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Still Standing Guard
The Warsaw Voice
17 April 2003
Marek Edelman, the last surviving
leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, talks to Jerzy
Sławomir Mac.
When the uprising started April
19, 1943, only one-10th of the initial 40,000 residents
were still living in the ghetto. Only 200 had weapons.
Why did you fight?
We wanted to show that the Jews,
who were considered subhuman, were people like any other.
In order to be a real man during the war, you had to
shoot at the enemy. So we started to shoot. There was
no talk about victory or avoiding extermination. It
could only be about surviving with dignity, with arms
in hand, for a few more days.
Your 200-strong group of poorly armed fighters battled
the Germans longer than France, nearly three weeks,
but few survived the uprising. Several hundred people
from the insubordinate Warsaw ghetto survived, while
in the Łódź ghetto, which fought for survival through
hard work until the fall of 1944, several thousand survived.
Which choice was right?
Those from the Łódź ghetto who avoided death, survived
in the extermination camps where they were transported,
but the Nazis didn't have enough time to kill them all.
Rumkowski, the head of the Łódź ghetto, in order to
live a few days longer, sent children, old people and
women to their death. What he did was highly immoral.
People should not have helped the Nazis in extermination.
Can the Warsaw ghetto uprising be evaluated in terms
of success or failure, like other Polish uprisings?
I don't know whether we can talk about any "uprising."
Uprisings are planned, prepared; it is known when they
will start. There was no talking done in this case.
We began shooting in a desperate and hopeless defense.
Did that have any importance? It did. We showed that
you could fight against the occupier. This was the first
brick yanked out of the wall of Nazism in Poland. After
our struggle, there were rebellions in the Treblinka
and Sobibór extermination camps, in the ghettos of Białystok
and Częstochowa. We shook the conscience of the Polish
underground army and international opinion. We started
a process that later led to formulation of the idea
of the fight for human dignity and rights included in
the UN Charter which later U.S. President Jimmy Carter
introduced into the canon of fundamental principles
of American policy. In Poland, Solidarity called for
that human dignity in 1980.
During the uprising, the Polish flag was waving over
the ghetto for the first time since September 1939,
but Poland did not recognize your fight as its own.
Next to the wall, on the Aryan side, there was a carousel
described by poet Czesław Miłosz in his poem "Campo
di fiore" and ghetto survivors were handed over
by Poles to Germans, or were killed-also after the war.
That is why almost all of your brothers in arms who
survived have left Poland. Even your wife and your children
left. You stayed. Why?
Someone had to stay. It would take a long time to explain
why and I don't want to talk about that. No one will
understand. Someone called me the "Guardian of
Memory." Let it be so.
In communist Poland you had to carry weapons with you
for safety because you were persecuted by the authorities
and were fired from several jobs. During martial law
from 1981-1983, General Wojciech Jaruzelski put you
in prison together with other Solidarity leaders and
in free Poland, after 1989, swastikas were painted on
your door and you received death threats.
That is true.
What do you feel as a man who has miraculously survived
the greatest hell of the 20th century, only to experience
all these things?
Contempt for those people.
Can you live in contempt for people around you for
many years without any positive feelings?
I believed there would be a better world eventually
but perhaps I will not live to see it. Some generations
have to die. Moses waited for 40 years. I think this
requires more time. Children of slaves are also slaves
in their spirit.
As the "Guardian of Memory" you stress the
importance of remembering the Holocaust which-as you
have written many times-was not only a Jewish and German
issue, but a European problem and a failure of its civilization.
Why hasn't contemporary man learned from that failure
only to keep repeating the same behavior that leads
to different forms of genocide?
Because man is poorly made. It's easier for him to
hate than to love.
Are intolerance and xenophobia intrinsic elements of
human nature just like sex drive?
This is not genetic. This is an issue of upbringing.
Intolerance and xenophobia are handed down from generation
to generation in the process of shaping personality.
Also by politicians. So, it is the task of politicians
to shape that process in a different way.
But politicians build their campaigns and collect votes
not on pronouncing "love thy neighbor," but
on using slogans of fighting one's opponent-that is,
on hate.
There are different political programs. Leon Blum's
government in postwar France built a program according
to the slogan "let's love each other." It
was similar to the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki
in Poland.
Both governments survived only several months, and
the only Polish party guided by the principles of decency,
the Freedom Union (UW)-your party-was swept from the
political stage by extremist, aggressive, populist groups.
Not only in Poland but also in the Czech Republic and
Hungary. Each revolution devours its children [attributed
to Georg Buchner-ed.] and unscrupulous people with strong
elbows gain high positions. Bad is always stronger than
good. Good is a delicate flower that requires constant
care.
In politics, there is no time for this, so is it a
hopeless case?
Not necessarily. You can say a lot of bad things about
America, like its eternal pursuit of money and so on,
but its politics is ruled by the principles of morality.
Why did Americans fight for Yugoslavia? After all, there
is no oil or any other resource there. Why are they
fighting for Iraq? After all, this war costs them more
than the potential profits from oil, even over the next
50 years. Why did Australia fight in East Timor and
now in Iraq? It's about fundamental principles, about
morality and human rights. Politics without morality
is doomed to failure.
