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The Ghetto Fights: Warsaw 1941 - 43
Appendices--Reports of the ghetto uprising sent out of Poland by Bund organisations.
This remarkable memoir by Marek Edelman, member of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance five-person command team, tells first-hand of the struggle of Warsaw's Jews against the Nazis in the spring of 1943.
This remarkable memoir by Marek Edelman, member of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance five-person command team, tells first-hand of the struggle of Warsaw's Jews against the Nazis in the spring of 1943.
119 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 19, 2020
Everybody should read about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, "one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people" according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The fact that a few Jewish resistance fighters with almost no weapons managed to resist the Nazis from the 19th April to the 16th May has something of incredible. I'm glad that Marek Edelman lived to tell their story. Please notice that this is his first report, written as Edelman was only 26 years old, a kind of report from the battlefield. He will write more about his experience later.
January 5, 2018
I feel like my reading this book was heavily by my identity, as an ethnically Catholic Polish-American, for whom the Holocaust was always just a thing I learned about in school as having happened to Other People, but which unavoidably relates to what I think of on some level as "my people," even though my family crossed the Atlantic before the First World War.
On a more fundamental level, Edelman's narrative was a powerful account of how people react to hopeless conditions, and how both fighting back and not doing so can be dignified responses to doom. But I couldn't help repeatedly placing myself in context with the events: feeling my heart swell a little as a socialist at the description of the ZOB members singing the Internationale on May Day in the knowledge that other people were doing so across the world. And feeling a bit of personalized guilt at every mention of ways the "Aryan" Poles might have done more to help them.
In any case, I am glad that I did read this, and I think that many of my friends would find it a powerful and worthwhile read as well.
On a more fundamental level, Edelman's narrative was a powerful account of how people react to hopeless conditions, and how both fighting back and not doing so can be dignified responses to doom. But I couldn't help repeatedly placing myself in context with the events: feeling my heart swell a little as a socialist at the description of the ZOB members singing the Internationale on May Day in the knowledge that other people were doing so across the world. And feeling a bit of personalized guilt at every mention of ways the "Aryan" Poles might have done more to help them.
In any case, I am glad that I did read this, and I think that many of my friends would find it a powerful and worthwhile read as well.
April 1, 2021
an account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, written by the only surviving commander of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), Marek Edelman.
This is horrifying and beautiful, written in the unadorned prose of a fighter. The Israeli government and its supporters try to co-opt this heroic struggle for their own colonial project. But the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was led by *socialists*. The fighters all sang the Internationale on May Day and saw themselves as part of a worldwide working-class struggle against fascism. Edelman himself stayed in Poland after the war, even though he was persecuted under the Stalinists, and remained critical of Zionism until his death.
Things I learned about the uprising that I hadn't realized before: many of their early actions were directed against Jewish police, as collaborators made up the first line of repression in the Ghetto, and SS men were only rarely seen. In these initial actions, something like four fifths of the ZOB fighters (!) were killed. The uprising was not a success in any military sense: few or no lives were saved. Yet the uprising sent out a call for resistance that resonated around the world, and until today.
The Nazis' plans for genocide were delayed by the uprising. But more than that: potential victims of the Nazis, who often felt confused and hopeless, now saw that they could fight back. Morale is the most important resource in the struggle against oppression, and the ZOB suffered a terrible military defeat but won an unprecedented moral victory. Let's remember their example. As Bertolt Brecht put it, loosely translated: "If all is lost, then fight!"
Great little book! Read it!
This is horrifying and beautiful, written in the unadorned prose of a fighter. The Israeli government and its supporters try to co-opt this heroic struggle for their own colonial project. But the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was led by *socialists*. The fighters all sang the Internationale on May Day and saw themselves as part of a worldwide working-class struggle against fascism. Edelman himself stayed in Poland after the war, even though he was persecuted under the Stalinists, and remained critical of Zionism until his death.
