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Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Witold Bereś, Krzysztof BurnetkoMarek Edelman: Simply A Life
About the book
Marek Edelman: “Stop making some sort of hero out of me. Who cares how many rifles there were and who fired where. You talk about it so seriously, but we were young people then too, just kids. Do you know how much tomfoolery we had in our heads?”
A few hours after the destruction of the bunker and the death of Anielewicz, it’s already evening when Edelman and several other people, including “Celina, ” go to check what’s happening on Miła Street. They walk through the sea of ruins. At one point a cellar roof gives way under “Celina”… At the last moment Edelman saves her life. Then they find fifteen other people who have survived miraculously, concealed in a hide-out by the door, and from them they learn what has happened in the bunker…
It is one of those moments when he saves someone else’s life. Because although he would never like talking about it, everyone knows that he would save “Celina” herself twice more during the Warsaw Uprising.
Unexpectedly – even for himself – at this time he becomes a support for others. He would tell Joanna Szczęsna that he doesn’t know why people listened to him, because he wasn’t all that serious.
Today he adds: “Well, all right – we were brave. Courageous. But military? If you looked at the Germans, we just weren’t in it. So maybe it mattered more that we were guided by some common values.”
And friendship was important here too.
Pnina Grynszpan-Frymer would tell Anka Grupińska (in What Goes Around, Comes Around) a similar story:
“Marek was the field commander, and the group commander was Jurek Błones. Marek did emergency drills at night to test our readiness. With his watch in his hand he would see how long it took us to be ready to attack. He was very cold and very brave. He was a responsible person, and so in his presence I felt safe.
“During the uprising, after the destruction of the brushmakers’ area, we moved from the central ghetto to the bunker at 32 Franciszkańska Street. Marek was the organiser of this move. He ran three groups – my one, which was Hersz Berliński’s, Dror Henoch Gutman’s, and his own, the Bund one.”
When we talk to Pnina in Tel Aviv in the spring of 2008, she supplements her description of that situation:
“Marek was my commander. Literally. It was like this: my then commander suddenly declared that he wanted to be on his own, without us, to go over to the Aryan side. I was devastated. And when I went up to Marek and told him about it, he calmly replied: ‘Don’t be afraid – I’ll be your commander now. And nothing will happen to you. Don’t worry…’ ”
Edelman: “During the Uprising I had a few communists under me as well. Somewhere around the beginning of May they started moaning and groaning that they had too few weapons, and they informed me that they were starting a hunger strike. Go ahead, I said, there’s nothing to eat – because there was nothing to eat anyway – you can go on hunger strike. Except that just then some sugar turned up. Someone mixed it with water so everyone could drink some. And there were those two, with their hunger strike. I can’t stand rebellion. So I said to my lot: disarm them and bring them here. And they went on saying they wouldn’t drink the sugar water. But I had a pistol… And they drank it…”
What a difference compared with the Edelman of the very beginning of the ghetto! Adina Blady-Szwajgier, Inka, will write of earlier times: “It was a lovely July day. This was before the ghetto was closed off. I came to work at the hospital in a very nice, pre-war suit made of crepe. It’s important that it was crepe, because that’s a material you shouldn’t get wet. I went up to the window, and there, outside the building, Marek was watering the lawn. When he saw me, he calmly turned the hose in my direction. I jumped through the window, it was the ground floor, and we started fighting on the lawn.”
A few decades after the war, when at his request Paula Sawicka would visit his former girlfriend Stasia in New York and would ask her what he was like then, the answer was, “Ruthless. But we all felt safe in his presence.”
Sawicka: “Stasia told me: ‘We all relied on him. We sat at home and waited for him to come and bring a can of soup. Otherwise we’d have gone hungry. We didn’t have to worry about a thing, because we knew Marek would sort it all out.’ This confession was also incredible because they were all older than Marek.”
Stasia, or Ryfka Rozensztajn, as Edelman would note, sang beautifully, she had a lovely voice, she drew well, she had black plaits, and she was his mainstay.
Edelman once told Sawicka that Stasia earned money in the ghetto by painting fancy patterns on umbrella handles. When the amazed Sawicka asked how it was possible to sell such a thing, (“In the ghetto?!”) she heard: “What do you mean? You think it never rained in the ghetto?”
So Stasia was Marek Edelman’s girlfriend. Though it also looks as if she was with Welweł Rozowski, “Włodek”, at the start of the war. In any case, Alina Margolis remembers that Rozowski was known as “Marek’s wife’s husband”. Paula Sawicka: “And Inka told me Marek was known as ‘Włodek’s wife’s husband’.”
In a small set of short stories by Alina Margolis, Ala From the Primer, there is one called “Shots”, describing those days and changing the heroes’ surnames. “Pnina, who never went out, made a sort of soup every day out of substitutes. Sometimes there were scraps of horse meat floating in it. She lived with her husband and her boyfriend. I wasn’t surprised by that… But I was surprised no one complained, when she left the best bits floating in the thin soup for them.”
Edelman: “Stasia was my girl! But even though she taught me everything I knew, I was always in charge! I knew her earlier, when she was a major activist in SKIF [the Socialist Children’s Union], and I was just a little brat.”
“So how did you come to be the boss?”
“They simply put me in a situation where I had to govern, and then it all becomes unimportant. I was no angel… All because their lives soon came to depend on me. Inka’s, Stasia’s, and Tosia Goliborska’s…. All that sighing is over that … Anyway, it’s not important. What matters is that there was the uprising, there was resistance, it lasted for a long time, and the great German army, which had thousands of soldiers, had to spend three weeks fighting two hundred boys. That matters, and not if someone fired from the corner of Niska Street or from the window on Śliska Street… Anyway, there was usually no one firing from anywhere, because there was nothing to do it with.
“Anyway, what could I do? There were lots of those people who thought they had to rely on me. A large number. But not many survived.”
“Your subordinates, your colleagues from the ghetto said you were like a father: that although you were just as young as they were, you looked after them.”
“I had a position and I was responsible for them. When you’re responsible, and especially when it’s a sort of army, everyone has to obey the commander. The ones who were disobedient got killed, and the ones who were obedient survived. Later there were various things going on, but until 10 May those who were obedient, who were in the group, and didn’t really try to think for themselves, survived. So that’s not taking care of people. What does taking care mean anyway, if it’s a matter of… That girl was afraid, so I said: come next to me, I’ll hold your hand. Of course there was nothing that could actually help her, but she felt more secure. It was nothing, she did the same as the others, she was afraid, but she thought that if she was holding my hand it was all right. How old was she, sixteen or not much more… I’m not surprised. But that’s not taking care of people.
“When you’re in a certain position, you have responsibilities. I didn’t have to take that position, but I did. Also by accident, because I shouldn’t have been there. There should have been an experienced person there who… But he resigned. There was no one, so they pushed me forward, and that’s how I got there. It was all a coincidence, an accident.”
“You could also have said no.”
“I could have, but I didn’t, because I myself had voted earlier for this organisation to be created. If you’ve already agreed to something, you have to carry out your task, do what is your duty. But all you people want is ‘soul.’”
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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