WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday of old age. He was 90.
Edelman also fought the Nazis in the Warsaw city Uprising in 1944. And for decades he fought communism in Poland.
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.
The Nazis in November 1940 crammed some 460,000 Jews from the city and from across Poland in inhuman conditions in the ghetto. After a year, almost half the people there had died of disease and starvation.
The resistance plans were implemented April 19, 1943, when the Nazis moved to liquidate the ghetto by killing or sending some remaining 60,000 residents to the death camps.
But the well-trained German troops encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance from a few hundred young, poorly armed Jewish civilians, determined to die fighting rather than in gas chambers.
The ghetto fighters inflicted heavy losses on the Germans, but eventually succumbed. With a small group of survivors, Edelman left through the sewers to the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid while helping to coordinate Jewish partisan groups in nearby forests.
In August and September of 1944, Edelman fought in the Warsaw Uprising, another ill-fated revolt meant to free the capital from Germans ahead of the advancing Red Army.