http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/warsaw-uprising.html
Marek Edelman was one of the originators of the Warsaw Uprising. In April 1943 he, along with others such as Mordecai Anielewicz, Chaim Frimmer and Adam Halperin embarked on a violent uprising, using a combination of home-made and obsolete weapons, against the Nazis. Their aim was to stop the Nazis from transporting them to Treblinka, one of the Operation Reinhard camps, and murdering them. Before 1943 there was no insurgency to speak of, only uncoordinated acts of personal resistance.
Edelman helped set up one of the two groups in the Warsaw ghetto who looked to violently resisting the Nazis, the Jewish Military Union. Both organisations together, the JMU and the Jewish Fighting Organisation, had less than a thousand guns, mostly hand pistols with a few submachine guns and 30 rifles. Oh, and some grenades.
It took a month of fighting for the Nazi war machine to quell the uprising, which it did by essentially demolishing the ghetto and killing anyone still in it. Most of its residents either died in the various Nazi assaults, or were sent to the death camps if unlucky enough to be captured alive. But it was a hard fight, so much so that it cracked the aura of Nazi invincibility. Revolts started all over Nazi held territories, including Treblinka and Sobibor, where prisoners were under constant surveillance and had next to no access to weaponry.
Edelman was one of the lucky few to escape, via the sewers. He also took part in the 1944 uprising, was part of the resistance to Stalinism, was in the workers resistance in Poland in the seventies and had a key role in Solidarity when it emerged in the 80s. The above is a link his account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Now why isn't this guy's life a movie?
Because he wasn't the Jew Bear?
because people aren't interested in reality
they're interested in how America kicks ass... and saved the world from (insert evil doers here)
Wasn't part of this covered in The Pianist? I ask because I only saw roughly half of it several years ago and remember almost nothing about it.
Took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about.
:lulz:
Thanks for pointing that out.
Quote from: Iason Ouabache on October 07, 2009, 05:44:25 PM
Wasn't part of this covered in The Pianist? I ask because I only saw roughly half of it several years ago and remember almost nothing about it.
Ok, actually read the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_(2002_film)) on it. The part in the movie (and memoir) was more about how Władysław Szpilman was on the periphery for the Warsaw Uprising and managed to get out of the ghetto before it happened. He didn't have any connection to Edelman. My bad.