A Hero Has Passed

Marek Edelman died last Friday.

You don't know who he is? Neither do I; neither did I.

But Marek Edelman was a hero in a time when the world needed heroes; in a time when men and women were being horrific to other men and women simply because of their faith. Marek Edelman was Jew. And in 1939, he was just twenty years old when the Germans took over Poland and rounded up all the Jews in Warsaw. Then the Germans built a brick wall around the town and topped it with barbed wire and posted sentries at entry points. Not to keep people from going in, mind you, but to keep the Jews from coming out.

By 1942 there were over half a million Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, wearing the Star of David armbands and working to make uniforms for the German soldiers. But Marek watched with a keen eye as the numbers of Jews in the ghetto began to shrink. Every day, some 5,000 Jews were lured out of the ghetto onto waiting trains with the promise of fresh bread and an easier life at the end of the ride. They were told they were being taken to another town, another factory, where the work was easier.

But Marek Edelman knew different. He and a small band of friends knew that the Jews being pushed and pulled onto the train were being taken from the ghetto to concentration camps near Lublin, where they were to be murdered; shot, for being Jewish. Executed in gas chambers, for being Jewish.

Edelman and his friends wanted to fight back. they wanted to keep the Germans from taking their friends and families away, never to be seen again. But how could this small band of men and women, with no weapons, no training, save themselves and others?

He spent every day at the train station, watching people loaded like cattle into boxcars. Marek Edelman worked as a messenger for the ghetto hospital, so his presence on the platform was not unusual. But what he was able to do was bring documents from the hospital designating some people as too ill to make the journey, and he could pull them off the trains. Edelman found a way to save people that might help the Jewish Combat Organization that was forming in the ghetto.

Edelman had to be merciless. Although people begged him to pull their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, off the trains, Edelman had to choose those that might best help fight the Germans from inside the ghetto.

By September 8, 1942, according to German records, some 310,322 Jews had been shoved onto the trains and sent to the death camps and another 6,000 had been murdered inside the ghetto. The "liquidation"was suspended. With just 60,000 Jews left in the Warsaw Ghetto, the leaders of the Jewish Combat Organization, certain the Germans would restart the liquidation, organized for an armed resistance.

On April 19, 1943, in the early morning hours, German soldiers and their Ukrainian, Latvian and Polish henchmen marched through the ghetto to round up more people. But this time, surprisingly they were the ones who were attacked. The Jewish Combat organization had somehow managed to obtains guns and being firing on their tormentors. By midafternoon the Germans were forced to withdraw without having taken a single person.

The Warsaw Ghetto fighting continued for three weeks with just 220 ghetto fighters in twenty-two units; units that were poorly armed for battle, but battled on nonetheless. These 200 men and women, using only a few pistols and some homemade bombs, took on the 2000+ German soldiers who each day swept the city, looking for cargo for the trains.

Edelman, having lived in the neighborhood before it was turned into a walled ghetto, used that knowledge to find escape routes for units that were pinned down; he also buried many of his friends. Even years later, he had no idea how many Germans they had killed.

“Some say 200, some say 30. Does it make a difference?...After three weeks most of us were dead.”

At the end Marek Edelman 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, and lost, the battle to free their capital.

Once the war was over, Edelman stayed in Poland, becoming one of the country's leading heart specialists. And he stayed silent about what he had seen and done in the ghetto. Even when 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.

It wasn't until 1976 that Marek Edelman was able to speak about his life during the war. he argued against those who told stories of the resistance as being heavily armed, and that they had been many more than 200 who fought off the Germans. He also spoke quite eloquently about how dying for a cause is no more heroic than dying in submission to an overwhelmingly vicious adversary.

“These people went quietly and with dignity. 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.”