Last uprising leader recalls Warsaw battle
By Monika Scislowska, Associated Press
Published April 16, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
Alik Keplicz / Associated Press
Cantor Joseph Malovany of New York sings a prayer at the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes monument during ceremonies Tuesday.
Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto by a handful of scrappy, poorly armed Jews against the Nazi army, becomes emotional when he speaks of the fighters he led.
"I remember them all - boys and girls - 220 altogether, not too many to remember their faces, their names," says the 89-year-old doctor, who still works in a Lodz hospital.
Edelman will lay a wreath in their honor at the Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto on Saturday, the 65th anniversary of the uprising.
The Nazis walled off the ghetto in November 1940, cramming 400,000 Jews from across Poland into a 760-acre section of the capital in inhuman conditions. On April 19, 1943, German troops started to liquidate the ghetto by sending tens of thousands of its residents to death camps.
Several hundred young Jews took up arms in defense of the civilians - the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II.
"It was the first, most important and most spectacular" instance of Jewish armed resistance to the Nazi Holocaust, said Andrzej Zbikowski, head of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
A service was held in Warsaw on Tuesday - to avoid conflicting with the Jewish sabbath - and drew a crowd of 1,000, including Israeli President Shimon Peres and his Polish counterpart, Lech Kaczynski, as well as U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Israeli and Polish flags fluttered in the afternoon breeze as Poland's chief orthodox rabbi, Michael Schudrich, read out the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the dead.
Peres praised the young fighters, who he said displayed "a heroism that our children will proudly carry with them in their hearts."
Edelman views the annual observances as "part of educating people and fighting genocide."
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FlyfishDude52 writes:
And there are those mis-guided despot islamo-fascists and david duke that would say that the holocaust never happened...