WARSAW, Poland -- Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday at the age of 90.
Edelman died of old age 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 Warsaw ghetto revolt and later in the 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.
One of the few survivors of three weeks of uneven struggle in the Warsaw ghetto, he felt obliged to preserve the memory of the fallen heroes of that first large-scale Jewish revolt against the Nazis. Each year, on the revolt's anniversary, he laid flowers at Warsaw's monument to the ghetto heroes, and called for tolerance.
'Man is evil, by nature man is a beast," he said, and therefore people "have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred."
He also felt obliged to appeal repeatedly to the world for freedom and peace -- even when it had to be won in a fight.And still more. Please read it all. An amazing life that will surely be remembered for many blessings."When you cannot defend freedom through peaceful means, you have to use arms to fight Nazism, dictatorship, chauvinism," Edelman said in an 2008 interview with The Associated Press in his apartment in the central city of Lodz, which was filled with portraits of Jews and of scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust.
He worked at a city hospital [in] Lodz, almost to his last day.
Chag Succot Sameach and
Shabbat Shalom.
