Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader dies

[Setzer]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33145701/ns ... ws-europe/

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.
Edelman died at the family home of his friend Paula Sawicka, where he had lived for the past two years.
"He died at home, among friends, among his close people," Sawicka told The Associated Press.
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.
One of the few survivors of three weeks of uneven struggle in the Warsaw ghetto, he felt obliged to preserve the memory of the fallen heroes of that first large-scale Jewish revolt against the Nazis. Each year, on the revolt's anniversary, he laid flowers at Warsaw's monument to the ghetto heroes, and called for tolerance.
'Man is evil, by nature man is a beast," he said, and therefore people "have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred."
He also felt obliged to appeal repeatedly to the world for freedom and peace — even when it had to be won in a fight.
"When you cannot defend freedom through peaceful means, you have to use arms to fight Nazism, dictatorship, chauvinism,"
Edelman said in an 2008 interview with The Associated Press in his apartment in the central city of Lodz,
which was filled with portraits of Jews and of scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust.

He worked at a city hospital Lodz, almost to his last day.
Edelman was born Jan. 1, 1919 in Homel, which was then in eastern Poland and is now in Belarus. His family soon moved to Warsaw.
When the Nazis invaded Poland on Sept.1, 1939, Edelman was member of Bund,
a Jewish socialist organization that later masterminded plans for resistance against the occupying Germans.
The Germans set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming some 460,000 Jews from the city and from across Poland in inhuman conditions.
After a year, almost half the people there had died of disease and starvation.
The resistance plans were implemented April 19, 1943, when the Nazis moved to liquidate the ghetto by killing or sending some remaining 60,000 residents to the death camps. Thousands were put on regular transports to the death camps of Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor.
But that April, the well-trained German troops encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance from a few hundred young, poorly armed Jewish civilians, determined to die fighting rather than in gas chambers.

At the age of 23, Edelman took command of a brush-makers unit, based at a brush factory.
"No one believed they would be saved," Edelman said. "We knew the struggle was doomed,
but it showed the world there was resistance against the Nazis, that you could fight the Nazis."
They had few guns and no food but were driven by a goal.
The Nazis "wanted to destroy the people and we fought to protect the people in the ghetto, to extend their lives by a day, or two or five," he said.
The ghetto fighters inflicted heavy losses on the Germans, but eventually succumbed.
More than 55,000 people were killed or deported to Nazi concentration camps when the uprising failed.
The uprising's leaders were rounded up in a bunker and, seeing no chance of escape, committed suicide on May 8, 1943.
The Nazis razed the ghetto street by street, as part of their so-called "final solution" in which they killed 6 million people in their efforts to wipe out European Jewry.
Edelman was not in the bunker. With a small group of survivors, he left through the sewers to the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he found places to hide and helped coordinate Jewish partisan groups in nearby forests.

The deadly struggle was "worth it ... even at the price of the fighters' lives," he said later. "They could not be saved, anyway."
In August and September of 1944, Edelman fought in the Warsaw Uprising,
another ill-fated revolt meant to free the capital from Germans ahead of the advancing Red Army.
After the war, Edelman became a cardiologist in Lodz. He joined the democratic opposition and the Solidarity freedom movement,
and was interned under the Dec.13, 1981, martial law aimed against Solidarity.
In the end, the Solidarity movement led to the ouster of communists from power in Poland in 1989.
Edelman's wife, Alina Margolis-Edelman, worked as a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto and after the war became a pediatrician.
With their son, Aleksander, and daughter, Anna, she left Poland for France following the communist-sponsored anti-Semitic purges of 1968. She died in Paris on March 23, 2008. But Edelman never wanted to leave Poland.
"When you were responsible for the life of some 60,000 people, you don't leave and abandon the memory of them," he told the AP.
He held honorary doctorate of the Yale University.
He is survived by his son, Aleksander, his daughter, Anna, and grandchildren Liza and Tomek.

To the memory of a true patriot and a genuine badass.

[LadyTevar]

To another Hero, gone to his well-deserved rest....

[Count Chocula]

Now THAT was a man. Requiescat in pace, Mr. Edelman.

[The Grim Squeaker]

May he rest in peace, and their bravery never be forgotten.

[PeZook]

The Nazis couldn't stand defiance. Even when it was patently obvious they simply wanted to kill everyone in the ghetto, and thus resistance became inevitable, the very act of resisting caused them to level the entire ghetto.


Warsaw Ghetto after the uprising was quelled

I sometimes wonder how it was possible for anyone to show such unbridled hatred, that he'd level an entire district to the ground in some incomprehensible display of punishment rather than use it for his own purposes.

[Samuel]

I believe the Nazi's intended to level the entire city in time- after all the Poles weren't Aryans.

[Sea Skimmer]

Its not really clear if all Polish cities were to be destroyed or not prior to the 1944 general rising. Hitler did intend to have almost all Russian cities destroyed.

Prior to the two uprisings, Warsaw was something of a necessity for the Nazi murder empire. The whole General Government sector of occupied Poland, of which it was a part, was to be a permanent slave labor colony to support various Nazi projects such as the German colonization of Russia. A large portion of the Polish population along with all of the Jews were driven into this area making it overcrowded even outside the Ghettos, so destroying it all would not have been conductive to a steady slave supply.

Now once the 1944 general Warsaw rising occurred Hitler very much ordered it all destroyed. As it was around 1/3rd of the city was completely flattened and 80% was largely destroyed by the time the rising was crushed. This is including the already flattened Ghetto areas. As for who is Aryan, the absurd thing is the Nazis themselves never fully agreed on which populations in the east were Aryan and which were not. But given the scale of murder even the most conservative plans required, they had time to think about it.

[Zor]

A Champion of the innocent against the evils of the Third Reich, may he rest in peace.

[Pelranius]

Well, RIP, Mr. Edelman sir.

I thought that the Nazis wanted to keep some Polish cities after deporting the population, like Lodz.

[Darth Yan]

RIP Brave man

[PeZook]

Well, RIP, Mr. Edelman sir.

I thought that the Nazis wanted to keep some Polish cities after deporting the population, like Lodz.

Pretty much. Lodz was located in the areas that were outright annexed into the Reich, same goes for places like Gdynia.

There was little doubt most of the Polish population was to die: food rations for Warsaw were set on the level of (IIRC) 400 calories per adult person throughout the occupation, the city only survived thanks to an epic smuggling ring that supplied it with food from outlying villages.

But while crippling food rations is a pretty efficient way to go at it, all things considered, using thousands of tonnes of high explosives in the middle of a massive campaign in Russia just to spite a place Jews once lived in is practically psychotic.

Its not really clear if all Polish cities were to be destroyed or not prior to the 1944 general rising. Hitler did intend to have almost all Russian cities destroyed.

IIRC, post-war Warsaw was to be reduced in role to an oversized rail yard. See the 1940 Pabst Plan: apparently, Warsaw's role as a cultural center was just intolerable, even with the populace replaced by Germans in entirety, so it had to be taught its place in the world.

Man, it sometimes is real easy to forget just how batshit insane the Nazi empire was...

[Thanas]

Interestingly, his death was also noted on the german evening news with even an added video reel.