Marek 
Edelman

‘I was born here, I went to school here. Here I learned to speak, read and write in Polish, here I learned to write and speak in Yiddish.
And here the Vistula River spoke Yiddish to me…
Here I learned what friendship is.
Here I saw wealth and poverty.
And here I was taught the duty of supporting the vulnerable ones, those who are beaten and persecuted, and the duty to oppose violence…’

‘My parents were shaped by Bund, a pre-war Jewish political party.
Bund meant friends, dignity and a value system which said that one has to help others and think less about oneself’.

‘At the very beginning of the war, on Żelazna Street, I saw some Germans putting an old Jew on a barrel and cutting his beard and side-locks with scissors.
And there were people gathered around, roaring with laughter. I told myself then that during this war I would never ever let anyone put me on a barrel’.

‘Despite the terror, despite the horrible hunger […] people were trying to live like people do: there were artistic soirées, literary works and artworks were created, a variety of underground life was organised. The atmosphere [thus] created brought forth our self-defence; some called it an uprising, and others – a fight for dignity…’

  ‘I found a mimeograph machine in a school at 29, Karmelicka Street. (…) I felt I just had to make use of it. I knew Rutka, who was the head of the laboratory in Dager’s photo studio. Well, Rutka had a radio in a cellar at Zamenhofa Street. She listened to the news and later wrote reports with the latest news by hand. I began to type them on a typewriter and copy them onto that mimeograph I’d found. I don’t remember how it happened that ‚Biuletyn’ started to be published instead of the radio reports’.

‘Only one man could have told them the truth [about the liquidation of the ghetto]: Czerniaków. They would have believed him. But he committed suicide. That wasn’t fair: he should have died with fireworks. Fireworks were very necessary at that time – he should have died having previously summoned the people to fight. Actually, it’s the only thing we blame him for. [...] Me and my friends. Those dead ones. [We blame him] For making his death his own, private matter. We knew that one had to die in public, for the world to see’.

‘I read in various accounts that people who were corralled to Umschlagplatz were screaming and crying. It isn’t true. Umschlagplatz was silent as a grave. From time to time, a child would cry. The carts driving people to Umschlagplatz were also completely silent. Deadly silence. And that was the dignity. Dignity, which frightened the Germans’.

‘We were groups of friends,
girls and boys, who’d been seeing each other
for years: classmates, friends from the same backyard, from youth organizations. It’s only from friends that you can demand the most difficult things, especially performing certain duties.
It was no an accident that
not a single case of betrayal occurred between us’.

‘This land covers the ashes of thousands of people. But it is not only the ashes of those people. The conscience of tacit Europe is also interred here. (…) Modern Europe will never
be what it had been before it experienced the crime of genocide. After the vast Holocaust, when some people became victims of mass murder, others became murderers, and still others were looking at that inertly in silence, no one could remain unchanged’.

‘(...) it wasn’t a complete relief. (…)
everything seemed sad, dark
and gloomy, and I was standing there alone, without my friends.
Without the people I had lived
and planned my future with’.

I’m standing here alone, I’m standing here by chance, as is probably the case throughout my life. Probably the universe also emerged by chance. (...) There is nothingness behind me. The nothingness into which hundreds of thousands of people perished, and I used to see them off to the train carriages. I have no right to speak on their behalf, because I don’t know whether they died with hatred or forgave their torturers. And now nobody will ever know. But it’s my duty to make sure that the memory of them doesn’t vanish. I know that the memory of those women, children, old and young people, who disappeared into nothingness, who were murdered without any sense or reason, is necessary. I know that the memory of them is necessary (…)’.

‘Wherever we were in the world,
we always looked in the same direction’.

‘To me, a man who had survived the Second World War, the harassment I was subjected to in 1968 was something petty and unworthy of my attention. But I know that for many people who had survived the Holocaust, that harassment was particularly difficult to bear. So they decided to leave Poland.

‘Under normal circumstances death is a natural thing. The point is that people who must die should die in some comfort, not like a dog in the street, they shouldn’t suffer and should be assisted till the end. It isn’t only up to the doctor. It depends on the nurses, on the general atmosphere in the ward. The point is to make a dying man still see the sun – and this is what depends on the atmosphere, or us.
What remained from those times, however, is the belief that life itself is the greatest value’.

‘On 13 December, they took me from here, from my home.
They came at 4 or 5 am.
I didn’t think anything was wrong.
What was I to be afraid of? That they would deport me?
I wouldn’t have died young anyway...’

‘They kept calling me. I can’t remember their names anymore. But they were high ranks. And they would invite me. But I didn’t go with them. For a long time I used to go alone (…).

‘When you look at evil and turn your head away, or you don’t help when you can, you become complicit.
Because by turning your head away you help those
who commit that evil.
And there were dozens of such cases.
It’s much easier and nicer to go to a café and savour a piece of cake than watch people being shot’.

‘Back then, during the war, the Germans built a wall around the hungry ghetto. Today, a wealthy Europe is building a wall around the world of the rich. (…)
And hunger is a thing that knows no borders, and no wall is going to stop the hungry.
That is why it is dangerous.
If Europe is closed, an enormous destabilization may occur. Especially that there are many hungry and unhappy people in Europe itself’

‘Today Europe is behaving like a holiday-maker out for a pleasant stroll, carelessly enjoying the merrygo-round next to the ghetto walls, behind which people are dying in flames. Indifference and crime bear the same name. That is why today we have to remember the merry-go-round at the burning ghetto [wall], the flames of the ghetto and its defenders, who after so many years might perhaps force the world to turn its attention to genocide. May this warning manage to save us from the defeat of civilization, humanity and progress. May the humans not destroy their species. May murder not become glory’.

 ‘Nationalism is a tool used by cynical and unscrupulous politicians.
The more primitive the man, the easier it is to turn him into a criminal by persuading him that he is better than others. It is equally easy to destroy some ethnic or religious group by convincing it that some other small group poses a threat and therefore has to be destroyed’.