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| Photo Internet. Khalad Nabhan with his granddaughter before her murder (Soul of my Soul) |
In 1939 the German Nazis took control of Warsaw and in 1940 set up the Ghetto where they locked in 300,000 Jews and later in 1942, they began to take them to places like Treblinka to murder them. In 1943 the Jews rose up. Marek Edelman was the only surviving commander of the rebellion. Jewish, antizionist and a courageous man. He wrote about his experiences in the Ghetto. His first work was The Ghetto Fights and later in 2013, following his death, There was also Love in the Ghetto, an oral history transcribed by Paula Sawicka. We sometimes forget that struggles interrupt daily life and this in turn interrupts struggles. In wars and conflicts real people fight, die, are born and love.
Why does nobody ever ask me about love in the Ghetto? Why is nobody interested in that? Someone should make a film about love in the Ghetto. It was love that helped you resist.[1]
There was also love in Gaza and there still is. There was love when it was a biblical town, and also in 1947 when it became a refugee camp for thousands fleeing Zionist terror. There was love when those same Zionists turned it into a Ghetto. And there is still love in Gaza in the midst of the genocide. Edelman didn’t just talk of romantic love, though he does tell various stories about it, of the joy that they found in love whilst the Nazis stalked them, but also fraternal love, parental, of community, of what and those who have no relationship to you.
Reading his books, the comparisons that can be made with Gaza are surprising. Every day in Gaza the people struggle, in a thousand different ways they give themselves over to the struggle to survive. There are those who could have escaped Gaza before the genocide, but did not do so. In Warsaw there were people who crossed over on missions to what Edelman calls the Aryan side and returned. Others had the option to leave, Edelman himself got many out, but some chose to stay.
Then came the mother’s turn. And at that moment the woman turns and says no, that she is not going. That she has been strongly attached to someone for over a year and it has been the happiest year of her life. So, she stayed. She remained by my side [Edelman] until her daughters waved to her from a window on the Aryan side, as we had arranged. The following morning, Władka took them to a flat prepared for them, where they survived the occupation.
In Gaza there are those who carry out play activities with children, music etc. to distract them for a while from the stench of death that surrounds them.[2] Many of them have fallen under the Zionist bombs or died at the hands of some murderous Zionist sniper. In the Warsaw Ghetto they also carried out classes and activities with the children. Edelman talks of how they set up a Drama Club and in 1941. 12,000 children attended their productions and two works, The Dolls and The Granary were performed 80 times. A huge cultural effort to keep the children’s spirit up. Any similarity to Gaza is spot on.
And then there are the doctors. Dr Abu Safia has a foreign passport, he could have escaped Gaza at any time, or at least tried to. But he never wanted to. There are interviews with him on the internet in which he is interrupted by bombings. Some of these interviews were carried out by Anas-al-Sharit a journalist murdered by the Zionists. Dr Abu Safia stayed, fully aware of the fate that awaited him. In the end the Zionists kidnapped him and now he rots in some part of the Zionist Gulag.[3] Similar things were seen in Warsaw.
Only Hendusia and Roza accompanied the children to Warsaw and then on their final journey. Hendusia could have got out of the Ghetto, saved herself, survive, but she didn’t want the children to be afraid, to cry. She stayed with them, even though she knew what awaited them. Was it out of a sense of duty or love for them? Back then, they were the same thing.
The doctors, journalists, clowns that played with the children of Gaza also stayed out of love and duty. We see it every day, whether it be when some doctor is interviewed or when he is murdered. We see children run amongst the ruins of what were their houses, schools, hospitals, playgrounds and more. Edelman describes similar situations. Any reading of Edelman inevitably brings to mind Gaza. The German Nazis’ tactics are similar to the Zionist Nazis’.
They played with the hunger of the people. In order to convince them to voluntarily board the trains they were told that they were going to another place to work and were given a hefty ration of bread (three kilos) and marmalade (one kilo). Edelman and the Resistance warned people about the reality of it all, but in their desperation many, though not all, didn’t want to believe them. Some preferred the comforting lie of bread, just like the Palestinian children and adults who queue to receive food in Gaza and are later murdered by Nazis of Zionist stock. He points out and reminds us that whilst they died of hunger in the Ghetto, the German Nazis made propaganda films showing hungry people and displays of food smuggled from the Aryan side. But the reality was that the Nazis played with the food and the children. The children would sneak out to seek bread and return, and Edelman tells us that every day a shot would ring out and another child would drop dead with bread under his arm, just like Amir, the Palestinian child murdered after kissing the hand of an employee of the Zionist agency GHF (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) and thanking him for the food he had picked up.[4] It is a propaganda body set up by Israel. Almost every day after handing out food, the Zionist armed forces shoot into the crowd and in one of those massacres little Amir fell. The German Nazis turned the murder of hungry kids into a routine; the Zionists keep that tradition alive. Theirs is a grotesque tradition.
Children are the most vulnerable in any conflict and obviously if their parents are dead, they are at greater risk. Not only did they die from the Nazis’ bullets in Warsaw, but they also died of hunger, a hunger resulting from the measures the Nazis had implemented, just like the hunger in Gaza.
At the start of Karmelicka St., there is a small alcove in the doorway of No. 6. Some children sit there to beg. Pale, emaciated, they can barely move; they barely have the strength to stretch out their hand. Beside them lies a child covered with paper. He died in that spot. A little further on, near Leszno, a young girl used to sit, hoping for some money, she used to sing a song. She sat there for a long time, until one day she sat down and went to sleep. She never woke up. With her head resting on the wall, she waits for someone to turn up the next day to throw her body onto a cart of naked corpses.
