Marek Edelman, who has died aged 90, was the last surviving leader of the ill-fated Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. The revolt was the first and largest act of armed urban resistance to the Germans during the second world war. Remarkably, he then fought in the general Warsaw uprising of 1944, attempting to liberate the city from the Nazis, and, after the war, became a cardiologist. In later years he joined the Solidarity movement and, while his career as a politician in post-Soviet Poland never quite took off, he remain-ed sought after as a living symbol of wartime resistance, a hero to Jews as much as to Polish nationalists.
Born in Homel (now in Belarus), Edelman lost both parents before he reached his teens. Turning 20 when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, he found himself corralled into a ghetto in the heart of Warsaw. Hastily formed in 1940, at its height the enclave housed nearly half a million Jews. Initially the ghetto survived on its own resources, even running schools, clinics and theatres. Soon, though, its inhabitants were stripped of their civic rights, forced to wear the Star of David, barred from normal work or contact with others, starved and subjected to the cruel whims of Nazi agents.
Jews poured into the ghetto from all over Poland and the greater German Reich. Then, on 22 July 1942, Nazis began deporting people at a rate of 6,000 a day. Edelman knew from camp escapees that the promised “resettlement” meant extermination in Treblinka. Six days after the first deportations Mordechai Anielewicz, Edelman and others formed the Jewish Combat Organisation, known by its Polish acronym ŻOB.
ŻOB combined Zionists, communists and Jewish socialist Bundists. Edelman was an ardent follower of the latter group, which opposed Zionism and religious orthodoxy, and championed Jewish cultural autonomy in a secular Europe. Riven by ideological divisions and bereft of arms, ŻOB struggled to mobilise ghetto inmates. Nor could it prevent the deportation of 300,000 people over a two-month period. ŻOB’s first actions were assassinations of Judenrat (“Jewish council”) officials whom they accused of colluding with the Nazis.
Edelman landed a job as a hospital messenger and used his influence to recruit fighters. On 18 January 1943, ŻOB troops disguised themselves as deportees and opened fire on the Nazis, disrupting expulsions and spreading the legend of resistance to similar ghettos in Vilna, Białystok, Minsk, Łódź and Riga.
The Nazis received an even greater shock when on Passover Eve, 19 April 1943, they entered the ghetto in Warsaw and ordered the last wave of deportations to begin. They planned to liquidate the ghetto within three days; but suddenly were forced to retreat as seemingly every window in vacated blocks opened with gunfire. Ultimately it took the Germans three weeks to quell the uprising.
Although ŻOB’s 220 core fighters, men and women, lacked the tanks, artillery and aerial support that their 2,000 German foes employed, they made the professional soldiers pay dearly. “It was a defensive action,” Edelman later explained. “We fought simply to stop the Germans alone picking the time and place of our deaths.”
Edelman succeeded Anielewicz when the Zionist leader and ŻOB commander died in battle. Eventually the Germans used scorched-earth tactics to force out the resistance fighters. Edelman fled through the sewers. He then joined the Polish resistance Armia Krajowa (Home Army) in the Warsaw uprising that began in August the following year. This, too, ended in disaster after 63 days, not least because Stalin disapproved of the venture and ordered that the Red Army, by now on the outskirts of Nazi-held Warsaw, desist from offering the rebels help.
“We fought to protect the people in the ghetto, to extend their life by a day or two,” said Edelman. He knew that the ghetto defenders could never win. Yet as early as 1945, when he wrote one of the first published Holocaust memoirs, The Ghetto Fights, he rejected the view that Jews should feel shame for allegedly going to their deaths like lambs to the slaughter. The dignity of the martyrs, he insisted, was more difficult than those who took up arms.
Unlike most Polish Jewish survivors, Edelman chose to remain in Poland. After the war he married Alina Margolis, a nurse at the ghetto hospital, and enrolled at the Łódź school of medicine. As one of Poland’s leading cardiologists he pioneered innovative techniques.
He also grew weary of Soviet domination, and, in 1981, pledged himself to the Solidarity cause. Notwithstanding his reputation, the communist authorities interned him in a doomed bid to crush dissent. In 1983 he refused to serve on a committee to commemorate the Warsaw ghetto uprising in a country “where social life is dominated by humiliation and coercion”. He narrowly failed to get elected to the Polish senate in 1989.
Edelman was never shy of voicing strong opinions. He joined the anti-communist Workers’ Defence Committee after 1976 and would defend the record of Catholic Polish partisans when scholars accused Poles of conniving in the murder of Jews, yet with equal vigour he spoke out against a memorial to displaced Germans.
Alina left for Paris in 1968 and died in 2008. He is survived by their son and daughter.
• Marek Edelman, resistance fighter and cardiologist, born 19 September 1919; died 2 October 2009
