I read this short book, first published in 1977 but now out of print, for the second time yesterday and it has lost nothing of its fascination. Although Hanna Krall chose a clumsy format, in which easy-to-flip-over passages of Marek Edelman's postwar career as a doctor, in which the focus is on saving life, alternate with an interview in which he describes the terrible times he lived through in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the focus is on death and mass murder and how he and a few people survived extinction when 400,000 other people did not, the book is a must-read for anybody interested in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In the last days of the Ghetto, Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of the ZOB, the Jewish Combat Organization. After the war he eventually decided to stay in Poland, where for a long time he was forgotten until his interview with Hanna Krall and subsequently becoming one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement. During and after WWII, and during the communist anti-Semitic actions of 1968, the memory of a Jewish presence in Poland was nearly eliminated and the great majority of the surviving remnant of Polish-born Jews wanted nothing more to do with the country. The divorce of Polish and Jewish memory obscured the centuries of common history up until 1939.

The interview with Edelman, by Hanna Krall, that appeared in a Polish literary journal in 1976, was, according to Timothy Garton Ash in the preface, the moment when Jewish and Polish memory began to become aware of each other again. In today's Poland, where the Jewish presence is still largely non-existent, the whole country seems now to be fascinated with all things Jewish. Krall's interview with Edelman was made into a book in 1997, and it has since sold many copies in Poland.

Here is an excerpt from Timothy Garton Ash's introduction to the 1986 American translation of the book:

"By the beginning of 1943 there was only one real question for those still left inside the Warsaw Ghetto: "How should we die?" Edelman and his friends, most of them barely turned twenty, discussed it: "The majority of us favored an uprising. After all, humanity had decided that dying with arms was more beautiful than without arms. Therefore we followed this consensus." But was humanity right?

"Well, one thing is certain," says Edelman now, "It's much easier to die shooting. Anyway, people have always thought that shooting is the highest form of heroism. So we were shooting."

But on the upper floor of his hospital a mother was giving birth just as the Germans cleared people out of the lower floors, in the "liquidation action". The doctor handed the newborn baby to the nurse, who immediately smothered it with a pillow. The nurse was nineteen years old. "The doctor didn't say a thing to her. Not a word. And this woman knew herself what she was supposed to do." Elsewhere on the upper floor there were several rooms with sick children. As the Germans were entering the ground floor, a woman doctor managed to poison them all. "You see, Hanna," says Edelman, "you don't understand anything. She saved those children from the gas chamber. People thought she was a hero."

So what, then, in that world turned upside down, was heroism? Or honor? Or dignity? And where was God? Edelman's answer to this last question is startling. God, he says, was on the side of the persecutors. A malicious God. Even today (in 1986), every time he has a heart patient on the operating table, he feels that he is competing with a malicious God to shield the flame of human life. "God is trying to blow out the candle and I'm quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention."

Marek Edelman died on October 2, 2009 in Warsaw ( )

NO OF PAGES: 124 SUB CAT I: Holocaust SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: A story of Marek Edelman, one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, yet chose to remain in Poland afterward. This book is an extended conversation between Edelman and one of the foremost journalists in Poland. Translated from Polish.NOTES: SUBTITLE: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

A story of Marek Edelman, one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, yet chose to remain in Poland afterward. This book is an extended conversation between Edelman and one of the foremost journalists in Poland. Translated from Polish.