In 2000 in the European Parliament you talked about
the "meanness of the West" whose attitude
to the war in Yugoslavia resembled the allies' passiveness
toward the extermination of Jews. Now in an interview
you called Western European pacifists "excited
cretins," saying that you cannot count on or trust
the French, Germans, or Russians. Does your daughter,
who lives in France, agree?
Of course. My son does too [Marek Edelman, cinematographer
who shot Roman Polanski's The Pianist-ed.]. In France
and in Germany opinions are also divided but pacifist
moods are fueled by politicians and the media. It's
not true that all of France backs President Jacques
Chirac, who won so decisively in the last presidential
elections only because France voted against Jean Marie
Le Pen.
I don't understand Gerhard Schröder but am amazed by
the stand of Joschka Fischer, who in his youth, in 1968,
fought for human dignity and rights and now stands aside
and talks about the necessity of peace. How can you
force a dictator like Saddam Hussein to pacifism and
persuade him to resign? With words? I don't know of
any such case in history. A dictator either loses in
a war-he flees or is killed-or resigns only when he
can see that he has already lost and that surrender
is the only way to survive. Pinochet resigned to save
his skin, not because he became a democrat.
In 1997 you met Yasser Arafat, a man accused of terrorism
and Hussein's ally, who said that he was fighting for
the same values for which you were fighting in the ghetto.
Was that a blunder or a provocation?
Both, I think.
But later you talked about him warmly.
I only said that he was an intelligent man, because
he is. The so-called Palestinian issue is not really
a Palestinian issue at all. This is an issue for rich
Arab oil states that finance and fuel the Palestinian
movement. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Oman are
totalitarian, backward, even fascist states. It's in
their interest to maintain unrest in the Middle East,
because oil is expensive. Palestinians are only a tool
in their hands. Hussein gave $10,000 to the family of
each suicide bomber and poisoned thousands of Kurds
with gas. This is fascist mentality. There is no difference
between him and Hitler.
Hussein has already lost, but there is no indication
that other Arab countries will be willing to give up
oil terror and change their systems from totalitarian
to democratic.
I am convinced that this will happen. I don't know
when, but it will. Iraq will activate a domino effect.
In 1945, were there any indications that Japan, a despicable
militarist country, would become a democracy? The same
can be said of Germany, where millions of people shouted
"Heil Hitler!" and when Hitler was finished,
the Nazis were too. The Italians hanged Il Duce themselves.
If you can teach democracy to a German, Italian, or
Japanese, it will also be possible to teach it to an
Arab. Because this is good for man. For each man.
Marek Edelman:
born 1921, is a heart surgeon. Before World War II,
he was an activist of the Jewish Workers' Union, Bund,
that called for cultural and social autonomy of Jews
in Diaspora countries. In the Warsaw ghetto, he co-founded
and became one of the commanders of the Jewish Military
Organization that started the 1943 uprising. After the
defeat he escaped through the sewers and fought in the
1944 Warsaw Uprising. After the war he moved to Łódź.
He was active in anti-communist opposition and in 1975
signed a letter of protest against changes in the Constitution
that would have created an eternal alliance between
Poland and the Soviet Union. A member of Solidarity
and the Freedom Union, the party of the first noncommunist
prime minister of postwar Poland, Tadeusz Mazowiecki.
He has written the books Getto walczy (The Ghetto Fights
On) and Zawał serca (Heart Attack).
For the Fallen
The Monument to Heroes of the Ghetto was unveiled amidst
the ruins of Warsaw April 19, 1948, the fifth anniversary
of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This grand
monument, the work of Natan Rapaport, today attracts
many visitors, especially the young. The western side
of the monument features a sculpture symbolizing struggle,
the eastern-a bas-relief representing the martyrdom
of the Jews. The Swedish stone lining used in the monument's
construction comes from an unfulfilled German order:
the material was to be used in monuments to Third Reich
victories and was purchased after the war by Jewish
organizations.
A still older monument, dating back to 1946, the work
of architect Leon Marek Suzin, is located nearby. Its
red sandstone plate, resembling a manhole cover, has
an inscription in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew: "To
those who fell in an unparalleled struggle for dignity
and freedom of the Jewish nation, for a free Poland,
for liberation of man. Polish Jews."
Both monuments are situated in the prewar center of
the Jewish district, at the junction of the former Dzika
and Gęsia streets. Ludwik Zamenhof, the physician who
won worldwide fame as the creator of the international
language Esperanto, lived near this place in the early
1900s. The former Dzika Street has been Zamenhof Street
since 1930. Gęsia Street was a major street of the former
Jewish district; funeral processions used to pass along
here to the Jewish cemetery at the street's western
end. After the war, a new street running along the former
Gęsia Street was named after Mordechaj Anielewicz, leader
of the Uprising in 1943.
The heroes of the ghetto were the first Varsovians
honored with a monument by their city after the war.
M.M.
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