The Associated Press has reported that Marek Edelman, the last surving leader of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 has died in Warsaw at the age of 90.
There are not a lot of survivors left who lived through the Holocaust, much less leaders like Edelman. For the remainder of his life he distinguished himself as a doctor and as an activist for democracy in Communist Poland, one of only a small number of Jews who survived and remained after the war.
WARSAW, Poland — Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday at the age of 90.
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Most of Edelman's adult life was dedicated to the defense of human life, dignity and freedom. He fought the Nazis in the doomed Warsaw ghetto revolt and later in the Warsaw city Uprising. And then for decades he fought communism in Poland.
His heroism earned him the French Legion of Honor and Poland's highest civilian distinction, the Order of the White Eagle.
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The uprising at the Warsaw ghetto was the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II.
Marek Edelman was a young member of the Jewish Labor Bund, a major democratic socialist organization that flourished in Poland and Russia in the early 20th century and up until WW II and the Holocaust (although it had to operate underground in Russia after the Communists came to power). Surviving Bundists still live in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and Israel (although the Bund was vehemently anti-Zionist, especially in its early days). Edelman was one of the very few Bundists to remain in Poland after the war.
There is a more complete story about him in the NY Times today:
Edelman- NY Times
Young Bundists like Edelman (and my parents) called themselves tzukunftistn
(tzukunft means "future.") Their idealism was interrupted however...
Dr. Edelman was one of a handful of young leaders who in April 1943 led a force of 220 poorly armed young Jewish men and women in a desperate and hopeless struggle against the Germans.
He was 20 when the Germans overran Poland in 1939, and in the months that followed he watched as they turned his Warsaw neighborhood into a ghetto, cutting it off from the rest of the city with brick walls, barbed wire and armed sentries. By early 1942, as many as 500,000 Jews had been herded into the area.
In worsening conditions of hunger and brutality, the ghetto residents, wearing the obligatory Star of David armbands, were forced to sew military uniforms and produce other war materials.
Then, starting on July 22, 1942, the ghetto population began to shrink ominously. Each day, armed Germans and the Ukrainians serving with them prodded and wedged 5,000 to 6,000 Jews into long trains, which departed from the Umschlagplatz, a square at the southern end of the ghetto. At times they lured people onto the trains with loaves of brown bread. The Germans said the trains were going to factories where work conditions were better.
Edelman heroically worked to rescue as many people as he could from being transported by train to the death camps. But according to German records, almost 400,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto had been killed by early 1943, and there were only an estimated 30,000 left within the Ghetto walls.
At 4 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1943, as German soldiers and their Ukrainian, Latvian and Polish henchmen marched through the ghetto to round up people, they came, for the first time, under sustained fire. By midafternoon they were forced to withdraw without having taken a single person.
The fighting continued for three weeks. On one side were 220 ghetto fighters, hungry and relatively untrained youths deployed in 22 units. Each unit had a pistol, five grenades and five homemade bottle bombs. They also had two mines and one submachine gun.
Ranged against them, on a daily average, were 36 German officers and 2,054 others with an arsenal that included 82 machine guns, 135 submachine guns and 1,358 rifles along with armored vehicles, artillery and air power used to set the ghetto ablaze.
Dr. Edelman buried his fallen comrades and used his knowledge of the neighborhood, where he had grown up, to find escape routes for units that were pinned down. Many years later he would say that no one ever established how many Germans they had killed: "Some say 200, some say 30. Does it make a difference?"
Almost all the Jewish resistance fighters eventually died but Marek Edelman managed to escape, and then joined the Polish resistance struggle in greater Warsaw. (Photo: Bundists in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto )
He became a doctor and continued on as an activist for democracy during the repressive Communist years, eventually becoming an early founder of the Solidarity movement.
My parents were Bundists, who escaped Warsaw literally as the Germans invaded. I grew up in The Bronx among survivors and surviving members of the Resistance. Marek Edelman was a hero to them, and I do think I met him as a child one time when he was allowed to visit New York.
In Yiddish we say" koved zayn ondenk (Honor his memory.)
Also, here's a diary that another Kossack, mole333, posted earlier this year aboutThe Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
A note about making the rec list for the first time: It means a lot to me that this diary honoring my own yerusha (heritage), Edelman and all idealists who don't give up, gets honored here. Thank you.