Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the heroic but doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, passed away on October 2nd this year. The irony of the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, an apostle of peace and non-violence, coinciding with the death anniversary of one who chose the path of violence against an oppressor made me read through an entire article on Mr. Edelman’s life. Having done that, I could not but search for more information on this exceptional person who lived through such a tumultuous period in history.
Have culled out details of his life and his beliefs from various obituaries and am reproducing these below (sources stated at the end of this post), primarily because I find the story of his life inspirational in many ways, also because I believe that ‘those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’.
The Warsaw ghetto had been established in October 1940 to cut off the city’s Jews, with a high wall and wire, from the general population. By April 1942 half a million people lived in this space of four square kilometres, with around 1,500 dying each week from hunger and disease. In those conditions, Mr Edelman said, the most important thing was just to be alive: not to be one of the naked corpses wheeled past on carts, heads bobbing up and down or knocking on the pavement. A “terrible apathy” took hold, in which people no longer saw or believed the random horrors round them. He tried to rouse his people, first by staying up night after night to print mimeograph newspapers, and then by fighting.
In 1942, Hitler put in place his plans for the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question. From July 1942, the Nazis began deporting 6000 Jews at a time on to trains that took them to the Death Camps at Treblinka etc. By the time the Nazis paused the ghetto clearance, in September 1942, only 60,000 Jews remained inside the ghetto.
The Nazi onslaught to finally liquidate the ghetto began on April 19th 1943. Marek Edelman was deputy commander of 220 untrained “boys” with pistols and home-made explosives. Against them were around 2,000 Nazi soldiers, the pick of the Wehrmacht, with plenty more behind them. Over the next three weeks, the fighting was intense. The Jewish fighters killed dozens of Nazi soldiers but inevitably sustained far greater losses. "After three weeks," Edelman recalled, "most of us were dead.” The Germans proceeded to flush out the few remaining fighters by burning down the Ghetto; Edelman always insisted, "We were beaten by the flames, not the Germans."
He managed to flee to the Aryan side of the city. Once he was there, he immediately joined the ranks of the Polish underground resistance. In 1944, he participated in the Warsaw Uprising, another failed attempt at liberating Poland's capital from German occupation.
Only 280,000 of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews survived the Holocaust and returned at the end of the war. By 1970 that number was down to 20,000 or 30,000, as many fled the communist regime. Edelman’s wife and children left Poland during the Cold War anti-Semitism of the late 1960s, but he stayed. “Warsaw is my city. … Someone has to stay here with all those who died,” said he.
Contrary to others who survived the holocaust, his dream was not of some Zionist homeland, but a socialist Poland in which Jews would have cultural autonomy. He continued to hope for that all his life. He said in 2001, “Warsaw is my city. It is here that I learned Polish,Yiddish and German. It is here that at school, I learned one must always take care of others. It is also here that I was slapped in the face just because I was a Jew.”
Edelman's experiences had left him with a somewhat grim view of society. "Man is evil, by nature man is a beast," he said. "People have to be educated from childhood... that there should be no hatred.”
To me, the nobility of Edelman’s character lies not just in his heroic deeds, but also in the empathy towards those who chose passivity over resistance, a choice totally contrary to his own. After the end of World War II, the 20 days of fighting in the Ghetto were sometimes described as a rare example of active Jewish resistance to the horrors inflicted by the Germans. Though by some accounts, Edelman remained furious with the traditional Jewish leadership for allowing the Ghetto to passively accept their fate, he always refused to make any distinction of character between those in the ghetto who fought and those who boarded the trains to the camps. Both groups, he said, were simply dealing with an inevitable death in the best way they could.
"We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning," he recalled. "We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka." Indeed, Edelman added, far from going passively, those who went steadfastly to Treblinka had shown the ultimate courage. "Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber."
Marek Edelman's political engagement earned him widespread respect in contemporary Poland. In the 1970s, while still pursuing a career in cardiology, he became engaged in the dissident Workers' Defense Committee, which gave birth to the first major pro-democratic movement behind the Iron Curtain - the Solidarity Trade Union.
On 17 April 1998 Edelman was awarded Poland's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle. He also received the French Legion of Honour.
Throughout his life, he stated his strong opinions bluntly and did not mince words - certainly not when confronting injustice and hypocrisy. In 1999 he publicly supported NATO strikes in the Balkans, arguing that a policy of pacifist non-intervention only played into the hands of dictators. In August 2002, he spoke up for the Palestinians as he felt that the Jewish self-defense for which he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression. He wrote an open letter to the Palestinian resistance leaders. Though the letter criticized the suicide bombers, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and press.
In April 2009, Edelman joined leading Polish filmmakers and writers in a protest to the government after a former neo-Nazi took over the running of the country’s public television network. “People who publicly support racism and anti-Semitism shouldn’t be allowed to play a role in public life,” he wrote in an open letter to Prime Minister. “Don’t forget that evil can grow bigger.”
Hanna Krall, a chronicler of the Polish Jews' past, recorded Marek Edelman's life story in her world-acclaimed book, 'Shielding the Flame'. The opus' reflects Edelman's afterthought on the nature of his medical profession. "God wants to dim the candle's light, and I have to shield it quick, before he notices," he described his craft as a doctor (he was a noted cardiologist in Poland after the war).
As Jaroslaw Adamowski says in this article, whether struggling against the Nazis in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto or curing his patients' illnesses, Marek Edelman would not let the light dim, shielding the flame by all means. It is how he should be remembered.
By,
Zen
Sources of information :
News articles -
1) http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14585545#
2) http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-perspec1018tyneroct18,0,3396676.story (this article also describes how Marek Edelman and other surviving fighters escaped from the ghetto and out into Poland when the Nazis burnt down the ghetto)
3) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/6259900/Marek-Edelman.html# (has some details of when and how preparations for the Warsaw uprising began)
4) http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254827721470&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
5) http://jta.org/news/article/2009/10/07/1008378/remembering-marek-edelman
6) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=a4h2M9HvJ4Kg
websites and blogs -
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek_Edelman
2) http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/10/marek-edelman.html (this post has a brief history of the Warsaw Ghetto from 1939 to 1943; also interesting as it ends with a brief reference to Tarantino’s latest ‘Inglourious Basterds’)
3) http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=19233
4) http://www.organizedrage.com/2009/10/obituary-marek-edelman-cardiologist.html#
5) http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/warsaw-uprising.html - some details on the history of the Jews in Poland after 1939
