In 1993, an Israeli delegation arrived in Poland for events marking the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. When the list of speakers was prepared, then Polish President Lech Walesa asked that a national hero speak on Poland's behalf Marek Edelman, Mordechai Anielewicz's deputy commander in the uprising. What happened during that visit, as told by those who attended, is described by Polish authors Witold Beres and Krzysztof Burnetko in their biography, "Marek Edelman," recently translated into Hebrew and published by Books in the Attic (Aliyat Hagag) Publishers. In that very same Israeli delegation, which included the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, there was Israeli pressure to prevent Edelman from speaking at the ceremony. Rabin was embarrassed, but gave in to pressure from members of his delegation. Ultimately Walesa saved Rabin from further embarrassment by cancelling Edelman's speech, thus the Israeli establishment prevented a Jewish combatant from the Warsaw Ghetto to speak at the memorial ceremony for his comrades. Lech Walesa, by the way, didn't give up altogether and prepared a surprise for the Israelis. When the time came for him to place the Polish president's wreath on the memorial, he walked over to Edelman, who was in the crowd, inviting Edelman to join him. The Israeli delegation considered this a "provocation." What was Edelman, born in 1919 according to one source and 1922 by another, guilty of in the eyes of the Israeli establishment? Being "a Bundist." The ghetto combatant never embraced Zionism, and the delegation was uncomfortable with that. "He also was critical of Israel," Simcha "Kazik" Rotem, one of the last combatants in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who saved Edelman and others from the burning ghetto, said this week. To 21st-century readers, this might seem strange. The Bund -- a Jewish socialist party in Poland and elsewhere in Europe which promoted workers' rights, fought anti-Semitism and was generally opposed to Zionism -- is already ancient history, and no one will deny it was a political movement concerned with the Jewish People's welfare, even if it wasn't Zionist. But is that enough to make one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto an outcast- To Moshe Arens, a former defense minister who's currently researching the Warsaw Uprising events (his book "Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto" was published in 2009), it's no surprise. For years, despite their differing ideologies, Arens has suggested to several Israeli universities that they grant Edelman who later became a world renowned cardiologist and a significant figure in the battle against the Communist regime in Poland an honorary doctorate. He was always refused. "It's not the university presidents who refuse," Arens said in a talk with Israel This Week. "They always turn to professors researching the Holocaust and accept their recommendation. The researchers have their official version" of what happened during that period. Arens has been campaigning in recent years for recognition of the ZZB (or the Jewish Military Union, culled from the Betar movement in the uprising) and came up against the same stonewalling. The events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were "canonized" in Israel. The process created a version of events, and especially conclusions, which were not to be debated. The ZZB issue can be understood against the background of political struggles. But why is the matter so significant when it comes to the Bund an organization that disappeared from the scene? "Edelman opposed the state of Israel and they couldn't accept that here," Arens says. "He visited Israel several times, he had some friends here and he didn't want the state to be destroyed. But he always stressed to me that we have to make peace with the Palestinians." Former MK and Knesset Speaker Shevah Weiss admits that the "fact that Edelman was a Bundist created a situation whereby in the ethos of the national Holocaust remembrance in Israel he is not mentioned and if he is, it's in a distorted fashion." It should be noted that Edelman never backed destroying Israel. For example, he protested to the Palestinians about their comparing the fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto and the situation in the territories. He was far from being a radical critic of Israel. That's a little ironic, especially since the most outspoken critics of Israel in the world accuse it of exploiting the memory of the Holocaust. Both the Israeli Left and Right agree that the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto in Israel has a clear political aspect. "They weren't very interested in politics" It turns out that Mordechai Anielewicz played the drum. In 1973 Edelman told Polish writer Hanna Krall about Anielewicz, "who walked around in a Scout uniform, played the drum and loved being the commander." Edelman added that the commander's mother, who sold fish, had a trick she used to make the fish look fresher. When these things were published, there were many who didn't like this down-to-earth description. Anielewicz, the man who committed suicide in the bunker at the tender age of 24, became one of the outstanding symbols of Zionism. The problem is that Edelman was also on the scene. The version accepted in Israel grants importance to the political hierarchy of the Jewish Combat Organization or the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, and significance to the way they were divided into units, to the point of accusations of falsification by those responsible at a certain time for the history books used in our education system. Edelman, for his part, said all along what many researchers, including Professor Arens, refused to accept that the Ghetto fighters didn't have any interest in politics. In the book by Beres and Burnetko, Edelman is quoted as saying: "And what do you think? What really determines things in such situations? Only friendships made in school or during the previous round-up of Jews to be sent to the death camps. After all, during the big round-up in 1942, all the organizations and all public life in the ghetto were crushed. There were few of us, boys and girls tied together in all kinds of youth organizations. You didn't accept anyone into your organization who you didn't know from childhood. We were a group of friends, boys and girls who had visited each other for years: friends from class, from the playground, from the youth movements. You can only demand the most difficult things from friends." "We didn't discuss ideology at all," agrees Kazik Rotem in his conversation with Israel This Week. "The uprising had nothing to do with those things." In the book, Edelman describes how Anielewicz was chosen to be leader of the uprising. He says that Anielewicz simply wanted to lead more than any of the others, and not because of any ideological preference the uprising's participants had for someone from Hashomer Hatzair. Edelman also defends the choice, noting that