Guest Post by David Rosenberg
“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors”.
The author of these words was the Bundist Marek Edelman who has just died aged 90. He was one of the commanders of the ZOB – the Jewish Fighting Organisation that led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.
To [...]
The Anthem of the Jewish Partisans: Zog Nit Keyn Mol
The news has just come through that Marek Edelman, leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising has passed away. Edelman cut his political teeth as a leader of the Jewish Workers Bund – a mass Jewish Marxist organisation – in prewar Poland – fighting against an authoritarian [...]
It never fails to annoy me when it’s claimed that some group or other is the ‘last’ group that it’s acceptable to be prejudiced about. Sure, there’s no denying we live in relatively enlightened times, but there are any number of marginalised sections of society that you can get away with offending without any fear [...]
As a visitor to a country it’s often difficult to pick up on the politics. Your experience ends up dominated by the tourist sites, and if you don’t speak the language then television news and newspapers are a brick wall. Thankfully, there was plenty of politics to be picked up in Poland, if you looked [...]
How much should we memorialise tragic events? Poland is home to many of the landmarks of horror associated with the Nazis. But of these arguably the two most notorious are memorialised in very different ways. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the concentration and extermination camps where over a million Jews, gypsies, communists, trade unionists and lesbians and gays [...]
N.B. This is the first of a number of posts from a recent trip to Eastern Europe. I’d hoped to put them up as I travelled, but technology and time got in the way.
Eastern Europe is a land of myths and legends. I don’t mean the sorts of myths that the guide books harp on [...]