Things I learned about the uprising that I hadn't realized before: many of their early actions were directed against Jewish police, as collaborators made up the first line of repression in the Ghetto, and SS men were only rarely seen. In these initial actions, something like four fifths of the ZOB fighters (!) were killed. The uprising was not a success in any military sense: few or no lives were saved. Yet the uprising sent out a call for resistance that resonated around the world, and until today.
The Nazis' plans for genocide were delayed by the uprising. But more than that: potential victims of the Nazis, who often felt confused and hopeless, now saw that they could fight back. Morale is the most important resource in the struggle against oppression, and the ZOB suffered a terrible military defeat but won an unprecedented moral victory. Let's remember their example. As Bertolt Brecht put it, loosely translated: "If all is lost, then fight!"
Great little book! Read it!
July 1, 2023
“Now it is the turn of France. The victory of fascism in this country would signify a vast strengthening of reaction, and a monstrous growth of violent anti-Semitism in all the world, above all in the United States. The number of countries that expel the Jews grows without cease. The number of countries able to accept them decreases. At the same time the exacerbation of the struggle intensifies. It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.”—Leon Trotsky “Appeal to American Jews menaced by fascism and anti-Semitism,” December 1938 in ‘On the Jewish Question.’
“The high percentage of Jews in the proletarian movement is only a reflection of the tragic situation of the Jewish people in our time. The intellectual faculties of the Jews, fruit of the historic past of Judaism, are thus an important support for the proletarian movement.
“In this latter fact lies a final—and not the least important—reason for modern anti-Semitism. The ruling classes persecute with special sadism the Jewish intellectuals and workers, who have supplied a host of fighters to the revolutionary movement. To isolate the Jews completely from the sources of culture and science has become a vital necessity for the decaying system that persecutes them. The ridiculous legend of “Jewish Marxism” is nothing but a caricature of the bonds that actually exist between socialism and the Jewish masses.”
--Abram Leon in ‘The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation,’ completed shortly before his death in Auschwitz in 1944. This book is a Marxist classic, which explains why the Jews have survived and why anti-Semitism still exists.
This gem I'm reviewing is a short book by Marek Edelman, a militant of the General Jewish Labor Bund; one of the few surviving central leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He also took part in the citywide 1944 Warsaw Uprising with the other surviving members of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization). (After the war he stayed in Poland, went to medical school, becoming a cardiologist. He was a member of Solidarity).
The Nazis had already deported most of the Jews from the ghetto to the death camps before it was possible to start resistance. For one thing they had no weapons, but more importantly most Jews refused to believe that the German soldiers were sending them to their deaths. The majority followed the Judenrat (Jewish Administration) which carried out the orders of the German occupiers through the Jewish Police, who helped the Nazis loading the cattle cars to Auschwitz and elsewhere. Israel Gutman, the author of ‘Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’ writes that “The behavior of the Judenrat in Warsaw during the Holocaust has always been a matter of considerable controversy.” To me, it’s not an academic question, but a class question. When resistance started, the Jewish Police were the first targets, and rightly so!
By 1942, the Jewish Bund had been able to prove to people what was actually happening, and to obtain from their comrades in the left-wing of the Polish Socialist Party and other sources their first weapons, mostly pistols. Later they got larger pistols, a few rifles, one machine gun, and they manufactured grenades and Molotov cocktails. In the fight they captured some German weapons. Armed Polish resistance hadn’t started yet. Together with other groups, mostly left-Zionists, they formed the ZOB—at a time when there were only 60,000 Jews (down from 300,000). Those Jews left in the Warsaw Ghetto were mostly working class. Full-scale rebellion didn’t start until April 1943. Despite their limited weaponry and lack of experience, the Jewish socialist partisans fought fiercely. The German troops in desperation tried to burn the entire ghetto, but resistance continued. Edelman writes,
“On May Day the Command decided to carry out a ‘holiday’ action. Several battle groups were sent out to ‘hunt down’ the greatest number of Germans possible. In the evening, a May Day roll-call was held. The partisans were briefly addressed by a few people and the ‘Internationale’ was sung. The entire world, we knew, was celebrating May Day on that day and everywhere forceful, meaningful words were being spoken. But never yet had the ‘Internationale’ been sung in conditions so different, so tragic, in a place where an entire nation had been and still was perishing. The words and the song echoed from the charred ruins and were, at that particular time, an indication that Socialist youth was still fighting in the Ghetto, and that even in the face of death they were not abandoning their ideals.”
