On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Yahoo News was cited
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091002/ap_on_re_eu/eu_poland_edelman_obit
The NYT obit today is remarkably good for them, and gets especially interesting about halfway in. His view is entirely the opposite of the usual heroic ideas about the uprisings:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/world/europe/03edelman.html
<snip>
The fighting continued for three weeks. On one side were 220 ghetto
fighters, hungry and relatively untrained youths deployed in 22 units.
Each unit had a pistol, five grenades and five homemade bottle bombs.
They also had two mines and one submachine gun.
Ranged against them, on a daily average, were 36 German officers and
2,054 others with an arsenal that included 82 machine guns, 135
submachine guns and 1,358 rifles along with armored vehicles, artillery
and air power used to set the ghetto ablaze.
Dr. Edelman buried his fallen comrades and used his knowledge of the
neighborhood, where he had grown up, to find escape routes for units
that were pinned down. Many years later he would say that no one ever
established how many Germans they had killed: "Some say 200, some say
30. Does it make a difference?"
"After three weeks," he recalled, "most of us were dead."
At the end he found a way out of an encircled position, leading 50
others with him.
Eventually, he took part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, when for 63
days Poles fought valorously but unsuccessfully to liberate their
capital from the Germans.
Once the war ended, he threw himself into his medical studies and
became a doctor in Lodz. For 30 years he kept his memories and thoughts
about what happened to himself, concentrating on his medical work and
becoming one of Poland's leading heart specialists and the author of a
much-used textbook on the treatment of heart attacks.
Even after Poland's anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, when he was demoted
at the hospital and most of the remaining Jews in Poland, including his
wife and two children, emigrated, Dr. Edelman stayed. He was unwilling,
and perhaps unable, to tear himself away from the place where East
European Jewry had once thrived and then perished as he watched.
Then, in 1976, he suddenly spoke out, telling Hanna Krall, a Polish
writer of Jewish origin, what he had so carefully remembered. The
recollections were stark and surprising. He challenged those who
claimed that there had been many more than 220 ghetto fighters. Most
provocatively, he insisted that it was not more meaningful or heroic to
die with a gun in one's hands than to perish in apparent submission to
an overwhelming and invincible evil.
"These people went quietly and with dignity," he told Mrs. Krall,
speaking of the millions killed in the Nazi gas chambers. "It is an
awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It is
definitely more difficult than to go out shooting."
After the book appeared, Dr. Edelman was often sought out by visitors
from around the world, whose questions he would sometimes wave aside
gruffly, saying that people who had not been there could never
understand the choices made in the ghetto.
He would cite the example of a nurse in the ghetto hospital who he said
was greatly admired, and deservedly so, for smothering newborn children
to save their mothers the inevitable pain that would come when the
babies starved to death.
He would dispute the use of the word "uprising," saying that it
normally implied some slight prospect of victory. In the ghetto, he
said, there was no such prospect.
"It was a defensive action," he would say, or, "We fought simply not to
allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths."
<snip>
The Polish title of the book Mrs. Krall wrote about Dr. Edelman could
be translated as "To Finish Before God," with the implicit idea being
one of racing with God. But when the English translation was published
by Henry Holt and Company, it was called "Shielding the Flame," a
reference to a passage in which Dr. Edelman explained his philosophy
both in the ghetto and later as a doctor.
"God is trying to blow out the candle, and I'm quickly trying to shield
the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention," he said. "To
keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than
he would wish."
<end obit>
Michael