wanting the job is an important quality for a leader. Nonetheless, Rotem still ponders the matter of the uprising's leadership. "Coincidentally or not I've been thinking a lot about Mordechai," he says. "I didn't see him during the whole uprising; I got to know him before the war but during the uprising I didn't even see him once. I was sent out of the ghetto without his briefing me, without even knowing what I was supposed to do. Is that the way a commander is supposed to behave-" So Anielewicz played the drum, and there was vodka and love affairs among the rebels, sometimes without being strict about monogamous relationships. That's how Edelman tells it not for the sensation; without graphic descriptions. He just describes what happened between the people, most in their early 20s and in a situation where they faced hunger and feared being killed by a German bullet, or fire which could be just a few hours away. Edelman also didn't accept Anielewicz's decision to commit suicide in the bunkers on Mila Street in Warsaw, which became a founding story in the State of Israel. He considered it an illegitimate decision for a commander, but mainly one that conflicted with his own value-system, which guided him all his days: Life comes first, an approach which went well with his being a cardiologist. Nonetheless, as Beres, one of the authors of the book, says, "Edelman always spoke warmly about his comrades. He didn't believe in Zionism but he never said a word about his personal relationship with the Zionists." Q: How much was his opposition to Zionism a personal matter based on the Bund's defeat- "When you grow up in an atmosphere of endless political struggles, there is no pure ideology. But I don't think Edelman ever blamed Zionism." An enemy and a hero The difference between Marek Edelman's status in Israel and in Poland, Europe and the rest of the world is huge. Ronen Zaretsky, who made a film a few years ago on the last living participants in the uprising, says that "the day that we planned for Kazik and Edelman to show us the sewer the fighters used to escape from the ghetto was May 1. That's a day where no one will work for you in Poland especially sewage workers. We were concerned raising the matter with Edelman, but Kazik did. The workers' looks of admiration when the two arrived at the spot said it all. These people were thrilled by the privilege that had come their way." When he screened the film in Warsaw, Zaretsky laughs, "Twenty-year-old girls asked about the possibility of meeting Edelman, even though he was already 80 at that time. He was pretty interested in them." Beres also treats Edelman like a Polish icon. "Some people think of him as an enemy. To many he's a hero," he says. He even chooses to describe how things were from his personal viewpoint. "I was born in 1960 in a small town in western Poland," he says. "As a child I knew nothing about the existence of Jews in modern Poland. I knew a lot about the past, but we were educated to think that Auschwitz was somewhere where millions of Poles were murdered. How is that possible? Through Communist censorship of the study material. "The first time that I learned the truth was in the era of the Solidarity Party, in 1980-81, during my studies in Krakow. I ran into Edelman just after the military government was installed in Poland, in response to the rise of solidarity. To me he wasn't a Pole or a Polish Jew, but a Jewish Pole. He was the hero of the struggle against Communism. He had power that derived from his persona. He knew how to help every victim of tyranny including political opponents from the Polish Right, when they became victims of Communism. At that point I already knew about the Poles' part in the Holocaust. I can't say that they made me feel personally guilty. Ultimately I chose to identify with Edelman's protecting the weak." Q: As someone influenced by Edelman is there a feeling in Poland that Israel took over guardianship of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? What do you think of those who draw a comparison between the Germans' guilt with that of the Poles- "As a Pole with a political and historic orientation, I don't feel that Zionism has taken over the uprising," he says. "The matter of the accusations against us sometimes angers me but I understand it. "I was in Munich at a meeting regarding the book," says Beres. "Munich is the birthplace of Nazism, but nonetheless during this gathering an elderly Jew got up and said that during the Holocaust, Jews feared the Poles would turn them in, they didn't fear the Germans. I partially agreed with him, but I cited Edelman who said that anti-Semitism has no nationalism. I also asked whether it was right to judge a person like me, who wrote a fair book? He spoke excellent German, so I asked him if he also daily accuses his Munich neighbors of responsibility for the Holocaust. "The same man came up to me afterwards, and this time spoke perfect Polish. He apologized and said: 'Understand, the Germans were the enemy at that time. The Poles were friends. When a friend hurts you, it's much more painful.' So I can understand the comparison between Germans and Poles in the eyes of Holocaust survivors. Nonetheless, when the comparisons come from young people or politicians it's just stupidity." Edelman's part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is only part of the myth that revolves around him in Poland. He was one of the outstanding members of Solidarity, the Polish trade union which led to the downfall of Communist rule in the country, and was even arrested at one point. In 1993, shocked by events in Sarajevo once again a city in the heart of Europe cut off, its people starved or murdered, this time in front of TV cameras he left for Bosnia with supply trucks. He was stopped by the U.N., but continued his efforts and finally reached Sarajevo. Edelman even strongly defended the fact that Polish soldiers had gone to fight in the Balkans. "Like we expected New Zealand soldiers to fight for Warsaw," he said. But why did he stay in Poland? Star status? Was he simply a true Polish patriot? "He was a Bundist," Kazik Rotem again notes. "That was his ideology. Even when there were hardly any Jews left in Poland, he didn't believe in the State of Israel. Not out of any bitterness; he thought that we were surrounded by 50 million Arabs, and since then many more had been added and it would be difficult for us to survive." And why did he stay in Poland until he died in October 2009? "I'll never have a complete answer," Rotem says, "The fact is that in 1968 he sent his wife and son to France." Shevah Weiss says, "Zvia Lubetkin and Yitzhak 'Antek' Zuckerman, also heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, tried to convince Edelman to immigrate to Israel. But he believed he belonged in Poland, his birthplace, where he dreamt of a social-democratic Europe and cultural autonomy for the Jews." Beres adds, "I wouldn't say for a moment that Edelman loved Poland. That said, however, he didn't have any other place in the world."
