Nesim All Around Me: The Life of David Mitzner

David Mitzner is an American businessman whose life spans five languages, three continents, and encompasses some of the most horrible - and most elating - features of Jewish fate in the 20th century. Born in an Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw when the city was still part of the Russian empire, he grew up in the newly independent Poland, sharing the hopes and delusions of its Jewish citizens, eventually setting himself up in business together with his father. When the country's two hostile neighbors invaded in 1939, a new international boundary between them suddenly cut off the city Mitzner lived in from where his family was. Undaunted, he set up a smuggling operation, which ensured the survival of his family in Warsaw until his mother and sister were killed in the Shoah. He himself was imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, which also killed his brother and father. Managing to flee Communist-dominated Eastern Europe in 1949, he arrived in New York with seventeen dollars in his pocket, not knowing English, and not having a trade. Today he is President of a major company in his country of birth, Apollo-Rida Poland, which in 2004 completed a billion-dollar real-estate purchase, considered the biggest ever in post-Communist Central Europe. His son lra is President of the American leg of the operation, Rida Development, which has built the largest hotel and resort complex in the US in the last three years, Champions Gate in Orlando, Florida. This is not just another rags-to-riches story but a testimony to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Konstanty Gebert, former underground "Solidarity" activist is a journalist in Warsaw, international reporter and columnist at "Gazeta Wyborcza", Poland's biggest daily, and publisher of "Midrasz" monthly, the country's most important Jewish publication. His other seven books include reports from the Yugoslav war, the first set of commentaries to the Torah ever published in Polish, and a history of Israel's wars.