One of the most troubling questions arising from the Holocaust is that of why the Jews did not resist more. That is not intended as an attempt to blame the victim, but more a desire to understand how so many people could fail to act in an effort to save their own lives and those of their children in the face of so great an evil.

But it is to be eternally remembered that some Jews did stand and fight – in particular the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. And last week the world lost the last surviving leader of that heroic uprising against the murderous Nazi thugs.

Marek Edelman, who died on October 2, probably aged 90, was the last surviving leader of the armed Jewish revolt against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto; having commanded the heroic but doomed struggle in April 1943 he was one of a tiny number of fighters to escape with his life, eventually taking part in the equally ill-fated citywide Uprising the following year.

Edelman was just 20 when the Nazis invaded Warsaw. By November 1940 the invading army had cut off his district from the rest of the city with walls and wire. As the anti-Semitic directives of the occupation were put into force, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were forced into the ghetto, inflating its population to almost half a million.

Conditions became intolerable and in the course of 1941 the ghetto population was decimated by disease and malnutrition. Early the following year however, with Hitler's decision to implement the Endlösung, or final solution to "the Jewish question", plans were put in place to liquidate the ghetto and its remaining occupants entirely.

From July 1942, Jews were herded through the ghetto to an umschlagplatz (or departure point), a square at its southern end, and on to trains 6,000 at a time. From there, the destinations were death camps. Two months after the ghetto clearance had begun, more than 300,000 Jews had been transported to the gas chambers. But even as Jews were encouraged on to the trains to Treblinka with promises of better conditions at their destination, Edelman and a small band of others were laying down plans for armed resistance.

And resist they did, fighting for three heroic weeks in 1943 against the Nazis who came to exterminate them Some escaped, while those who remained behind died in a last ditch resistance against the great evil of the age.

And Edelman provided a perspective on the question raised at the beginning of the post that to me is quite profound.

After the war, the 20 days of fighting in the ghetto were sometimes described as a rare example of violent Jewish resistance to the horrors inflicted on them by the Nazis. But Edelman always refused to make any distinction of character between those in the ghetto who fought and those who boarded the trains to the camps. Both groups, he said, were simply dealing with an inevitable death in the best way they could.

"We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning," he recalled. "We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka." Indeed, Edelman added, far from going passively, those who went steadfastly to Treblinika had shown the ultimate courage. "Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber."

It is a perspective that I had never considered before reading this brave man’s obituary. I do not know that I agree with it. Still, I honor it as I honor the man who so many years ago led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – and I am sure that his entry into the presence of God was one which saw him greatly honored as well.

Posted by: Greg at 09:51 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 716 words, total size 4 kb.