Born:
April 11, 1915
Warsaw, Poland
Died: September 23, 2016
Raised in an Orthodox family in Warsaw, Poland, David Mitzner had gone into business with his father’s construction firm when German and Soviet forces invaded Poland in September 1939. To provide for his family, David established a smuggling operation to transport goods between Soviet territory in the east and German-occupied Poland. Mitzner subsequently was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag where he survived eight years of hard labor in Siberia. David escaped Communist Europe in 1949, arriving in New York that April. He married his wife Ruth in 1954 and worked in the clothing industry before he began investing in real estate in 1972. In 1980, Mitzner and his sons founded the RIDA Development Corporation in Houston. In the 1990s he entered the real estate market in his native Poland. On David’s 100th birthday in 2015, Houston mayor Annise Parker declared the day “David Mitzner Day” for the city.
Parents:
Mordechai Mitzner, d. in Holocaust
Faiga Pragel Mitzner, d. in Holocaust
Siblings:
Shmuel, deported to Siberia, unknown
Rose, survived
Trosha, d. in Holocaust