The Book of the Ghetto Wars: Between the Walls, in the Camps, in the Forests

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.

A poet, translator, and editor who also wrote under the name M. Bik, Moshe Basok was born in Kovno and grew up in Vilna, also studying at the Slobodka yeshiva. Basok moved in 1936 to Palestine, where he edited newspapers, documented Jewish resistance during World War II, and worked for the publisher Ha-kibbutz Ha-me’uḥad.