Reader, friend, and Tribe member brad_in_ma sent me some sad news yesterday:
Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90
Marek Edelman was part of a small handful of Jews trapped in the Warsaw ghetto who saw the horrors of the Nazi war machine first hand and decided to fight rather than roll over and die. Armed with a small number of homemade bombs, pistols, and grenades, some 200 fighters held the highly trained Nazi forces at bay for three weeks. Dr. Edelman would use this knowledge to hold out for two months in later fighting in another uprising.Marek Edelman, a cardiologist who was the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Germans, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 90.
A friend, Paula Sawicka, told The Associated Press that Dr. Edelman had died among friends, among his close people,” at her home, where he had lived for the past two years. For many years he lived in Lodz, Poland’s second largest city.
To make that decision - to fight rather than meekly submit to death - even though the odds were long and eventual death all but certain... That's heroism. That's dying on one's feet rather than living on one's knees. It's the same mentality that led a small group of folks to reclaim flight 93 before the terrorists could turn it into a fourth missile against targets on the ground. Never give up. Never surrender. Never stop raising your clenched fist in defiance to evil.
Requiescat in pace, Dr. Edelman. The world mourns the loss of a fighter, a hero, a leader.
That is all.
3 comments:
There is a display of weapons used in the Warsaw ghetto uprising at the Yad Vashem (or there was, 33 years ago when I visited it). I'll have to scan it and send it to you. Seems it would be an appropriate addition to this post.
Er... I'll scan in the PICTURE I took of it, that is.
Dude! Did you stop reading my blog? ;)
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