Farewell to the last survivor

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Saturday, 3 October 2009, 12:58

photo by Mariusz Kubik

The world lost one of the heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance yesterday with the death of Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Marek was one of 200 Jews who battled German troops for a month in 1943 before the Ghetto was razed to the ground. It was the single largest revolt during the Holocaust.

The Warsaw Ghetto was set up by the Nazis in 1940, as part of a wider operation to round up Jews across occupied Eastern Europe. Between 300,000 and 400,000 people were crowded into the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of its kind in Europe.

In the summer of 1942 the Nazis began the forcible transportation of Jews from the Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp, in an operation codenamed Grossaktion Warschau.

In mid-January 1943, the Germans began their second wave of deportation, but this time it was met by an armed insurgency within the ghetto. While Jewish families hid in their "bunkers", Jewish Military League (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW) fighters, joined by elements of the Jewish Combat Organisation (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) engaged the Germans in two direct clashes. Hundreds of people took up small arms to fight the Nazis. They took control of much of the Ghetto, built defences and executed collaborators.

At its peak, in April 1943, the uprising involved 1,000 people. However, the Nazis struck back. Over 2,000 Nazi soldiers, including 821 Waffen SS troops, were sent in and within three days crushed the resistance.

The longest-lasting defence of a position took place around the ŻZW stronghold at Muranowski Square from 19 April to late April. In the afternoon of 19 April, two boys climbed up on the roof of the headquarters of the Jewish Resistance there and raised two flags: the red and white Polish flag and the blue and white banner of the ŻZW. These flags were easily seen from the Warsaw streets and remained atop the house for four entire days, despite German attempts to remove them.

The German commander of the assault, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, noted: “The matter of the flags was of great political and moral importance. It reminded hundreds of thousands of the Polish cause, it excited them and unified the population of the General Government but especially Jews and Poles. Flags and national colours are a means of combat exactly like a rapid-fire weapon, like thousands of such weapons. The Reichsführer [Himmler] bellowed into the phone: 'Stroop, you must at all costs bring down those two flags'."

The uprising was crushed and most of the ŻZW leadership were killed. The remaining fighters escaped the ghetto through the Muranowski tunnel, and relocated to the Michalin forest.