Page 6 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana. Edelman. The Man

‘You have one life

for all eternity’.

Marek
Edelman
Marek Edelman was born on 1 January, 1919 in Homel
(present-day Belarus). His parents were Socialists. Natan
Feliks Edelman, his father, was associated with the so-
called SRS – Russian socialist revolutionaries. He was born
in Warsaw, where he returned with his family when Marek
was a small child. Soon after their return in 1924, Natan
Edelman died.
The boy was left with his mother, Cecylia nee Percowska.
She was a member of a women’s organization Yidishe
Arbeter Froy (Working Jewish Woman) affiliated with
Bund – a left wing and anti-Zionist Jewish party. As
a result, Marek Edelman had a close association with
Jewish socialist circles from an his early age. Initially,
he was a member of the Bundist children organization
Sotsyalistisher Kinder-Farband (SKIF), later he joined
Tsukunft (‘the Future’), a socialist youth association.

His mother died in 1934, and the growing boy was taken
care of by people associated with Bund. ‘I’m not a family
person, I have never learned it, because I had no real family’,
he used to say.