Thus spoke Marek Edelman in an interview with Polish television channel, TVN24, four years ago. On Tuesday of this week Edelman laid a wreath at the Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto in Warsaw. Looking on in the ceremony were Israeli President Shimon Peres, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Secretary of U.S. Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. Dr. Marek Edelman commanded, at 24 years, one of three resistance groups in the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begun in the spring of 1943. Tomorrow marks the 65th anniversary of that heroic and doomed struggle by young men and women, boys and girls as Edelman describes them, to extend their lives and that of other Ghetto residents if only for a few days. He is the last surviving member of the Uprising leadership.
After invading Poland in 1939, Adolph Hitler’s Nazis forcibly removed the 120,000 non-Jewish residents of an area in Warsaw to create a walled compound into which they forced an estimated 450,000 Jews. It was comprised of an area approximately 1.2 square miles or about 760 acres of habitable space. Food, space, warmth and health care were rationed or non-existent. Most residents were forced to work in horrid conditions in miserable factories to supply goods and materiel for the Third Reich. It is estimated there were 7.2 men, women and children per room housed in the Ghetto and the food ration consisted of 300 calories per day.
In the late summer of 1942, the Nazis deported 265,000 (killing another 35,000 in the process) Jewish residents to the prison camp, Treblinka, for extermination. Word of these mass murders made its way back to the Warsaw Ghetto and when the German Army decided in early 1943 to empty the remaining 60,000 Jews from the Ghetto, they decided to fight, and fight they did. Using old or smuggled pistols and rifles, Molotov cocktails and their considerable wits, these young, brave Jews managed to fend and sabotage the mighty German Army for weeks. In the end, little more than a thousand managed to escape through the sewers of Warsaw. The rest were murdered by the Nazis at the end of a barrel, by the endless torrent of fires set by the Germans or in a concentration camp.
Let me return, for a moment to the interview with Dr. Edelman. It was translated from Polish by and posted on the website of the remarkable Arthur Chrenkoff. Here are some excerpts of the reporter asking about the current war in Iraq:
Interviewer: So this war is one over some silly beliefs?
Edelman: Now, now. Who started killing people? Americans didn’t invade a wonderful democratic Iraq. There was a dictatorship there, torture, terror.
Interviewer: But there are people who say it’s not our business.
Edelman: And whose business is it? Every war with fascism is our business. In 1939 there were also many people who said that the war in Poland was not their war, and what happened? Great nations fell because politicians listened to those who were saying that it’s not worth dying for Gdansk [Danzig]. If only we’d intervened militarily after Hitler re-entered Rhineland we probably would not have had the war and the Holocaust.
and this:
Interviewer: But the incident nevertheless seriously damaged America’s standing. What to say to Polish people after the death of several more of our soldiers?
Edelman: But they died fighting for their freedom. How many thousands of people died in the Warsaw Uprising [in 1944]?
Interviewer: But those people then were fighting for their country.
Edelman: They were fighting for their world. Free and democratic. Just like those who died during the martial law [in Poland in 1981-3]. Did they die only for Poland? No. They died for the freedom of the whole Europe, for the freedom of all those enslaved behind the Iron Curtain.
Yes, they were fighting for their world. A free and democratic one.
Sheh-Hashem Yivarech Otcha, Dr. Edelman.
Filed Under Front Page · · · · 
Print This Post
··
Comments
15 Responses to ““Every War With Fascism Is Our Business””Search
Our Sponsors
Poll
Loading ...
Men like Dr. Edelman are true heroes.
I’m betting Dr. Edelman didn’t buy into the theory of “blowback”.
I linked up to the full interview. This is a truly great man who should be listened to. I was particularly impressed at how he refused to be led by the interviewer and answered every question from the point of view of standing up to world terror.
Thank you for posting this for us.
#2 hamous
Blowback is for cowards, those who cower under their beds when confronting evil.
Great interview - thanks for the link.
Thirty years ago, my fiancee was visiting Israel as a young college student. She and a local companion were walking down a beautiful shaded street in the scenic seaside city of Netanya. They watched a group of high school kids indulging in horseplay along the sidewalk. One of the kids threw a sandwich down on the sidewalk. A middle-aged, elegantly dressed woman had been walking behind the children and when she saw the sandwich, she knelt down and began to sob. The lady gently wrapped the food in a handkerchief, eventually gathered herself and walked away after saying a prayer.
My fiancee saw, as the woman knelt, the tattoo on the lady’s arm. Her Israeli friend told her the woman had been in the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinka and had nearly died from starvation. Somehow, she had escaped and survived, but the nightmares never left her.
We cannot forget what happened to these people, because there are those in the world who would put all of us into a ghetto of death, to force there will upon us. Bless these people whose will not to die, to fight, forged history to teach us.
History is so much more compelling and meaningful when it gets presented on a personal level. Its unfortunate that the majority of us were taught by memorizing timelines and names.
“All that is required for Evil to prevail, is for Good men to do nothing.”
— Edmund Burke
#6 Texpat, Thank you for that moving comment. For those of us old enough to have encountered concentration camp survivors in our daily lives, this incident brings back those encounters in stark, wrenching recollection. One can but assume that the dear lady who retrieved the sandwich went straight into the Lord’s outstretched arms when He called her home.
The nuns in my grade school and high school told the students what those numbers on arms meant and to have the utmost respect for those who bore them.
This is a horror that could easily be repeated. Especially with the selfishness and laziness prevalent in this world today. Do you think that your neighbors would rise up to fight anything like that? Or would they shut their doors and hope it doesn’t happen to them?
I believe that WW2 and all the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis were just a dress rehearsal for the end…..
WONDERFUL POST.
I love reading your stories, even when I have tears running down my face to blur my vision, and I still read on. Keep up the great work.
#13 emmekelley
Thanks.
Those that do not learn from history . . . .