Yet another tradition the Zionists keep alive and perfect. Of course, the Warsaw Ghetto lasted for three years and the German Nazis entertained themselves after their murders. Every day they randomly shot adults and children in the street. Only meters from where they committed their crimes they held parties.
Every day after the curfew, cars flocked to the Hotel Bretaña. Every night the Germans would amuse themselves here. They had their girls inside, and it is not known whether it is a place for parties or a brothel. The street is deserted. Music can be heard. It is most likely the Germans are dancing. Children gather round the terrace. They hope for someone to toss a cigarette butt out the window. And in the early morning a cart will pass by and take away various children’s corpses.
It reminds me of the current genocide and the previous military operations when the Zionists walked up hills near Gaza to drink alcohol and watch the bombs fall on defenceless civilians or the boats that now go out to sea with children aboard to offer them a view of Gaza and the genocide. The lack of empathy, the sadism, the complete lack of compassion. For those travellers on the cruises, the Palestinians are subhuman, Untermenschen, as the German Nazis would put it. I don’t know how the Zionist Nazis would say it in Hebrew, but I do know they are raising another generation of Zionist Nazis.
In the midst of the repression and Nazi violence there were collaborators. In the Warsaw Ghetto, there were Jewish policemen, who detained other Jews to hand them over to the Nazis. Just like ICE in the USA they had a quota of people to hand over (seven per day) and they didn’t care who they were. According to Edelman they were the most inflexible in their duty, they handed over doctors and even lost children. There was also a Jewish Council set up by the Nazis to administer the Ghetto, the Judenrat, and there was no shortage of those who argued against violence. They argued that it was best not to provoke the Nazis. Of course, here we have a clear difference between Warsaw and Gaza. In Warsaw such traitors were in the midst of the population. With Gaza they are far away. The Palestinian police that collaborates with the Zionist Nazis are in the West Bank, the Judenrat is the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas. They collaborate with the Israelis on a daily basis, with the occupation forces. They do not shoot at the Israelis but rather against other Palestinians in the West Bank who resist.
Edelman urges us to bear in mind what the Holocaust was, as in the West a single person is blamed: Hitler. The entire capitalist set up at the time was part of the Holocaust. Companies like IBM, Coca Cola, Siemens, IG Farben etc. that took part in the war and the Holocaust itself are not mentioned. Those who remind of this are dissident discordant voices; they are not those of the governments or mainstream media. Now in the midst of the genocide, some Zionist apologists want to lay the blame on one person: Netanyahu. But he doesn’t act on his own, not even in Israel. He has the support of the population, foreign governments, the European Union, large companies. There are multiple people responsible for the Gaza genocide. They are to be found in Paris, London, Washington and of course Berlin where the current government wants to be remembered as what were termed in the trials of the Argentinian Juntas, necessary collaborators, i.e. people or entities whose participation was necessary and without that participation it couldn’t have gone ahead. Without Germany, Britain, France, the USA, the EU there would be no genocide in Gaza. According to Edelman:
Above all we should remember one thing: what the Holocaust was. It is not true that it was a Jewish issue. It is not true that it was about four szmalcowniks (informers). Or fourteen. Or forty. Or four hundred. It is not true that it was about those one hundred or two hundred thousand Germans that personally took part in the extermination. No, it was about Europe and the European civilisation that created the factories of death. The Holocaust was a defeat for civilisation. And unfortunately, that defeat did not end in 1945. We have to remember it. Everyone should remember it. The question of memory is a political question. Politics shapes society’s memory, the group’s; it doesn’t matter if it’s about the group of us here, or a business association, or a national one. All of this is shaped by politics. The politics of totalitarian countries does so with greater force. The Hitlerite propaganda was magnificent; it shaped memory on the basis of murder, as Goebbels was a great propagandist. And this has continued up to now.
It is true. We are repeating a genocide because societies forgot what happened in the Holocaust. We blame individuals and not economic, political or military powers and there are those who believe Gaza is an aberration in international politics when really it is an integral part of it. Israel will fall and though I am not confidant, I hope we have the opportunity to see all of those responsible in a tribunal similar to Nuremberg, and that we see them all swinging from the gallows. There was love in Warsaw, there was love in Gaza and we should seek justice and vengeance. Neither forgive nor forget any of them, from the rank-and-file soldier to the presidents and CEOs of multinationals. In practice many were pardoned after Nuremberg, that mistake should not be made twice.
Edelman’s books should be read. They talk of the past and the present. I cannot do them justice here. You have to read them over and again as what they describe has happened over and again since 1945. Edelman finishes The Ghetto Fights saying that those who did not perish in Warsaw leave to us the duty to keep the memory of those who fell, alive. We didn’t do that. We failed. Gaza is the irrefutable proof of that.
References
[1] All textual quotes are from There was Love in the Ghetto. There is no English version available and the translations are mine.
[2] You can see the work of some of these people at.
[3] See.
[4] Middle East Monitor (31/07/2025) Child in Gaza kisses aid worker’s hand before being fatally shot by Israeli forces.
"The question of memory is a political question."
ReplyDeleteMarek Edelman
And hence it is often distorted and manipulated, sometmes consciously, and at other times unconsciously.