I was just about to take the Telegraph’s obituarist to task for a failure to mention the death of Marek Edelman, when I discovered that he or she was in fact quicker off the mark than me. I thus have no need to recount the life story of the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but I do think that an extraordinary human being deserves a eulogy as well as an obituary.
The month-long fight of the doomed Jewish community against overwhelming force was a great act of resistance, even though the chances of survival were no greater than for those who went to the camps. Edelman was one of very few survivors of the ghetto’s total destruction, and had to hide underground for the remaining two years of the war, quite an achievement in itself. After the war he became a cardiologist of high standing, though this did not save him from further anti-Semitic persecution under the Gomulka regime. Once more he bounced back, as a Solidarity activist from the very beginning of the movement. One senses that he came out of his dreadful wartime experiences with an intense commitment to human freedom and dignity.
Edelman was never a Zionist; before the war he had been a leader of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist organisation, and he remained firmly Polish. In old age, he was not afraid to speak up for the Palestinians when he felt that the Jewish self-defence for which he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression. He was thus a controversial figure in Israel; but whether or not one agreed with his views, it cannot be denied that he had earned the right to express them.
Marek Edelman, zikhrono livrakha!
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