WARSAW (AFP) — As Poland prepares to commemorate the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis, the last leader of the Jewish revolt is still crystal clear about what drove him and his comrades to take up arms.
"We knew perfectly well that there was no way we could win," Marek Edelman, 85, told AFP in an interview.
"It was a symbol of the fight for freedom. A symbol of standing up to Nazism, and of not giving in," he said ahead of the April 15 commemoration.
The annual ceremony has been brought forward because this year the actual April 19 anniversary of the outbreak of the revolt falls on the Jewish Sabbath.
Edelman is not planning to take part in the official event, due to be attended by Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his Israeli opposite number Shimon Peres, preferring instead to remember his comrades in private.
The spark for the uprising was the decision by Poland's World War II German occupiers to wipe out the ghetto.
The ghetto, set up in 1940 by the invaders to isolate the thriving Jewish community in the capital, contained over 450,000 people at its height.
About 100,000 died inside from hunger and disease, and over 300,000 were sent to Nazi death camps, mostly in mass deportations in 1942 to Treblinka in eastern Poland.
As the Germans moved against the remaining 60,000 ghetto dwellers, a estimated 1,000 Jews, mostly in their teens and twenties, decided to make a last stand against the "Final Solution".
Edelman's underground movement, the ZOB, had several hundred members, and in the months before the revolt had scraped together a small arsenal and built ties with other groups.
The fighters first clashed with Nazi troops from January 18-22, managing to hinder the deportations.
"That gave us some confidence," said Edelman, who was just 20 at the time.
"It was the Germans who actually set the date for our uprising" on April 19, he said.
"On the first day, we attacked the columns of Germans who moved into the ghetto to liquidate it. They had to pull out. That was our day of total victory," he said.
"The Germans withdrew. They changed commander, and Juergen Stroop was put in charge of the operation," he added.
Stroop, a senior SS officer, was notoriously brutal. Arrested in Germany and tried in Poland after the war, he was executed in 1952.
"Of course, nobody could have expected to win. We weren't stupid. We knew perfectly well what the situation was," said Edelman, noting that Soviet forces were still fighting the Nazis far to the east and that the Western Allies were yet to open a second front against the Axis powers.
"We wanted to defend the population of the ghetto, to do as much as possible to delay the deportation to the death camps," he explained.
"On the second day, we fought a pitched battle at a camouflage factory. We lost, and that's when the street fighting started. It was a guerrilla operation. We had the whole population behind us, we knew all the secret passages and hiding places."
The fighters managed to hold out for almost a month.
With his 3,000 troops unable to snuff out the revolt as fast as expected, Stroop decided to burn down the ghetto, building by building.
The 24-year-old leader of the uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, and 80 comrades committed suicide in their command bunker on May 8, as Nazi forces closed in.
Edelman took his place and, along with around 40 fighters, escaped through the sewers on May 10.
Skirmishes gradually petered out over the following days, and on May 16 Stroop ordered Warsaw's main synagogue to be blown up to mark his "victory over the Jews".
Around 7,000 Jews died in the revolt, most of them burned alive, and more than 50,000 were deported to the death camps.
Estimated Nazi losses were 300, dead and injured combined.
Edelman and his comrades vowed to continue the battle, and he later fought in an unsuccessful two-month uprising launched by the Polish resistance in Warsaw on August 1, 1944.
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