A pause to remember Warsaw ghetto

http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2008/04/20/last_survivor_honors_warsaw_ghetto_fighters/

WARSAW - The last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising paid silent tribute yesterday to the young Jews who launched the doomed revolt against Nazi troops 65 years ago.

Marek Edelman, 89, handed yellow tulips and daffodils to his grandchildren, Liza and Tomek. He watched as they placed them at the foot of the gray-and-black Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, located in a barren square at the heart of the former ghetto.

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The uprising was the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II. The Nazis walled off the ghetto in November 1940, cramming 400,000 Jews from across Poland into it, under inhuman conditions.

On April 19, 1943, German troops started to liquidate the ghetto by sending tens of thousands of its residents to death camps. In the face of imminent death, several hundred young Jews took up arms in defense of the civilians.

They held off German troops for three weeks with homemade explosives and a cache of smuggled weapons. The uprising ended when its main leaders - rounded up by the Nazis - committed suicide on May 8, 1943. The Nazis then razed the ghetto, street by street.

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Just a personal observation. My father was an American soldier during World War II, an Army paratrooper in the 101st and the 82nd Airborne Division. As a child I remember well two books we have in the family that he had obtained and kept. (This is very significant because we did not have a home library; to this day I only have two books, historical romantic novels, that he read for pleasure. Poor people used the library and only had the Bible as their personal book at home). But we had these books because they had photographs taken by the soldiers as they liberated the concentration camps, but they were not rescue photos. They were photos of the skeletal bodies they found, piled up to be dumped into open pits. These photos showed evidence of the physical hell on earth that humans had created for themselves. My brother, who was born in Germany during WWII and adopted by our dad, has custody of those two books. It is important that we continue to bear witness by listening to those who were there, who saw what happened, and who lived through it. My dad fell in love with and married a German lady (my mother), but he had no love lost for the Nazis, fighting and killing them into the heart of the Nazi empire. (My father was wounded by gun fire, shot through his left arm, but he returned to action with a cast on his arm. He also had his front teeth knocked out by a Nazi soldier's rifle butt, but my dad returned to action with dentures! ;-) As a small child I wondered why my dad had dentures, until I was old enough to understand the combat story.

My admiration for the man, Mr. Edelmen, profiled in the above article, who fought and survived, bearing witness.

One of the perfect components of the perfect address that Pope Benedict gave yesterday to youth and seminarians is his witness to what Nazis did, and what humans continue to have the capacity to do, both physically and spiritually:

My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew – infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion – before it was fully recognized for the monster it was. It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good. Many of your grandparents and great-grandparents will have recounted the horror of the destruction that ensued. Indeed, some of them came to America precisely to escape such terror.

Let us thank God that today many people of your generation are able to enjoy the liberties which have arisen through the extension of democracy and respect for human rights. Let us thank God for all those who strive to ensure that you can grow up in an environment that nurtures what is beautiful, good, and true: your parents and grandparents, your teachers and priests, those civic leaders who seek what is right and just.

The power to destroy does, however, remain. To pretend otherwise would be to fool ourselves. Yet, it never triumphs; it is defeated. This is the essence of the hope that defines us as Christians...