On October 13, 2023 I posted the above message on my FaceBook page. I received this comment from Damon Silvers:
I once had lunch with Marek Edelman. He was the Labor Military Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A few hundred young Jews with pistols and gasoline bombs against the entire German army. And they held them off for a month.
The 50,000 starving people who remained after months of deportation and mass murder tried to hide in bunkers. The Germans decided they would rather not fight it out in the maze of buildings and tunnels and bunkers that the Jewish resistance had created and they simply ringed the ghetto with artillery and flattened it. Twenty-eight (28) fighters survived by crawling out through the sewers. Edelman was one. He escaped to the forests, joined the partisans there, and kept fighting.
In the 1980's, after a career as a heart surgeon, he became a labor activist again, in the Polish trade union movement Solidarnosc. A young Polish journalist asked him, "what does it mean to be a Jew?" He answered "To be a Jew is to be on the side of the weak."
In 2002, when Hamas was organizing suicide bombings in Israel and Israel was bombing apartment buildings in Gaza, Edelman wrote to the leadership of Hamas. Here is the full letter --
He wrote--
"To all leaders of Palestinian military, paramilitary and guerrilla organizations; to all soldiers of Palestinian militant groups:
My name is Marek Edelman. I am a former Deputy Commander of the Jewish Military Organization in Poland and one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the memorable year of 1943 we fought for the survival of the Jewish community in Warsaw. We fought for mere life, not for territory, nor for a national identity. We fought with hopeless determination, but our weapons were never directed against the defenseless civilian population, we never killed women and children. In the world devoid of principles and values, despite a constant danger of death, we did remain faithful to these values and moral principles.
We were isolated in our fight, and yet the powerful opposing army was not able to destroy these barely armed boys and girls. Our fight in Warsaw lasted several weeks, and later we fought in the partisan groups and in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
Yet nowhere in the world can urban guerrilla force bring a conclusive victory, but it cannot be defeated by well-armed armies either. And this war will not bring any resolution. Blood will be spilled in vain and lives will be lost on both sides."
He was trashed in the Israeli press for addressing the Palestinians armed groups respectfully, as people engaged in the same kind of struggle he had been. And yet he wrote to them to point out that NO CIRCUMSTANCE justified the mass murder of civilians.
To Marek Edelman "never again" meant "never again for anyone." It was a statement of human solidarity, not a license to commit mass murder of those you fear or wish to dispossess.
Marek Edelman remained in Poland all his life. He refused to leave the country of his birth and at his death the Polish military high command carried his coffin. I have read that the Israeli ambassador did not attend. I don't know if that is true or not but I do know that Marek Edelman would recognize what it means to cut 2 million people, most civilians and half under 18, off from food and water and bombard them with jets and artillery.
That is not how you be on the side of the weak.
And if you are young and Jewish and you don't feel right about what is being done in your name, but feel like you are all alone, you are not. Marek Edelman, the best of us, the bravest, he is with you.
-- Damon Silvers was formerly Policy Director of the AFL-CIO and is now a Visiting Professor of Practice at University College London and a Senior Advisor to labor unions in the US and the UK. The views expressed herein are his personal views alone.
(Never Say)
Lyrics by Hirsh Glick (1943)
Inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Friday's Labor Folklore
Saul Schniderman, Editor
Photos: Wikipedia
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