WARSAW, Poland — Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday. He was 90.
Edelman died of natural causes at the family home of his friend Paula Sawicka, where he had lived for the past two years. “He died at home, among friends, among his close people,” Sawicka told The Associated Press.
Most of Edelman’s adult life was dedicated to the defense of human life, dignity and freedom. He fought the Nazis in the doomed 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt and later in the 1944 Warsaw city uprising. And then for decades he fought communism in Poland.
His heroism earned him the French Legion of Honor and Poland’s highest civilian distinction, the Order of the White Eagle.
Former Israeli ambassador to Poland Shevach Weiss paid tribute to Edelman.
“He will remain in my memory as a fighting hero, a man of great courage,” Weiss said. “He never ceased in his struggle for human freedom and for Poland’s freedom.”
The uprising at the Warsaw ghetto was the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II.
One of the few survivors of three weeks of uneven struggle in the Warsaw ghetto, Edelman felt obliged to preserve the memory of the fallen heroes. Each year on the revolt’s anniversary, he laid flowers at Warsaw’s monument to the ghetto heroes and called for tolerance.
“Remember them all — boys and girls — 220 altogether, not too many to remember their faces, their names,” he said in a 2008 interview with AP.
