The Ghetto Fights is Marek Edelman’s account of Jewish armed resistance to the Nazis’ destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw from 1941-1943. Written in 1945 it is a near contemporary eye witness account of the most tragic and inspiring act of resistance to the Nazis. The parallels between one of the best equipped, technologically sophisticated armies of its time besieging and starving a civilian population while fighting a much inferior opposing force are stark.

Edelman was a member of the Bund, a Jewish organisation which was both trade union and political party. It had a variety of names including the Jewish Socialist Party and the General Jewish Workers Union of Poland. Ideologically it was closer to the Mensheviks than the Bolsheviks but was seen as part of the revolutionary socialist movement of its time. Stalin murdered many of its members. It opposed the emigration of Polish Jews to Palestine and polemicised with Zionist organisations on this, accusing them of collaborating with Polish anti-semites who agreed with them on the issue.

The Germans created the ghetto in Warsaw by surrounding it with a 3 metre high, 18 kilometre long wall and forced 500 000 of the city’s Jewish population into the sealed off area beginning in October 1940. Many of the forcibly displaced civilians had no housing in this killing zone and it is estimated that thousands died each month from starvation and disease.

Edelman’s account of the conditions in the ghetto will be familiar to anyone aware of what is happening in Gaza.

“The hunger increased daily…bodies with diseased feet, covered with open wounds, wrapped in dirty rags.” (p.40)

“The grave diggers were unable to dig fast enough. Although hundreds of corpses were being put into every grave, hundreds more had to lie around for several days..” (p.41)

“The Germans made it a habit to shoot passers-by without the slightest provocation.” (p.49)

“Three children sit… A gendarme passing by, shoots all three with a single round.” (p.52)

“Sweating, feverish children lie helplessly in their mothers’ arms.

Killing for sport and terror

Many of the German techniques used in Warsaw are now being used by the Israelis in Gaza with the unconditional support of the American, British and German governments. The population has been uprooted and confined into an open air slaughterhouse where it’s deprived of shelter, food, water and medical supplies. Random killing for sport and to terrorise the population is widely reported, a difference being that the Israelis appear to have a policy of deliberately creating a large number of child amputees. People are left to decompose under rubble; medical staff and intellectuals are specifically targeted.

Those of us on the left can identify with the Bund. There is a direct intellectual and emotional link with them that it is not possible to have with a reactionary religious organisation like Hamas. The Bund were socialists and internationalists. Unlike the Zionists, they saw Jewish workers as an integral part of the European working class and when they launched their armed struggle against the Nazis they knew that it was doomed. Their purpose was to show to workers in Poland and across Europe that it was both possible and necessary to resist fascism.

German imperialism’s first experiment with genocide was in Namibia at the beginning of the 20^th century. As with every other colonial power, they legitimised mass murder and genocide by asserting their own moral, cultural and intellectual superiority over peoples they designated as inferior. No one in Israel is proposing the industrialised mass slaughter of Palestinians but there is a definite racial supremacist strand of thought in Israeli society which sees the continuing physical survival of a Palestinian population as a threat to the Zionist state. The settler movement, funded with a lot of American money is its spearhead and if they criticise Netanyahu for anything, it is for not killing Palestinians in sufficient numbers quickly enough.

Marek Edelman survived the war and remained in Poland as an anti-Stalinist socialist. He refused to give Jew haters in European society what they wanted. The introduction to the Bookmarks edition of The Ghetto Fights was written by John Rose. By pure chance I was at a screening of The London Recruits, a new film in which he features which began with an announcement he had died that day. It tells the story of how he and other young anti-apartheid activists from abroad ran secret missions for the ANC and is a better obituary than most of us will get.