Page 46 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana. Edelman
P. 46
Indeed, Marek Edelman has spent his entire life fighting
for the remembrance of the killed and fallen. “I’ve
read many recollections that described people hur-
ried to wagons as screaming and crying. It’s not true.
There was a dead silence at Umschlagplatz. A dead-
ly quietness. That was dignity. Dignity that filled the
Germans with fear,” he recalled.
In autumn of 1942, youth organizations Bund, Dror,
Hashomer Hatzair, Akiba and PPR formed the Jewish
Combat Organization (pol. Żydowska Organizacja
Bojowa, ŻOB). Marek Edelman became a deputy
commander in a five-person command of the organ-
ization.
On April 19, 1943, when German Waffen-SS combat
units entered the ghetto area to relocate the remain-
ing residents of the closed district to Treblinka, the
uprising began. The Jews showed armed resistance
and forced the Germans to fall back; they already
knew where the transports were heading.
“Can you even call it an uprising? The point was to
not get butchered when they came for us. It was just
a matter of choice of how to die,” Edelman said in one
of his post-war accounts.
The ghetto fights lasted for about two weeks. Edelman
commanded five ŻOB groups in the area of the so-
Marek Edelman in the ruins of a tenement apartment, called “brush shop”. After a couple days, Germans
under which Michał Klepfisz was buried, 1945. decided to eradicate the ghetto one house at
Photo from the collection
of Lodzia [Roza] and Irena Klepfisz a time, burning and demolishing entire districts. On
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