This article was first published in the Hilary 2013 edition of the ISIS magazine (http://isismagazine.org.uk/)
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”
Hillel the Elder
“We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning. We fought simply not to allow the Germans 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.” Marek Edelman, who spoke these words, was, until his death in 2009, the last remaining survivor of the five-person command team that led the Warsaw Ghetto resistance against the Holocaust in the Spring of 1943.
The resistance of Edelman and his comrades did not start in 1940 when the Ghetto was formed, or even in 1942 after the Ghetto realised it was to be exterminated. 200-300,000 people, or around a third of the Ghetto’s population, were transported to Treblinka before resistance began. Active resistance and self-preservation were far from synonymous for most of the Ghetto. The inevitability of death and persecution did not automatically mean rebellion. Many Jews exhibited an almost complete lack of resistance. ‘Provocations’ were avoided, most abiding by the various Nazi decrees and orders, hoping somehow that by obliging they would save themselves and their families. Judenrats (Jewish councils that governed the Ghetto) and the Jewish police collaborated in deportations ordered by the Nazis, and were accorded certain privileges.
Raul Hilberg, the Jewish Holocaust scholar, explained this passivity in terms of the history of the Jews in Europe. It was the product of their inherited resignation to the inevitability of persecution. Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish council in the Warsaw Ghetto, committed suicide when the deportations began. He was not willing to aid the Nazis, but also not willing to call on the Ghetto to fight back. Edelman believed that Czerniakow had no right to act in the way he did. He continued to insist that he “should be reproached for making his death his own private business”. Instead, men “should die only having called the people into struggle.” Yitzhak ‘Antek’ Zukerman, part of the command group with Edelman, claimed that Czerniakow thought he was “going back to the age-old Jewish tradition of supplication when this idea had become obsolete… I can’t accuse him of anything; he was a man with clean hands. But he wasn’t the right man for his times.” For Edelman, Zukerman, and the large network of Jews in the socialist-Zionist youth— the Bund— redemption through passive supplication was not an option: they chose resistance. For Edelman, ‘‘to overcome our own terrifying apathy, to fight against our own acceptance of the generally prevailing feeling of panic… required truly gigantic efforts on our part.” The shift from passivity to rebellion meant not only a shift of consciousness among participants, but also a clean break from traditional Jewish organisations. The socialist-Zionist Emanuel Ringelblum—a leading figure in the Ghetto rising—called the Nazi-collaborating Jewish councils the “beastly face of the bourgeoisie”. “If there was a God,” he writes, “he would destroy this nest of wickedness, hypocrisy and exploitation.”
Eventually it was Edelman’s Jewish-Socialist Bund, the socialist-Zionist youth and the Communists who came together to form the ‘Jewish Fighting Organization’ (or ZOB, the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa). The fighting that erupted on April 13th 1943 involved thousands. Jurek Blones single-handedly held off two German SS divisions in fighting that took place around the Ghetto’s brush factories, and saved hundreds of lives. Tobcia Dawidowicz, though seriously wounded in the leg, successfully led her group to the sewers to help them escape. Not wanting to be a burden she stayed to defend their route out, incurring certain death. On the Germans finding a Jewish hideout, David Hochberg barricaded himself against the door, holding them up for 15 minutes to allow his comrades to escape. This was done with only a limited number of smuggled light weapons: handguns, homemade grenades and looted German rifles. Over 1200 German, Ukrainian and Latvian soldiers were killed, and much vital infrastructure was destroyed. But only a few of the fighters managed to make their escape through the sewers and tunnels. The rest were killed in action or captured and executed. Edelman, Antek, and a number of Jews, having escaped though the sewers in the last days of the Ghetto rising, also fought in 1944 as part of the the Warsaw citywide rising against the Nazis. The fight of the Poles and the Jews against the Nazis was part of the same struggle. After its defeat by the Wehrmacht, and Stalin’s cynical order to hold the Red army on the right-bank, Edelman had to hide in the ruins of Warsaw for months, living off scraps.
Edelman chose to stay in Poland after the war rather than flee to Israel or the US. He believed that what he and his comrades had fought for was a free and socialist Poland, not Zionism. He became one of Poland’s leading cardiologists, helping save thousands more lives. Even after most of his family had left the country, Edelman kept fighting as part of the pro-democracy movement in Poland in the 1970s. He was a member of Solidarnosc [Solidarity], the first trade union in a Warsaw Pact country that was independent of the party, and was interned during General Jarulzelski’s military coup in 1981.
Marek Edelman has always been a major problem for the self-image of the Israeli state. From the start, Edelman was critical of Israel and the threat the state posed to the Palestinians. In 2002 he sent an open letter to the Palestinian resistance leaders. Although he condemned the Palestinian use of suicide attacks, Edelman angered the Israeli state and press in the process by drawing comparisons between Jewish resistance in World War Two, and Palestinian resistance in the present day. Receiving the highest honor in Poland and the Legion d’honneur from France, Edelman received no recognition from Israel. To Edelman, Zionism was fatalism. He did not see the native Polish population as inherently hostile to the Jews—as a socialist and anti-Zionist, Edelman did not see anti-Semitism in Europe as inevitable. Instead of avoiding the fight against anti-Semitism by returning to a new state of Israel, Edelman advocated continuing the struggle in Europe.
“And if I am only for myself, what am I?” the rabbinical saying runs. The intellectual case for Zionism sometimes argues that those who oppose Israel are anti-Semitic. But Edelman, a proud Jew, affirmed human dignity and freedom over prejudice and sectarianism throughout his life, and fought the injustices of the Israeli state just as he fought Nazi anti-Semitism many years before.
Imagination Without Strings 