Why is this night different from all other nights?

[struggle4progress]

Last commander marks 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising

WARSAW (AFP) — The last commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, Marek Edelman, .... 85, was .. pushed in his wheelchair to the site of the bunker where the leader of the revolt, 24-year-old Mordechaj Anielewicz, and 80 comrades had committed suicide as Nazi forces closed in ...

Edelman, who took command after Anielewicz's death, rarely attends high-profile official ceremonies, preferring to remember his comrades in a lower-key fashion on April 19, the day the revolt actually began ...

"We knew perfectly well that there was no way we could win .... It was a symbol of the fight for freedom. A symbol of standing up to Nazism, and of not giving in," he said ...

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jwI50AQ38fw-eNGZDLkb0HuakUGQ

Ghetto uprising leader remembers the brave 220

... Edelman, who still works as a doctor in a Lodz hospital, becomes emotional when he speaks of the struggle he helped launch.

“I remember them all – boys and girls – 220 all together, not too many to remember their faces, their names,” he said ...

About 40 surviving fighters escaped through the city’s sewers and joined the Polish partisans.

“No one believed he would be saved,” said Edelman ...

http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=193694

The Freedoms Of Passover

This year, the celebration of Passover coincides with the anniversary of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto ...

A morbid curtain of death separated the Warsaw ghetto from the rest of humanity. There was no hope of escape. Public prayer was forbidden and punished by execution. Yet prayer services were held in hundreds of clandestine locations. Secret factories fabricated matzoh. Thousands of children affirmed their freedom to be human by studying the Torah in underground schools. Secular cultural activities flourished in the hollow of this hell. Theater productions, for example, were staged in Yiddish, Russian and Hebrew.

Why did these people use their last vestige of freedom this way? Consider the example of historian Emmanuel Ringelblum. He chose to use his freedom to create an underground archive documenting the Nazi atrocities and, more important, the refusal of the Jewish people to surrender their religious, cultural and political life to Nazi tyranny. The records were buried in large milk cans and discovered after the war ended ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/18/AR2008041802465.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

... with bread unleavened and bitter herbs ... loins girded, sandals on your feet, staff in hand, hurriedly ...

[Sinistrous]

1. With a full heart, I thank you.

[bahrbearian]

2. We must remember these atrocities , less we repeat them.

Maybe too late already.

[razors edge]

3. They should have fought back instead.

[Chulanowa]

4. They did

Read up on the events of the Warsaw Ghetto.

[razors edge]

5. Just reading the post,

they committed suicide, how many of their own could they have saved by fighting back?

How many Germans might they have stopped? Suicide is pointless.

[struggle4progress]

6. The Warsaw Ghetto

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/warsawtoc.html

[Chulanowa]

7. Modern histroy has a funny way of glossing things over

It seems that some history sources would rather have us believe the HOlocaust victims were like lambs to slaughter, rather than human beings who strove to escape and fought back when and where they could. I have no idea why history tries to paint the victims of the Nazis as being so complacent about it - I suppose it's the same "cuddly martyr" thing that has turned MLK from a rather radical firebrand into a big teddy bear.