Dr. Marek Edelman, LdH, Order of the White Eagle

Adrian Roberts · Oct 4, 2009

A tremendously brave man, morally as well as physically, who stood all his life against oppression and only in old age knew a Free Europe.

Marek Edelman - Telegraph

Marek Edelman, who died on October 2, probably aged 90, was the last surviving leader of the armed Jewish revolt against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto; having commanded the heroic but doomed struggle in April 1943 he was one of a tiny number of fighters to escape with his life, eventually taking part in the equally ill-fated citywide Uprising the following year.

Edelman was just 20 when the Nazis invaded Warsaw. By November 1940 the invading army had cut off his district from the rest of the city with walls and wire. As the anti-Semitic directives of the occupation were put into force, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were forced into the ghetto, inflating its population to almost half a million.

Conditions became intolerable and in the course of 1941 the ghetto population was decimated by disease and malnutrition. Early the following year however, with Hitler's decision to implement the Endlösung, or final solution to "the Jewish question", plans were put in place to liquidate the ghetto and its remaining occupants entirely.

From July 1942, Jews were herded through the ghetto to Umschlagplatz, a square at its southern end, and on to trains 6,000 at a time. From there, the destinations were death camps. Two months after the ghetto clearance had begun, more than 300,000 Jews had been transported to the gas chambers. But even as Jews were encouraged on to the trains to Treblinka with promises of better conditions at their destination, Edelman and a small band of others were laying down plans for armed resistance.

He was under no illusion about the real fate of those leaving from Umschlagplatz, and using the small influence of a position at the ghetto hospital, Edelman plucked those he thought would be useful to the rebel cause off the death transports.

By the time the Nazis paused the ghetto clearance, in September 1942, only 60,000 Jews remained inside. Edelman and his comrades, however, had little doubt that the Germans would return to finish the job. They began acquiring weapons and organising themselves into units which would try to make up for their lack of training and munitions with an intimate knowledge of the ghetto, both above ground, and, through its sewer network, below.

The Nazi onslaught began on April 19 1943, as more than 2,000 Nazi troops moved in. "The Germans weren't expecting resistance of any kind, let alone that we would take up arms," Edelman recalled recently. In fact, some 220 fighters of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, (ZOB, the Jewish Combat Organization), of which Edelman was deputy commander, had split into small groups each armed with a pistol, a few grenades, and some homemade explosives. They put up fierce resistance and the Nazi troops were forced to withdraw.

Over the next three weeks the fighting proved intense, with Jewish fighters killing dozens of Nazi soldiers. Inevitably, however, the losses were far higher on their own side, and, surrounded on May 8, ZOB's leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, committed suicide, leaving Edelman in command. "After three weeks," Edelman recalled, "most of us were dead."

But just as Nazi forces were flushing out the few remaining fighters by burning down the ghetto ("we were beaten by the flames, not the Germans," Edelman always insisted) two "liaison men" from the Polish underground on the "Aryan side" emerged through the sewers that still linked the ghetto with the rest of the city.

Though many of its tunnels were barely two feet high, and often booby-trapped, the sewer network had long proved a vital escape route. If they could reach the other side, the liaison men promised to shelter Edelman and his few remaining comrades. Accordingly, on the morning of May 10, as bemused passers-by looked on, Edelman and the filthy remnants of the ZOB emerged through a manhole in Warsaw proper. The fighters who remained behind were never heard of again. The uprising was at an end.

After the war, the 20 days of fighting in the ghetto were sometimes described as a rare example of violent Jewish resistance to the horrors inflicted on them by the Nazis. But Edelman 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 Treblinika 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 was probably born in Homl, now Belarus, on New Year's Day 1919. That, in any case, was the date marked on his official documents, but he freely admitted that he could not know for sure. "I don't know my exact age," he said in 2007. "My father died when I was very little, I almost don't remember him at all. My mother died a few years later, so there was no one who could tell me when I was born."

In fact he knew his mother, Cecylia, a hospital secretary, long enough to pick up on her political activism, and to follow her into the Bund, a Jewish socialist organisation. With her he moved, still a child, to Warsaw, the city he always called home. After she died when he was 14 he was looked after by other staff members at the hospital.

"Warsaw is my city", he said in 2001, at ceremony to mark his wartime heroics. "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."

The defiance and organisation of the Bund clearly made its mark on Edelman, and provided a template for the ZOB. As conditions for Jews worsened in the 1930s, Edelman said Bund members preferred to challenge the mounting anti-Semitism rather than flee.

"The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine," he said. "They believed that Poland was their country and they fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities' rights would be guaranteed."

His hospital upbringing proved invaluable in the ghetto and, after fighting in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, he decided at war's end to pursue medicine as a career. He moved to Lodz, Poland's second city, in 1946, completing his studies and getting married. He worked as a cardiologist, but remained active politically, disagreeing with Bund's decision to close in 1948. In the following 20 years he became one of his country's leading heart doctors, pioneering techniques to cut the risk of heart attacks.

But his expertise was not enough to save him from renewed waves of anti-Semitism in Cold War Poland. He lost his job in 1968, and watched as his wife and children, like many of the surviving Jews in the country, emigrated. He remained, saying: "Someone had to stay here with all those who perished here, after all."

In was not until 1976 that he chose to recount his wartime experience publicly, in the book Shielding the Flame, which brought him a measure of recognition. But the tale of his exploits was not enough to prevent him, now a member of the pro-democracy movement as well as the banned trade union, Solidarity, from being interned, if only briefly, when General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981.

He was understandably indignant, two years later, when asked by the same regime to help it by attending a ceremony to mark the ghetto uprising's 40th anniversary. He refused, noting that life in Poland then was still "dominated throughout by humiliation and coercion".

He did, however, participate in the process in 1989 that brought a negotiated end to communism in Poland, known as the Round Table Talks. Though by then 70, he launched a brief political career and, when that came to an end, returned to his medical position.

Marek Edelman was appointed to both the Légion d'honneur and Poland's Order of the White Eagle, the country's highest award. His experiences, inevitably, left him with a grim view of humanity. "Man is evil, by nature man is a beast," he said. "People have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred."

His wife Alina, who also survived the ghetto, died last year. He is survived by their son and daughter.
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Dr. Marek Edelman, LdH, Order of the White Eagle

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