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.
Former Israeli ambassador to Poland Shevach Weiss paid tribute to Edelman.
"He will remain in my memory as a fighting hero, a man of great courage," Weiss said. "He never ceased in his struggle for human freedom and for Poland's freedom."
The uprising at the Warsaw ghetto was the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II.
One of the few survivors of three weeks of uneven struggle in the Warsaw ghetto, Edelman 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.
"Remember them all — boys and girls — 220 altogether, not too many to remember their faces, their names," he said of the young fighters in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press.
'Man is evil, by nature man is a beast," he said then. 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.
"When you cannot defend freedom through peaceful means, you have to use arms to fight Nazism, dictatorship, chauvinism," Edelman said in the 2008 interview 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 Lodz, almost to his last day.
Edelman was born Jan. 1, 1919 in Homel, which was then in eastern Poland and is now in Belarus. His family soon moved to Warsaw.
When the Nazis invaded Poland on Sept.1, 1939, Edelman was member of Bund, a Jewish socialist organization that later masterminded plans for resistance against the occupying Germans.
The Germans set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming some 460,000 Jews from the city and from across Poland in inhuman conditions. After a year, almost half the people there had died of disease and starvation.
He is survived by his son, Aleksander, his daughter, Anna, and grandchildren Liza and Tomek.
giant marionette through Berlin. AP/Franka Bruns
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