Marek Edelman (1921–2009)

Marek Edelman was born to a politically active Jewish family in Warsaw. Poland. His father Natan Feliks Edelman was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and his mother Cecylia Edelman was a member of the Jewish Labor Bund. His mother died when he was 14, and he was looked after by staff members at the hospital where she had worked.

As a child, Edelman was a member of Sotsyalistishe Kinder Farband (SKIF), the Jewish Labor Bund’s youth group. In 1939, after Nazi Germany invaded Poland at the start of World War II, Edelman was forced along with other Jews into the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, he helped found the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ŻOB (Jewish Fighters Organization. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19–May 16,1943, he was one of the three deputy commanders and led the revolt in the Brushmakers area, the site of one of the fiercest battles. The ZOB was outnumbered and outgunned but put up a passionate resistance. On May 8, ZOB chief commander Mordechaj Anielewicz, was surrounded by German forces and committed suicide, and Edelman stepped into his place.

He was among the last of the surviving fighters to finally escape the ghetto through the underground sewers and make their way to the "Aryan" side of Warsaw.

In the summer of 1944, he participated in the citywide Warsaw Uprising as a member of the Polish People’s Army. Afterwards, he and a group of other ŻOB fighters hid in the ruins of the city before being rescued and evacuated by other Polish partisans.
He was among the first leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to publish his memoirs. After the war, he studied at Łódź Medical School and became a well-known cardiologist.

He married Alina Margolis, another survivor of the ghetto, with whom he had two children. His wife and children emigrated to France in the wake of anti-Semitic actions of the Polish Communist authorities in 1968, but Dr. Edelman chose to stay in Łódź. He joined the Solidarity movement and, when martial law was declared in 1981, he was interned. In 1983, he refused to take part in the official celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising sponsored by the Communist government, and instead walked with friends to the street where Anielewicz’s bunker had been located.

After the fall of Communism in 1989-1990, he became a member of various centrist and liberal parties. He also wrote books documenting the history of wartime resistance against the Nazis in Poland, including his memoir, Getto walczy: Udzial Bundu w obronie getta warszawskiego, published in 1945 (1946 English translation, The Ghetto Fights, Warsaw 1941-43).