Iser Cukier

Of Blessed Memory 1909 – 2004

Iser Cukier (born Iser Cukrowski) the youngest of seven children, was born in Częstochowa, Poland, where his family owned a large bakery that was located in the same building as their apartment. An older brother advised him to learn a trade rather than attend high school. He became a men’s tailor and, when that proved insufficiently challenging, he moved to Lodz to learn women’s tailoring and then to Warsaw and Katowice to attend design school. Eventually he had his own shop in Zawiercie, employing ten people and supporting his mother. He also married and had a child. His wife and son and the rest of his family were murdered during the Holocaust, but Iser was kept alive as a slave laborer making German uniforms in a factory in Zawiercie.For a time, after the slave labor workshop was disbanded and most of the workers deported, a sympathetic officer hid him on a Luftwaffe base. In May 1945, after liberation, he made his way to Paris, where he worked as a designer and met and married Tola Gottlieb. They immigrated to the United States in 1952.