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French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (R) awards Marek Edelman with the French Legion of Honour on April 15, 2008 at the French Embassy in Warsaw.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2008
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WARSAW (EJP)---Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was awarded with France’s highest distinction, the Order of Commander of the Legion of Honour.
Edelman, who is 86, was decorated on Tuesday by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner at the French embassy in Warsaw, on the day Poland commemorated the 65th anniversary of the start of the Jewish insurrection against the Nazis on 19 April 1943.
The decision to award Edelman was personally made by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy a few days ago.
So far, the prestigious distinction has been awarded in Poland to scientist Mary Curie-Sklodowska, playwright Slawomir Mrozek, former Polish PM Tadeusz Mazowiecki and filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.
Kouchner said Edelman embodies heroism, persistence, freedom and fraternity.” He is our model, our hero, our resistant,” the minister added. “He is an epic Jew and a tireless militant”.
“The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the mother of all insurrections,” Kouchner stressed.
A member of the Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, a secular Yiddish-speaking socialist organization, he was among the founders of the underground "Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa" or Jewish Fighting Organization which took part in the ghetto uprising.
He took over as commander after the death of Mordechai Anilewicz. After the uprising collapsed, Edelman and some of his comrades succeeded in escaping the Nazis.
He decided to stay in Poland after the war and became a cardiologist in Lodz where he lives today. He later became an activist of the Solidarity movement and served as a member of the Sejm, the Polish parliament.
His wife Alina, who worked with Bernard Kouchner in the Doctors Without Frontiers association, died earlier this month.
Edelman said the uprising and the entire Holocaust of European Jewry showed man's moral weakness."It was not Germans who did that. These were people, all of this was done just by people," he added.
But he preferred to stay away of Tuesday’s official commemorations of the uprising anniversary.
