April 17: Marek Edelman, Fighter and Healer

Dr. Marek Edelman, the only one of five commanders of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to survive the conflagration, was awarded Poland’s highest medal, the Order of the White Eagle, on this date in 1998. Edelman was a young Bundist when he helped create the Jewish Fighting Organization. He escaped the burning ghetto through the sewers to the “Aryan” side of Poland with a small cadre of fighters. In 1944 he resumed battling the Nazis in the citywide Warsaw uprising. “Humanity had decided that dying with a gun is more beautiful than dying without a gun,” Edelman said years later. “So we went along with this decision.” After the war he remained in Poland, trained to be a cardiologist, and in 1971 introduced a new revolutionary method for the treatment of heart conditions that involves connecting a vein to an artery. In 1981, Edelman was jailed by the Polish regime for his activism in what would soon be known as the Solidarity labor movement. In 1989, he was elected to Parliament following his participation in the roundtable talks that brought communism to an end in Poland. A critic of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, he was denied awards and honors in the Jewish state, particularly after he wrote a letter in 2002 addressed “to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organizations ...” Edelman died in 2009 at age 90.

“Both you and the State of Israel have to radically change your attitude. . . . Life is one for eternity. Nobody has the right to mindlessly take it away. It is high time for everybody to understand that.” —Marek Edelman, letter to Palestinian fighters