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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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 Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 8:01 am Post subject: Marek Edelman, Warsaw Ghetto Cmdr & last survivor, dies |
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Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90
From the NY Times:
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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.
Dr. Edelman was one of a handful of young leaders who in April 1943 led a force of 220 poorly armed young Jewish men and women in a desperate and hopeless struggle against the Germans.
He was 20 when the Germans overran Poland in 1939, and in the months that followed he watched as they turned his Warsaw neighborhood into a ghetto, cutting it off from the rest of the city with brick walls, barbed wire and armed sentries. By early 1942, as many as 500,000 Jews had been herded into the area.
In worsening conditions of hunger and brutality, the ghetto residents, wearing the obligatory Star of David armbands, were forced to sew military uniforms and produce other war materials.
Then, starting on July 22, 1942, the ghetto population began to shrink ominously. Each day, armed Germans and the Ukrainians serving with them prodded and wedged 5,000 to 6,000 Jews into long trains, which departed from the Umschlagplatz, a square at the southern end of the ghetto. At times they lured people onto the trains with loaves of brown bread. The Germans said the trains were going to factories where work conditions were better.
Marek Edelman and the young people with whom he had forged clandestine links knew that such claims were lies and that the human cargos were in fact being taken to camps near Lublin, where they were shot, put into boxcars with quicklime or forced into gas chambers. He and his colleagues talked about armed resistance but had no weapons at the time.
He spent every day at the Umschlagplatz watching as trains were loaded and sent off. He was there ostensibly in his official capacity as a messenger for the ghetto hospital, carrying documents in his pocket that enabled him to pull people off the trains by designating them too ill to travel. Since the Germans held to the fiction that the passengers were being sent to better surroundings, they made a show of holding back the sick. In fact, young Marek used the passes to save people who would be useful to the Jewish Combat Organization, then being formed. |
The Times' full obituary is available at the link, but I guess it is not surprising that they do not even mention the fact that he always refused to emigrate to either the US or Israel, and that he remained a staunch anti-Zionist throughout his life.
In fact,
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| To this day Edelman blames the traditional Jewish leadership for allowing the Ghetto passively to accept their fate. |
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In the summer of 2002, Edelman, still going strong, intervened in Israel�s show trial of the now jailed Palestinian resistance leader, Marwan Barghouti.
He wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian movement, and though he criticised the suicide bombers, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press. Edelman had always resented Israel�s claim on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a symbol of Jewish liberation.
Now he said this belonged to the Palestinians. He addressed his letter to �commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations � to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations�.
The old Jewish anti-Nazi Ghetto fighter had placed his immense moral authority at the disposal of the only side he deemed worthy of it. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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rocket_scientist
Joined: 23 Nov 2009
Location: Prague
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| Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2010 2:22 pm Post subject: |
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Hi bacaspar
No one responded to your post becuase we are all tired of holocaust stories and associated psych ops
If the Ukrainians helped, it was for revenge against the Jews who murdered 8 million Ukrainians during the winter of 1932 in the Holodomor
Your post intentionally mixes Germans with Nazis so I did that with my post
Its pretty inflammatory
r_s |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2010 8:01 pm Post subject: |
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| rocket_scientist wrote: |
Hi bacaspar
No one responded to your post becuase we are all tired of holocaust stories and associated psych ops |
Hi rocket_s
When did you become board spokesman? Anyway, I wasn't aware that holocaust stories were "psych ops" although they sure can do a number on one's mind.
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| If the Ukrainians helped, it was for revenge against the Jews who murdered 8 million Ukrainians during the winter of 1932 in the Holodomor |
What are you talking about here?
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| Your post intentionally mixes Germans with Nazis so I did that with my post |
The fact is it was Germany, not simply "the Nazis," who declared war. Soldiers who committed atrocities were soldiers in the German , not Nazi, army. So Nazis were not mixed among Germans? Sorry, but you need to explain this.
That is like saying if we were talking about American soldiers in the Iraq war, that I am mixing Americans with Republicans because the war was started under their administration. 
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| Its pretty inflammatory |
Your post sure is. |
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