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Marek Edelman, RIP
Sometimes insurgents are the good guys, and Marek Edelman was one of the good guys. He died a over a week ago, and when I read his obituary in the newspaper after his passing, I found myself shaking my head in awe. "What a life."
I always like the back-page obituaries in the Economist because they tend to celebrate the lives of the men and women they profile rather than mourn their passing. On the heels of a highly amusing obituary for William Safire last week, the Economist then did Edelman justice this week.
The odds were overwhelming. He was deputy commander of 220 untrained “boys” with pistols and home-made explosives. Against them were around 2,000 Nazi soldiers, the pick of the Wehrmacht, with plenty more behind them. The Nazis had come on the eve of Passover, April 19th 1943, to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, from which they had been deporting 6,000 Jews a week to the death camps. For almost a month Mr Edelman helped keep them at bay, barricaded in the streets around the brushmakers’ district until the whole place was burned down round him.
wow. mega badass. speaking
wow. mega badass. speaking of which, you should totally check out this site, or at least the following entries:
http://badassoftheweek.com/massoud.html ahmad shah massoud
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaitsev.html vasily zaitsev
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kauser.html my personal favorite, rukhsana kauser, who took out Lashkar-e-Taiba assholes with her little brother in self-defense. UBER badass.
yup, he was a Polish
yup, he was a Polish nationalist to the end (in spite of all the compelling reasons for a Jew, living in Poland during and after the Shoah, not to be). The Warsaw ghetto fighters were a diverse bunch-- many Zionist, many non-Zionist. Many nationalist, many internationalist-Marxist. Many of its leaders (Mordechai Anielewicz, however you spell his name, comes to mind) used previously existing Zionist clubs and organizations to mobilize the resistance.
The differences tended to blur against the Nazi enemy, for obvious reasons.
Hello ex-IDF I've probably
Hello ex-IDF
I've probably missed the boat on this post but did you ever come across talk of this guy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Trepper
He ended up in Israel, although I understand his earlier orientation to be anti-zionist (he thought of it as another ethnic nationalism).
thanks
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