Essential to understanding what fascism is and how it could have been prevented by the Communist Party if it had had a leadership like in the days of Lenin is Trotsky’s ‘The Struggle against Fascism in Germany.’ But I recommend for starters a book by Daniel Guerin, in part based on Trotsky’s writings, but a research work rather than a book of polemics, ‘Fascism and Big Business.’
For the fight in the US to open the doors to Jewish refugees, see ‘The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party: Minutes and Resolution, 1938–39.’
I wasn’t in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine, but there’s a fine line between saying that Israel, with 6 million Jews has “no right to exist” and saying that the Jews have “no right to exist.” There is a Palestinian national struggle, but also a class struggle in Israel, as there is everywhere in the world. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which holds all Israelis (if not all Jews!) responsible for the oppression of the Palestinians, is as anti-working-class as it is anti-Semitic. But those who try to ban their activities are equally reactionary; we must debate those we disagree with, not ban them. I don’t give political support to the US imperialist government, army, and cops, but I don’t say the US has “no right to exist”; I call for a workers and farmers government to replace the big business government.
Fidel Castro in a 2010 interview with ‘Atlantic’ magazine reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, said the Jews “are blamed and slandered for everything,”
“Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms,” Castro said. “There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.”
Cuba’s revolutionary government has strongly opposed Tel Aviv’s assaults and discrimination against Palestinians. But Castro responded, “Yes, without a doubt,” when Goldberg asked if he thought Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
A Cuban athlete was asked by a BDS supporter why he played against Israel. His response was “we play against the United States, why would we refuse to play Israel?”
In this coronavirus crisis, which is really primarily a crisis of capitalism, along with the realization of the ever-widening class gap, and the anger at the bosses who made people work with totally inadequate protective gear--if any, the role of Cuba’s medical internationalism in the world is also getting more press, despite the government lies that they’re “slave labor.” For more on this see 'Red Zone: Cuba and the Fight Against Ebola in Western Africa.'
And now, the coronavirus has taken the backseat to fighting the “virus” of racism.
To learn about the fight against racism in Cuba, let me recommend the interview with Harry Villegas in ‘Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces,’ and ‘From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution’ by Víctor Dreke. Also, ‘Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution.’ For the story of the most important Jewish Cuban revolutionary, see Enrique Oltuski’s ‘Vida Clandestina: My Life in the Cuban Revolution.’
“The high percentage of Jews in the proletarian movement is only a reflection of the tragic situation of the Jewish people in our time. The intellectual faculties of the Jews, fruit of the historic past of Judaism, are thus an important support for the proletarian movement.
“In this latter fact lies a final—and not the least important—reason for modern anti-Semitism. The ruling classes persecute with special sadism the Jewish intellectuals and workers, who have supplied a host of fighters to the revolutionary movement. To isolate the Jews completely from the sources of culture and science has become a vital necessity for the decaying system that persecutes them. The ridiculous legend of “Jewish Marxism” is nothing but a caricature of the bonds that actually exist between socialism and the Jewish masses.”
--Abram Leon in ‘The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation,’ completed shortly before his death in Auschwitz in 1944. This book is a Marxist classic, which explains why the Jews have survived and why anti-Semitism still exists.
This gem I'm reviewing is a short book by Marek Edelman, a militant of the General Jewish Labor Bund; one of the few surviving central leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He also took part in the citywide 1944 Warsaw Uprising with the other surviving members of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization). (After the war he stayed in Poland, went to medical school, becoming a cardiologist. He was a member of Solidarity).
