Review of "The Ghetto Fights" by Marek Edelman

A short, gripping, but painful to read book about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and the prelude to it. Especially painful is the account of how so many Jews desperately wanted to believe that the stories of extermination camps were not true, and that they really would be relocated to find work in the East...and the way in which traditional Jewish strategies of accomodating to even the most oppressive authority, which had been "successful" in the past, turned out to be so terribly wrong in the case of the Nazis.

The book was published in English in the immediate post war period by the Bund, in the US, but it was only published relatively recently in the UK, and by Bookmarks, the SWP's publishing house. So there is a foreword by John Rose, an SWP member who has also written some decent history books. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Rose goes over the story of how the author, Marek Edelman, has been largely ignored by mainstream Jewish and Israeli audiences, because he remained true to his Bundist principles and continued to oppose Zionism. But I'd say he does this in a surprisingly generous way. He doesn't at all play down the contribution of Zionist fighters from the various Socialist-Zionist groups, or repeat any of the allegations about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. And he includes in afterwords the bad responses he's received from Zionist commentators, as well as his responses (which seem to me to be be scrupulously fair) to those when they were published.

It might have been interesting to have seen some discussion as to what the history means for the argument between Socialist-Zionists and Bundists. Zionists have generally acted as if the Holocaust proved that they were right all along. Bundists have often suggested that the way Israel has turned out proved that they were right all along. Still, this book probably isn't the place for that.