in 1933. He applied to study at the
University of Vilnius and
Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, but never began university studies. In the spring of 1940 he moved to
Warsaw, where he became one of the leaders of the
Dror Hechaluc youth movement, along with his future wife
Zivia Lubetkin. Zuckerman was issued a false passport by the
Ładoś Group. 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. 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 in battle, he nonetheless proved a crucial link between resistance forces within the ghetto and the
Home Army on the "Aryan" side. 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. 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. In 2001, the tale of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was turned into a made-for-TV film entitled
Uprising, with actor
David Schwimmer portraying Zuckerman. ==See also==