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By
MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
October 3, 2009
Marek
Edelman, a cardiologist who was the last
surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto
uprising against the Germans, died Friday in
Warsaw. He was 90.
A
friend, Paula Sawicka, told The Associated
Press that Dr. Edelman had died "among
friends, among his close people," at her
home, where he had lived for the past two
years. For many years he lived in Lodz,
Poland's second largest city.
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.
Marek
Edelman and the young people with whom he had
forged clandestine links knew that such
claims were lies and that the human cargos
were in fact being taken to camps near
Lublin, where they were shot, put into
boxcars with quicklime or forced into gas
chambers. He and his colleagues talked about
armed resistance but had no weapons at the
time.
He
spent every day at the Umschlagplatz watching
as trains were loaded and sent off. He was
there ostensibly in his official capacity as
a messenger for the ghetto hospital, carrying
documents in his pocket that enabled him to
pull people off the trains by designating
them too ill to travel. Since the Germans
held to the fiction that the passengers were
being sent to better surroundings, they made
a show of holding back the sick. In fact,
young Marek used the passes to save people
who would be useful to the Jewish Combat
Organization, then being formed.
"I
was merciless," he recalled many years later.
"One woman begged me to pull out her
14-year-old daughter, but I was only able to
take one more person, and I took Zosia, who
was our best courier."
On
Sept. 8, when according to German records
310,322 Jews had been put on the trains and
sent to the death camps and 5,961 more had
been murdered inside the ghetto, the
liquidation was suspended. There were some
60,000 Jews still in the ghetto. The leaders
of the Jewish Combat Organization were
certain that the Germans would try to finish
the liquidation, and for the next six months
the organization planned for armed
resistance.
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?"
"After
three weeks," he recalled, "most of us were
dead."
At
the end he found a way out of an encircled
position, leading 50 others with him.
Eventually,
he took part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944,
when for 63 days Poles fought valorously but
unsuccessfully to liberate their capital from
the Germans.
Once
the war ended, he threw himself into his
medical studies and became a doctor in Lodz.
For 30 years he kept his memories and
thoughts about what happened to himself,
concentrating on his medical work and
becoming one of Poland's leading heart
specialists and the author of a much-used
textbook on the treatment of heart
attacks.
Even
after Poland's anti-Semitic campaign of 1968,
when he was demoted at the hospital and most
of the remaining Jews in Poland, including
his wife and two children, emigrated, Dr.
Edelman stayed. He was unwilling, and perhaps
unable, to tear himself away from the place
where East European Jewry had once thrived
and then perished as he watched.
Then,
in 1976, he suddenly spoke out, telling Hanna
Krall, a Polish writer of Jewish origin, what
he had so carefully remembered. The
recollections were stark and surprising. He
challenged those who claimed that there had
been many more than 220 ghetto fighters. Most
provocatively, he insisted that it was not
more meaningful or heroic to die with a gun
in one's hands than to perish in apparent
submission to an overwhelming and invincible
evil.
"These
people went quietly and with dignity," he
told Mrs. Krall, speaking of the millions
killed in the Nazi gas chambers. "It is an
awesome thing, when one is going so quietly
to one's death. It is definitely more
difficult than to go out shooting."
After
the book appeared, Dr. Edelman was often
sought out by visitors from around the world,
whose questions he would sometimes wave aside
gruffly, saying that people who had not been
there could never understand the choices made
in the ghetto.
He
would cite the example of a nurse in the
ghetto hospital who he said was greatly
admired, and deservedly so, for smothering
newborn children to save their mothers the
inevitable pain that would come when the
babies starved to death.
He
would dispute the use of the word "uprising,"
saying that it normally implied some slight
prospect of victory. In the ghetto, he said,
there was no such prospect.
"It
was a defensive action," he would say, or,
"We fought simply not to allow the Germans
alone to pick the time and place of our
deaths."
Marek
Edelman was born on Sept. 19, 1919, the only
son of a family that spoke Yiddish at home
and Polish at work. His father died when he
was very young; his mother, who worked as a
secretary at a hospital, died when he was 14.
While going to high school he was looked
after by his mother's friends from the
hospital.
Dr.
Edelman was an early member of the Solidarity
free labor union and was among those interned
when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared
martial law in 1981.
Two
years later he was asked to serve on the
organizing committee for an observance of the
40th anniversary of the ghetto uprising. He
declined, saying that to do so "would be an
act of cynicism and contempt" in a country
"where social life is dominated throughout by
humiliation and coercion."
Eight
years later he served as Solidarity's
consultant on health policy in the
round-table talks that led to democratic rule
for Poland. In the first free elections, he
ran for the Polish Senate, losing narrowly.
He kept working at the hospital in Lodz,
dodging any suggestion that he retire. He
held an honorary doctorate from
Yale.
Dr.
Edelman's wife, Alina Margolis-Edelman, a
pediatrician, died last year in Paris. She
had worked as a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto.
He is survived by their two children,
Aleksander, a biophysicist, and Ania, a
chemist, both of Paris, as well as two
grandchildren.
The
Polish title of the book Mrs. Krall wrote
about Dr. Edelman could be translated as "To
Finish Before God," with the implicit idea
being one of racing with God. But when the
English translation was published by Henry
Holt and Company, it was called "Shielding
the Flame," a reference to a passage in which
Dr. Edelman explained his philosophy both in
the ghetto and later as a doctor.
"God
is trying to blow out the candle, and I'm
quickly trying to shield the flame, taking
advantage of his brief inattention," he said.
"To keep the flame flickering, even if only
for a little while longer than he would
wish."
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