New York, American Representation Of The General Jewish Workers' Union Of Poland, 1946. Item #42871

1st English Language Edition. Softcover, 76 pages, 8vo, 23 cm. Published the year after the end of the war by the longest surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising--as well as a participant in the Polish Solidarity labor movement and a lifelong anti-Zionist and supporter of Palestinian rights. With the ownership stamp of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Scholar Philip Friedman, as well as that of the YIVO, where he was based at the end of his career, on the title page.
"Translation of a pamphlet published in Warsaw, Poland, in 1945 by the Central Committee of the 'Bund. '"
Marek Edelman (1919/1922 -2009) “was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Long before his death, he was the last one to stay in the Polish People's Republic despite harassment by the Communist authorities.
Before World War II, he was a General Jewish Labour Bund activist. During the war he co-founded the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB). He took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, becoming its leader after the death of Mordechaj Anielewicz. He also took part in the citywide 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
After the war, Edelman remained in Poland and became a noted cardiologist. From the 1970s, he collaborated with the Workers' Defence Committee and other political groups opposing Poland's Communist regime. As a member of Solidarity, he took part in the Polish Round Table Talks of 1989. Following the peaceful transformations of 1989, he was a member of various centrist and liberal parties. He also wrote books documenting the history of wartime resistance against the Nazi German occupation of Poland….
His father, Natan Feliks Edelman (died 1924), was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (his father's brothers, also Socialist Revolutionaries, were executed by the Bolsheviks). His mother, Cecylia Edelman (died 1934), a hospital secretary, was an activist member of the General Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish socialist workers' party….
As a child, Edelman was a member of Sotsyalistishe Kinder Farband (SKIF), the Jewish Labour Bund's youth group for children.
In 1939 he joined and became a leader in Tsukunft (Future), the Bund's youth organization for older children. During the war, he restarted these organizations inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
The defiance and organization of the Bund made their mark on Edelman. As conditions for Jews worsened in the 1930s, Bund members preferred to challenge the mounting antisemitism rather than flee. Edelman later said: ‘The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They believed that Poland was their country, and they fought for a just, socialist Poland in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities' rights would be guaranteed.’
In 1939, after the German invasion of Poland Edelman found himself confined—along with the other Jews of Warsaw—to the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, as a Bund youth leader he co-founded the underground Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ZOB). In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz, Edelman was one of the three sub-commanders and then became the leader after the death of Anielewicz.
When the Germans had stopped their campaign of transporting Ghetto residents to Treblinka extermination camp in September 1942, only 60,000 had remained. Edelman and his comrades, however, had had little doubt that the Germans would resume the job. The Jewish Combat Organisation had begun acquiring weapons and organizing into units that would make up for lack of training and munitions with an intimate knowledge of the ghetto, both above ground and in its sewer network.
The Germans resumed their attack on the ghetto on April 19, 1943, with over 2,000 troops. According to Edelman: ‘The Germans weren't expecting resistance of any kind, let alone that we would take up arms.’ The outnumbered and outgunned Ghetto fighters' strong resistance forced the German troops to withdraw. It was on the second day of the Uprising, while protecting the retreat of Edelman and other comrades, that another prominent insurgent and Bundist, Michal Klepfisz, was killed.
Over the next three weeks, the fighting was intense. The Jewish fighters killed and wounded scores of Nazis but inevitably sustained far greater losses. On May 8, ZOB's commander, Mordechaj Anielewicz, was surrounded by German forces. Anielewicz died during the final assault on the ZOB's bunker on 8 May 1943, which meant that now Edelman was in charge. ‘After three weeks,’ he recalled, ‘most of us were dead.’
The Germans proceeded to flush out the few remaining fighters by burning down the ghetto - Edelman always insisted, ‘We were beaten by the flames, not the Germans.’ At that juncture, couriers from the Polish underground outside the ghetto came through the sewers that still linked it with the rest of Warsaw.
On the morning of May 10, Edelman and his few remaining comrades escaped through the sewers and made their way to the non-Ghetto part of Warsaw to find safety among their Polish compatriots. At this point the Uprising was over and the fate of those fighters who had remained behind is unknown….
’We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning. We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka.... Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head.... It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber.’
In mid-1944, Edelman, as a member of the leftist Armia Ludowa (People's Army), participated in the citywide Warsaw Uprising, when Polish forces rose up against the Germans before being forced to surrender after 63 days of fighting.After the capitulation, Edelman together with a group of other ZOB fighters, hid out in the ruins of the city as one of the Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw before being rescued and evacuated with the help from the centrist Armia Krajowa (Home Army)....
Edelman was a lifelong anti-Zionist….He remained firmly Polish, refusing to emigrate to Israel. In his old age, Edelman spoke in defence of the Palestinian people, as he felt that the Jewish self-defence for which he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression.
Filip (Philip) Friedman (1901-1960) was a “Polish-Jewish historian….After the fall of Poland at the beginning of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Lwów, Friedman went into hiding on the ‘Aryan side’ of the city i.e. outside the Lwów Ghetto. He survived the war but lost his wife and daughter.
After the liberation of Poland, he taught Jewish History at the University of Lódz, and also served as the director of the Central Jewish Historical Committee (created by the Central Committee of Jews in Poland), whose mission was to gather data on Nazi war crimes. He collected testimonies and documentation and also supervised the publication of a number of pioneering studies, including his own on the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
This work, To jest Oswiecim, was published in Warsaw in 1945 and appeared in an abridged English version as This Is Oswiecim (1946). He also continued to publish historical works, including several monographs on various destroyed Jewish communities, including Lwów, Bialystok and Chelmno and about Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the Nazi occupation. At the same time, he taught Jewish history at the University of Lódz (1945-1946) and was a member of the Polish State Commission to Investigate German War Crimes in Auschwitz and Chelmno.[citation needed]
After testifying at the Nuremberg trials, Friedman and his new wife decided not to return to Poland. For two years he directed the educational department of the Joint Distribution Committee in Allied-occupied Germany. He also helped the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris to set up its documentary collection. He….was the Research Director of the YIVO-Yad Vashem Joint Documentary Project, a bibliographical series on the Holocaust, from 1954 to 1960.
and a volume describing Christian rescue, Their Brothers' Keepers (1957). A volume of his essays devoted to Holocaust topics, Pathways to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (1980), was edited posthumously by his wife, Dr. Ada Eber-Friedman” (Wikipedia).
SUBJECT (S) : World War, 1939-1945 -- Poland -- Warsaw. Jews -- Poland -- Warsaw. Some sunning and touch of edgewear to cover. Very Good Condition. Excellent copy with important association (Holo2-18-24A).