Marek Edelman - People didn't believe they were going to their death (65/145) скачать в хорошем качестве

Marek Edelman - People didn't believe they were going to their death (65/145)

To listen to more of Marek Edelman’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Marek Edelman - Recollecting my parents (1...   Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna; date recorded: 2003] TRANSCRIPT: So we had no luck with this. We posted it up in the streets, something we didn't do on principle because we were afraid that when people would read these leaflets, these newsletters in the streets the Germans would shoot them. We only posted this in the streets where there were German announcements on red paper saying who's been shot for crossing the wall or for smuggling, which children had been shot. We'd attach slips of paper, tiny little slips of paper to these announcements saying 'shame on the murderers' in Polish, in Jiddish and in German. But these were the only actions in which we were involved the street because we were afraid. We were afraid that this would be a colossal provocation. And we had no luck, no one believed us so that later, when we wrote about this in the 'Biuletyn', it was interesting that people approached us and said, don't write these lies, don't spread this propaganda because people are beginning to doubt all of these other things that you're writing about. I wonder how 'Gazeta Wyborcza' would behave today in a similar situation, would they carry on writing, I wonder? What do you think? I'm asking because it's a psychological matter. You need to connect with people, yet if you didn't connect but said they're going to their death and they replied saying, that's not true. It wasn't a matter of having a large print run, it was a matter of the relationship. After all, these newsletters weren't being published by professional journalists but by political activists. Perhaps there were some journalists there but they weren't writing editorials, you understand? No one was writing reports saying Aunty Betty had relieved herself by the garden fence. We had none of that. The articles were about politics and news. For example, we received information that 2,000 people had been deported from Nowy Dwór and had been killed some here, some there, no one believed that. People arrived from Nowy Dwór - we had this Pnina from Nowy Dwór. She was in Warsaw, she'd escaped deportation, she stayed here for a couple of weeks or months and then went home because that's where her home was. She didn't believe that her neighbours had been deported to I don't know which camp where they'd been exterminated, so what would 'Gazeta Wyborcza'. esteemed by its readership, have done? Would it have lost that esteem or not? What do you think? You're the expert in this field. [L] These situations are so different from one another, that it's hard to imagine them. The only thing I can compare them to is the underground 'Solidarność' where our problem was whether to write about the repression or not, in case it scared people. So what did you decide? [L] We decided to write about it since it gave people, those who were being repressed, felt better, their families felt better because it wasn't so anonymous. Ah, the repressed. They were the ones who died, here the repression was death, so there was nothing that they could feel. [L] Yes, but my point is that there's no comparison. No comparison... Yet Goebbels had an idea about that. He knew this couldn't be made public, that it has to be top secret so that no one would know. I know what he was afraid of. He was afraid that if people believed that they were being slaughtered, then they would resist, whereas he wanted all of this to be done quietly.