The Nazis had already deported most of the Jews from the ghetto to the death camps before it was possible to start resistance. For one thing they had no weapons, but more importantly most Jews refused to believe that the German soldiers were sending them to their deaths. The majority followed the Judenrat (Jewish Administration) which carried out the orders of the German occupiers through the Jewish Police, who helped the Nazis loading the cattle cars to Auschwitz and elsewhere. Israel Gutman, the author of ‘Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’ writes that “The behavior of the Judenrat in Warsaw during the Holocaust has always been a matter of considerable controversy.” To me, it’s not an academic question, but a class question. When resistance started, the Jewish Police were the first targets, and rightly so!
By 1942, the Jewish Bund had been able to prove to people what was actually happening, and to obtain from their comrades in the left-wing of the Polish Socialist Party and other sources their first weapons, mostly pistols. Later they got larger pistols, a few rifles, one machine gun, and they manufactured grenades and Molotov cocktails. In the fight they captured some German weapons. Armed Polish resistance hadn’t started yet. Together with other groups, mostly left-Zionists, they formed the ZOB—at a time when there were only 60,000 Jews (down from 300,000). Those Jews left in the Warsaw Ghetto were mostly working class. Full-scale rebellion didn’t start until April 1943. Despite their limited weaponry and lack of experience, the Jewish socialist partisans fought fiercely. The German troops in desperation tried to burn the entire ghetto, but resistance continued. Edelman writes,
“On May Day the Command decided to carry out a ‘holiday’ action. Several battle groups were sent out to ‘hunt down’ the greatest number of Germans possible. In the evening, a May Day roll-call was held. The partisans were briefly addressed by a few people and the ‘Internationale’ was sung. The entire world, we knew, was celebrating May Day on that day and everywhere forceful, meaningful words were being spoken. But never yet had the ‘Internationale’ been sung in conditions so different, so tragic, in a place where an entire nation had been and still was perishing. The words and the song echoed from the charred ruins and were, at that particular time, an indication that Socialist youth was still fighting in the Ghetto, and that even in the face of death they were not abandoning their ideals.”
Essential to understanding what fascism is and how it could have been prevented by the Communist Party if it had had a leadership like in the days of Lenin is Trotsky’s ‘The Struggle against Fascism in Germany.’ But I recommend for starters a book by Daniel Guerin, in part based on Trotsky’s writings, but a research work rather than a book of polemics, ‘Fascism and Big Business.’
For the fight in the US to open the doors to Jewish refugees, see ‘The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party: Minutes and Resolution, 1938–39.’
I wasn’t in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine, but there’s a fine line between saying that Israel, with 6 million Jews has “no right to exist” and saying that the Jews have “no right to exist.” There is a Palestinian national struggle, but also a class struggle in Israel, as there is everywhere in the world. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which holds all Israelis (if not all Jews!) responsible for the oppression of the Palestinians, is as anti-working-class as it is anti-Semitic. But those who try to ban their activities are equally reactionary; we must debate those we disagree with, not ban them. I don’t give political support to the US imperialist government, army, and cops, but I don’t say the US has “no right to exist”; I call for a workers and farmers government to replace the big business government.
Fidel Castro in a 2010 interview with ‘Atlantic’ magazine reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, said the Jews “are blamed and slandered for everything,”
“Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms,” Castro said. “There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.”
Cuba’s revolutionary government has strongly opposed Tel Aviv’s assaults and discrimination against Palestinians. But Castro responded, “Yes, without a doubt,” when Goldberg asked if he thought Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
A Cuban athlete was asked by a BDS supporter why he played against Israel. His response was “we play against the United States, why would we refuse to play Israel?”
In this coronavirus crisis, which is really primarily a crisis of capitalism, along with the realization of the ever-widening class gap, and the anger at the bosses who made people work with totally inadequate protective gear--if any, the role of Cuba’s medical internationalism in the world is also getting more press, despite the government lies that they’re “slave labor.” For more on this see 'Red Zone: Cuba and the Fight Against Ebola in Western Africa.'
And now, the coronavirus has taken the backseat to fighting the “virus” of racism.
