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Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna]; date recoded: 2003]
TRANSCRIPT: It depends on what you want to know. Of course, I could just talk about trivial things, this is how it was, the sun shone, we had soup, there was this and that. But that's not the whole truth since all of these events the minute, the great and the small were all taking place within a certain atmosphere, which affected everything, an atmosphere of terror or hunger or filth, an atmosphere where people knew that something very bad was going to happen. The first action was when 260 or 80,000 people were deported to Treblinka and everyone already knew that they were going to their death, that there were gas chambers there, so 60,000 people were left who, after a big selection which took place and was meant to leave 44,000 but some more were smuggled through illegally and so there were more or less 60,000 of them all desperate because they knew what was waiting for them. It was a very strange group of people, that wanted to live, to live fast and to the full.
