The maker of miracles

David Mitzner was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1915, the eldest of four children. He grew up in a building at ul. Miła 28, in the city’s Muranów district. While “Miła” means “lovely” in Polish, according to his memoirs in those days it was anything but: a crowded slum in the city’s Jewish quarter where people struggled to make a living. Nevertheless, the family’s clothing business thrived in the interwar years and the Mitzners were able to move to the more upmarket ul. Gęsia 13. The young David increasingly gave up his studies as he became more involved in the business, spending much of his time in Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine) at the family’s Warsaw Hosiery Factory [Warszawska Fabryka Trykotazy]. It was here he found himself at the outbreak of World War II as the rest of his family remained back in Warsaw, which under the Nazi-Soviet Pact fell under German control. Lwów, however, was in the region annexed by the USSR. In the