” HE WAS sure that once he started fighting, he was going to die. No
point in being scared about it. Death was death; there was nothing
more, nothing bigger, that could happen to him. At least in this way,
taking up arms, he could die on his own terms rather than theirs. His
time, his place. Suicide would have been another way to do it, but he
never considered that. Going to the gas chamber or the mass grave with
quiet, considered dignity, like many of the residents of the Warsaw
ghetto, was another way: far more admirable and more difficult, he
thought, than running through random bullets as he did. But it was not
for him. Only by dying as publicly as possible, loudly and with his gun
blazing, could he let the world know what the Nazis were doing to the
Jews in Poland.
The odds were overwhelming. He was deputy commander of 220 untrained
“boys” with pistols and home-made explosives. Against them were around
2,000 Nazi soldiers, the pick of the Wehrmacht, with plenty more behind
them. The Nazis had come on the eve of Passover, April 19th 1943, to
liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, from which they had been deporting 6,000
Jews a week to the death camps. For almost a month Mr Edelman helped
keep them at bay, barricaded in the streets around the brushmakers’
district until the whole place was burned down round him.
The ghetto had been established in October 1940 to cut off the city’s
Jews, with a high wall and wire, from the general population. Jews were
crammed into its four square kilometres from all over the city, Poland
and the German Reich. By April 1942 half a million people lived there,
many on filthy straw mattresses directly on the ground. Around 1,500
were dying each week from hunger and disease. In those conditions, Mr
Edelman said, the most important thing was just to be alive: not to be
one of the naked corpses wheeled past on carts, heads bobbing up and
down or knocking on the pavement. A “terrible apathy” took hold, in
which people no longer saw or believed the random horrors round them.
He tried to rouse them, first by staying up night after night to print
mimeograph newspapers, and then by fighting.
As a messenger at the ghetto hospital, Mr Edelman was one of the few
allowed out. He passed on news of Nazi atrocities to the larger Polish
underground, and gathered up weapons and fighters. Precisely how much
help he got is still disputed. He implied later that gentile Poles both
couldn’t do much, and wouldn’t, to help the Jews they still distrusted,
even though they faced a common enemy. But the beleaguered Jews were
disunited too: secular, socialist, non-Zionist Jews like him, with
ardent Zionists and communists, all bickering over tactics at the edge
of the abyss.
He considered himself both a Pole and a Jew, despite his white
armband with its blue star. Warsaw was home to him; his parents had
died when he was young, leaving him to be brought up by staff in the
hospital. He spoke Polish, Yiddish and Russian. His dream was not of
some Zionist homeland, but a socialist Poland in which Jews would have
cultural autonomy. He continued to hope for that all his life.
During the final throes of the ghetto uprising 50,000-60,000 Jews
were deported to the camps. Mr Edelman survived, escaping with a
handful of colleagues along tunnels barely two feet high, slimy water
up to his lips, to safety. Some 16 months later, in August 1944, he
took part in the larger Warsaw uprising, which was crushed after 63
days. It led to the razing of the city by the Nazis in a last act of
revenge.
After the war, Mr Edelman was one of the few Jewish Holocaust
survivors who stayed in Poland. He moved to Lodz, where he graduated in
medicine. Subsequent waves of anti-Semitism did not dislodge him: not
even one in 1968 when up to 20,000 Jews left, including his wife and
daughter. When he lost his job, he merely moved to another hospital.
Nothing else terrible happened to him, as he put it. In 1981, having
become an activist for the Solidarity movement, he was briefly interned
under martial law. He had known worse.
Mr Edelman could be brusque and difficult with colleagues. But it was
his quiet thoughtfulness that most irritated people. He refused to
express open hatred for the Nazis, and for years would not talk about
the ghetto uprising. As Bronislaw Geremek, another ghetto survivor,
said once, he was “a hero who didn’t like heroism”. Only in old age did
he start to speak out, not least to try to influence the present. In
1999 he publicly supported NATO strikes in the Balkans, arguing that a
policy of pacifist non-intervention only played into the hands of
dictators.
His expertise was in cardiology (uninhibited by his chain-smoking),
and the heart and its emotions seemed to intrigue him more as the years
passed. His last book, published this year, made a point of describing
the love affairs of the Warsaw ghetto: the “marvellous things” that
happened, and the ecstatic moments of happiness, when terrified and
lonely people were thrown together. Man was naturally a beast, but love
could overwhelm him, and love could also be taught. As for his general
devotion to medicine, that was easily explained. Someone who had known
so much death, he used to say, bore all the more responsibility for
life. “
– From The Economist print edition
All the heroes are dead, everyone else is just a
survivor. In life, Marek Edelman was a survivor. Now that he
has passed from life we may call him a hero, without fear of causing
him embarrassment. That is the way of all real heroes.
Today, as we work and play, and complain of our little
inconveniences, Islamic law, Sharia law, the law of Submission, is
planting seeds through much of Western Europe. Those faithfully
obeisant to the totalitarian screed of the megalomaniac who eliminated
and enslaved the Jews, Christians, and pagans of ancient Arabia are
exploding in population, and are increasingly insisting that the
societies they have emigrated into bend to their will, that the laws
and traditions of the Western world Submit to the will of the long-dead
tyrant they worship.
By the year 2050, the native population of Europe, most of whom have
put off having children so as not to interfere with their
self-indulgent lifestyles, will be in the throes of a demographic
collapse. It has already begun.
We can not look back upon history with any intellectual honesty and
not see what is coming. The Hindu genocide of Bangladesh. The Armenian
genocide. The Assyrian genocide. The Hebron massacre. And others, and
others, over and over again, all the way back to the beginning, back to
the unlucky caravans, back to the Banu Qainuqa, the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qurayza.
We will be old men and women by then, watching the young make heroes of
themselves. Watching those who taught the Nazis best, making heroes by
the millions.
“Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -already, you see,
the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a
thing Christianity! -then we should in all probability have been
converted to Mohammedanism (Islam), that cult which glorifies the
heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior
alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world.
Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.” -Adolf Hitler, August 28, 1942
.