Marek Edelman

Marek Edelman is the man.

He is the lone surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, and a founding member of the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization).

What I admire about him most, aside from his resistance work both in the ghetto and for Solidarity afterwards in Poland, is his tenacity.

Rather than leave Poland for Israel or the United States after the war like so many of the few surviving Polish Jews, Edelman went to medical school and stayed right there in Poland.

What the Holocaust showed Polish Jews in abundance was the absence of any limits to Polish antisemitism. After the Germans eradicated the political, religious, and intellectual leaders of Poland in the first weeks of September, 1939, the majority of the Poles who were left were easy to engage as violent Jew baiters.

The message after April, 1945 across Europe, not just Poland, was that the surviving Jews were no longer welcome in Europe. But Edelman stayed. He refused to leave his home; he refused to give up his culture and his language.

Over the years, Poland has tried to give him accolade after accolade as the lone , surviving representative of the Jewish uprising, and he has refused them all. He was recently awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor, but he accepted this for his work on Solidarity, not his surviving of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

He refuses recognition or special honor simply because chance allowed him to survive while it denied survival to so many others. The powerful lesson that Edelman's life teaches is that no man deserves to die or live over another.