Marek Edelman - The setting up of the Jewish Fighting Organisation (82/145) скачать в хорошем качестве

Marek Edelman - The setting up of the Jewish Fighting Organisation (82/145)

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 recoded: 2003] TRANSCRIPT: There was no action there because all the action was in the ghetto where around 200 'szomrzy' survived as well as all those youth from Dror, and they made their way over in October or November when the farm was demolished and so they made their way over to the ghetto in carts, bringing clothes with them. But we didn't know anyone, no one knew Antek nor Anielewicz. Anielewicz wasn't in Warsaw much at all, he usually travelled around the country. He was very lucky because he was never caught up in any large deportation, because wherever he arrived, he came either just before or just after but he never witnessed any deportation. He went to Silesia just after one, he went to the Białystok region and it was just before. He was a person who was new to all of this. He'd never experienced a deportation. Discussions began, they lasted quite a long time, from September until October. I remember that meeting for the youth from Bund when the issue had already been raised of whether to form our own organisation or a joint one. There was a massive discussion, and it wasn't about whether we needed a common organisation but about who we were dealing with, are they strangers, they need to be people who know one another. In a word, some were in favour, others - it was passed by one vote that we would have a joint organisation, there were 11 people and it was passed by one vote that we would have a joint organisation. So on 15 October, that joint organisation was formed, and it was called Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organisation) to which all the Zionist youth organisations belonged which took its human material from Czerniaków because they had no other as there were none of them left in the ghetto. I think only Antek and Celina survived. They had two or three people in the ghetto - the rest came from Czerniakow. Jurek Wilner was also on the Aryan side, they didn't have any more people in the ghetto. We had a few because apart from the ghetto, we had nothing but even that we could count on the fingers of one hand. When we counted up all of the youth who were capable of forming an organisation, it came to 40 or 50 people whereas before the first action, it hadn't been a problem to mobilise 500 people, but they had all been deported. So the Jewish Fighting Organisation was set up on 15 October and a command was nominated with one person joining from every organisation under the cloak of a political organisation called the co-ordinating commission. This included adults from all of the parties that were going to provide ideological leadership to the Jewish Fighting Organisation, from which direction we were going to shoot at the Germans, whether from the left or the right, whether the flag should be red or blue or white, in short, the ideology of this organisation, what we were fighting for. This was set up. No one knows how it happened, this command met once, twice, three times, the roles were divided up, everyone had something to do. Everyone who was in this command, these five people, was leading a particular group. But there were no weapons, there were eight guns and that was it, the communists gave us those guns. There was that one gun that Jurek had bought and then seven or eight guns given to us unofficially by the communists as someone knew someone there. In fact it was Jóźwiak who'd arranged this after which people said he was the worst anti-Semite but he'd arranged this and he was a great guy. If you ask me if this had been given by the PPR or some other communist contacts, then I wouldn't be able to tell you today. But Jurek was the one who was in contact with them because he was on the Aryan side. Weapons are a desirable thing, he gave these weapons to his friends. We, the Bund groups, had one gun while they had six or seven, they might have had a grenade, no, they didn't have one. And that's how those militant groups were formed. There were several of them I don't remember how many but they were there.