To learn about the fight against racism in Cuba, let me recommend the interview with Harry Villegas in ‘Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces,’ and ‘From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution’ by Víctor Dreke. Also, ‘Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution.’ For the story of the most important Jewish Cuban revolutionary, see Enrique Oltuski’s ‘Vida Clandestina: My Life in the Cuban Revolution.’
November 13, 2022
The Ghetto Fights by Marek Edelman with an introduction by John Rose is a remarkable first hand account of jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. Marek Edelman was part of the Bund's youth organization; the bund along with the communists and Jewish Zionists went on to form the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) of which Edelman was a commander. The bulk of the book is Edelman account of his experiences resisting Nazi extermination in the Warsaw ghetto from 1941 to 1943, which is followed by two appendixes. The first appendix contains reports from the Jewish Underground while the second appendix covers some of the controversy surrounding John Rose's introduction that also points to some of the greater issues of historical memory. The brutal crimes of the Nazi's are well known and can be found in history book after history book, but there is something categorically different when reading about what happened from someone who witnessed it, resisted it, and survived it.
September 27, 2019
Such a good book. Gives you a real insight into how horrible the ghettos set up by the nazis were, and how even in those conditions, it was still hard for Jewish people to believe the extent of the nazi atrocities. And through the nazi manipulation they managed to convince Jewish people to do many things completely against their own self interest. All until they fought back. The united groups coming together to form a larger organisation that had the ability to offer a small amount of resistance was super inspiring, even if it’s incredibly sad.
September 20, 2013
Teilweise sehr betroffen machend, aber kein literarisches Meisterwerk, eher ein interessanter Augenzeugenbericht.
April 15, 2018
Grim, at times hard to get through but important. A true hero. My great-grandfather lived and worked on Nowolipie Street, so this book has a personal albeit tragic connection for me.
December 31, 2020
Exceptionnel témoignage quasiment heure par heure de la résistance héroïque et tragique du ghetto de Varsovie, où l'on découvre la lucidité rapide de l'analyse politique des combattant.e.s juif.ve.s de l'irrationnalité de l'Etat nazi d'exterminer tout un peuple "sans intérêt" alors que la faim et la peur ne peuvent faire qu'espérer une paix rapide ou du travail au sortir des convois au reste du ghetto.
L'auteur-combattant, grande figure du syndicat laïc yiddishophone Bund, retrace par sa rédaction dès 1945 tous les premiers éléments indiquant dès le début de la guerre les exécutions systématiques suivant la ghettoïsation des Juif.ve.s (il mentionne aussi la liquidation de Tziganes) mais ne se contente pas d'un récit chronologique terrible car il honore avec génorosité la mémoire d'hommes et de femmes résistantes jusque dans la mort parfois la plus terrible, qu'ils ou qu'elles soient resté.e.s célèbres ou non. Edelman est bien sûr sans pitié avec les responsables de la police juive du ghetto mais aussi l'implication énorme des Ukrainiens et des Polonais dans le massacre programmé.
La préface de Vidal-Naquet, même si un peu chargée de trop nombreuses citations ou comparaisons, reste incontournable.
L'auteur-combattant, grande figure du syndicat laïc yiddishophone Bund, retrace par sa rédaction dès 1945 tous les premiers éléments indiquant dès le début de la guerre les exécutions systématiques suivant la ghettoïsation des Juif.ve.s (il mentionne aussi la liquidation de Tziganes) mais ne se contente pas d'un récit chronologique terrible car il honore avec génorosité la mémoire d'hommes et de femmes résistantes jusque dans la mort parfois la plus terrible, qu'ils ou qu'elles soient resté.e.s célèbres ou non. Edelman est bien sûr sans pitié avec les responsables de la police juive du ghetto mais aussi l'implication énorme des Ukrainiens et des Polonais dans le massacre programmé.
La préface de Vidal-Naquet, même si un peu chargée de trop nombreuses citations ou comparaisons, reste incontournable.
April 29, 2023
This narrative on the Holocaust is completely absent from contemporary discourse, but this is one of or maybe the most important part!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews