Last commander marks 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising

JCFalkenbergIII · #1 (**permalink**) April 20th, 2008, 05:17 AM

Last commander marks 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising
by Jonathan Fowler Sat Apr 19, 4:17 PM ET

WARSAW (AFP) - The last commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, Marek Edelman, on Saturday honoured the memory of his comrades who died fighting Nazi Germany in the doomed Jewish stand against the Holocaust.

Joined by family members, hundreds of bystanders and city officials, Edelman marked the 65th anniversary of the revolt at the imposing monument to the ghetto fighters, unveiled in 1948.
Braving driving rain, the silent participants first laid flowers at the monument.
The frail Edelman, 85, was then pushed in his wheelchair to the site of the bunker where the leader of the revolt, 24-year-old Mordechaj Anielewicz, and 80 comrades had committed suicide as Nazi forces closed in.
The crowd then walked to the site of the "Umschlagplatz", the railway siding from which the Nazis sent more than 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp in northeastern Poland.
Edelman, who took command after Anielewicz's death, rarely attends high-profile official ceremonies, preferring to remember his comrades in a lower-key fashion on April 19, the day the revolt actually began.
This year's official event was held on Tuesday, in the presence of Poland's President Lech Kaczynski and Israel's Shimon Peres.
That ceremony had been brought forward because the actual anniversary fell on a Saturday, which is the Jewish Sabbath.
On the eve of World War II, Poland was Europe's Jewish heartland.
It was home to 3.5 million Jews, and Warsaw alone had a community of around 400,000.
After invading Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany set up ghettos nationwide to isolate the country's Jews and facilitate the "Final Solution" -- half of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish.
At its height, more than 450,000 were crammed into the walled Warsaw ghetto.
About 100,000 died inside from starvation, disease and in summary executions. Most of the rest were sent to Treblinka in mass deportations which began in 1942.
In the ghetto, a handful of Jewish paramilitary groups, mostly made up of young people -- Edelman was just 20 -- coalesced into a poorly-armed force of around 1,000.
The banner of one group was a blue Star of David on a white background, which caused Nazi ire when it was hoisted during the revolt. It became the flag of Israel.
On Saturday, youths handed out paper armbands emblazoned with the symbol, which participants wore as they formed a human chain around the monument while sirens wailed and a Polish army honour guard fired a salute.
The ghetto fighters first clashed with the Nazis on January 18-22, 1943, managing to hinder the deportations.

On April 19, 1943, they took up arms again, as the Nazis moved to wipe out the remaining 60,000 ghetto dwellers.
"We knew perfectly well that there was no way we could win," Edelman told AFP in a recent interview.
"It was a symbol of the fight for freedom. A symbol of standing up to Nazism, and of not giving in," he said.
The fighters held out as 3,000 Nazi troops razed the ghetto with explosives and fire.
Following Anielewicz's suicide on May 8, Edelman and several dozen comrades escaped through the sewers. The Nazis marked their "victory over the Jews" by blowing up Warsaw's main synagogue on May 16.
Around 7,000 Jews died in the revolt, most of them burned alive, and more than 50,000 were sent to Treblinka.
Besides denting the Nazis' sense of superiority, the fighters managed to inflict some damage, killing and injuring a combined 300 troops.
Sporadic clashes continued in the ghetto ruin until the autumn.
Edelman and many other survivors later took part in the Warsaw uprising, launched on August 1, 1944 by the Polish underground. That failed 63-day revolt and the Germans' brutal response cost the lives of 200,000 civilians and 18,000 resistance members, and saw the near-total destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis.

Last commander marks 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising - Yahoo! News

JCFalkenbergIII · #2 (**permalink**) April 22nd, 2008, 03:11 PM

Ex-leader recalls Warsaw Ghetto uprising
By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, Associated Press Writer Tue Apr 15, 4:14 PM ET

LODZ, Poland - Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto by a handful of scrappy, poorly armed Jews against the Nazi army, becomes emotional when he speaks of the fighters he led.
"I remember them all — boys and girls — 220 altogether, not too many to remember their faces, their names," says the 89-year-old doctor, who still works in a Lodz hospital. Edelman will lay a wreath in their honor at the Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto on Saturday, the 65th anniversary of the uprising.
The Nazis walled off the ghetto in November 1940, cramming 400,000 Jews from across Poland into a 760-acre section of the capital in inhuman conditions. On April 19, 1943, German troops started to liquidate the ghetto by sending tens of thousands of its residents to death camps.
Several hundred young Jews took up arms in defense of the civilians — the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II.
"It was the first, most important and most spectacular" instance of Jewish armed resistance to the Nazi Holocaust, said Andrzej Zbikowski, head of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Edelman said the Nazis "wanted to destroy the people, and we fought to protect the people in the ghetto, to extend their life by a day or two or five."
Then 24 years old, Edelman took command of one of the revolt's three groups. His fighters, between the ages of 13 and 22, scraped together guns and ammunition that they and the Polish resistance managed to smuggle in from the outside.
His brigade included 50 fighters known as "brush men" because their base was a brush factory.
"There weren't enough guns, ammunition. There was not enough food, but we were not starving. You can live for three weeks just on water and sugar," which they found in the homes of those deported to death camps, he said.
They adopted hit-and-run tactics. With time, as supplies and forces began to run low, they resorted to attacks at night, for more safety.
"Every moment was difficult. It was two or three or 10 boys fighting with an army," Edelman said. "There were no easy moments."
But they were outnumbered and outgunned.
"It lasted for three weeks, so this great German army could not cope so easily with those 220 boys and girls," he said with a grain of pride.
The uprising ended when its main leaders — rounded up by the Nazis — committed suicide on May 8, 1943. The Nazis then burned down the ghetto, street by street.
About 40 fighters escaped through Warsaw's sewers and joined the Polish partisans.
"No one believed he would be saved," Edelman said. "We knew that the struggle was doomed, but it showed the world that there is resistance against the Nazis, that you can fight the Nazis."
Edelman and a few others stayed in Warsaw to help coordinate and supply the Jewish resistance groups. Some fighters still live in Israel and Canada. Edelman is the last one in Poland.

Despite the ghetto uprising's ultimate failure, "it was worth it," Edelman said. "Even at the price of the fighters' lives."
After the war, Edelman chose to remain in Poland, becoming a social and a democratic activist, and guardian of the ghetto fighters' memory.
"When you were responsible for the life of some 60,000 people, you don't leave and abandon the memory of them," he said.
A service was held in Warsaw on Tuesday — to avoid conflicting with the Jewish sabbath — and drew a crowd of 1,000, including Israeli President Shimon Peres and his Polish counterpart, Lech Kaczynski, as well as U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Israeli and Polish flags fluttered in the afternoon breeze as Poland's chief orthodox rabbi, Michael Schudrich, read out the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the dead.
Peres praised the young fighters, who he said displayed "a heroism that our children will proudly carry with them in their hearts."
Edelman views the annual observances as "part of educating people and fighting genocide."
He said people "have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred." "They have to be shown that all people are the same, that skin color, race, religion don't matter," he said. "We have only one life and we must not murder each other. We see the sun only once."

Ex-leader recalls Warsaw Ghetto uprising - Yahoo! News