History must be based on truth and truth alone. This truth is missing in the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Why?

This is not at all easy to explain after the passing of so many years. In Poland under Communist rule, there was officially one false story of a ghetto uprising involving the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB), with its leader Mordechaj Anielewicz.

When German troops crossed the ghetto gate at seven o'clock in the morning on 19 April 1943, the Nazis were greeted with petrol bottles, grenades, pistol shots and several rifles by 20-30-strong groups of ŻOB fighters. They were commanded by Mordechai Anielewicz. The poorly armed insurgents defended themselves until 8 May, when most of the organisation's command, including Anielewicz, committed collective suicide in a bunker at 18 Miła Street. A handful of insurgents survived. They left for the Aryan side through the sewers. This story was reproduced on radio, television, in history textbooks, books and newspaper articles for many years after the war ended.

For propaganda reasons, it was more convenient for the Communists to immortalise the uprising of the leftist Jewish youth in the ghetto than the heroism of the military formations of the Jewish Military Union. While some were erased from history, monuments were erected to others, and they were made patrons of schools, streets and squares.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE One of the first after the war to officially mention the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) was Bernard Mark, director of the Jewish Historical Institute (, 'The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising', Warsaw 1963). He mentioned two leaders of this organisation: David Appelbaum - alias. 'Jabłoński', 'Kowal', 'Mietek' - and Paweł Frenkel. 20 years later, Wacław Poterański, an employee of the Department of Party History at the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), wrote about the participation of the ŻZW in the ghetto struggle ('Warszawskie getto', Warsaw 1983). He estimated the fighting Jewish forces in the ghetto at about one thousand men.

He wrote: , "The ŻOB had 23 combat units, including 5 GL (People's Guard) units, and the ŻZW had 3 platoons" - without explaining where the People's Guard units had come from and how a unit differed in number from a platoon. He added that: , "The Warsaw AK (Home Army) District Command donated dozens of pistols, several hundred grenades, 1 machine gun and many explosives to the ŻOB. The People's Guard also provided dozens of pistols and a considerable amount of explosives. The Jewish Military Union had 2 machine guns, many hand grenades and bombs. The PLAN combat group supplied grenades and small arms to the ŻZW soldiers, and the KB [Security Corps] group of Major Henryk Iwański "Bystry" with three cases of "filipinka" type grenades. The rest of the weaponry was produced on the spot [incendiary bottles and mines - note M.K.]".

Poteranski's book was the official position of the Polish communist authorities on the obscure history of the ghetto uprising due to the participation of militant organisations in it. In the introduction to the book, another communist historian, Ryszard Nazarewicz, wrote: "Poteranski's work will contribute to the formation of a rational view of the past, to the dissemination of progressive, patriotic and internationalist content". Communist rule ended in 1989, and Nazarevich's message has remained relevant to some of the public, including some historians, to this day. Apart from the People's Guard units concocted by Poteranski.

The birth of a myth

In November 1945, Marek Edelman, a surviving member of the ŻOB leadership, gave his written memoirs of his stay and uprising in the ghetto to the well-known Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska. After reading it, she wrote: , "This book, the typescript of which was brought to me by a stranger, the young author, one of the leaders of the Jewish Uprising, I read in one breath, not breaking away from it for a moment. (...) His non-literary short story achieves what not all masterpieces manage to do'.

Edelman's memoirs appeared in print under the title "Ghetto fights", with the annotation: "The Bund's participation in the defence of the ghetto". This note disappeared in the edition reissued under martial law in 1983 (CDN underground publishing house) and in another one in 1987, published by Solidarność Walcząca. Marek Edelman had already become an oracle and a hero of the uprising a few years earlier, after the publication of interviews with him by reporter Hanna Krall in her book 'To Outrun Before God' (Warsaw 1977). Sentences uttered by him were quoted uncritically: "... for each fighter there is on average one revolver (10-15 cartridges), 4-5 grenades, 4-5 incendiary bottles. There are 2-3 rifles for each area. There is one machine gun for the entire ghetto". Few wondered how, with such armament, the Germans did not liquidate the insurgent resistance in a few days.

In Krall's book, the ŻOB reigns supreme; there is not a single sentence about the ŻZW. The author admitted years later in a conversation with Helena Zaworska ('Playing in the light and dark. A conversation with Hanna Krall", [in]: "It's Good That I Lived. Conversations with writers'. Muza, Warsaw 2002), that "if I had known at that time as much about the ghetto and the uprising as I later learned from numerous books, chronicles, reports, testimonies - I would never have dared to enter into conversation with Edelman. I would have been paralysed by the subject". The book, translated into several languages, went around the world. Well-written, but inconsistent with the truth. This falsified and incomplete picture of the ghetto uprising was later uncritically reproduced.

Appelbaum or Apfelbaum?

My first encounter with the insurgents of the Jewish Military Union took place in the early 1990s, when collecting documentation for a monograph on the 4th Home Army "Gurt" Grouping in the Warsaw Uprising. During the German occupation, the grouping had a gunsmith's shop in the morgue and a weapons storehouse in the infectious diseases hospital at 37 Wolska Street.

The cleaned and working weapons - dug out from places hidden after the capitulation of Warsaw in 1939, including in Wola district - were not only supplied to the underground units of the Home Army, but some were also given to the Jewish Military Union, which had been active in the underground since the end of 1939. I could not keep silent about this. despite the comments of fellow historians that it would be better not to touch this subject. In three texts printed in 'Plus Minus', the Saturday-Sunday edition of the daily newspaper 'Rzeczpospolita' ('The unfinished story of Appelbaum in Anielewicz's shadow', 12 October 2002; 'Forgotten soldiers of the ŻZW', 12 June 2004; 'The white-red armband with a Star of David', 12/13 March 2005), I described the participation of the ŻZW in the fighting in the ghetto. The texts were reprinted by the American and Canadian press, and there was silence in the country. Apart from an anonymous letter addressed to me, sent to the editors of the "Rzeczpospolita", with uncensored sentences beginning: "Goy, why are you meddling in a story that is not your own?".

For this is a story with officers, cadets and non-commissioned officers of the Polish Army, Lieutenant-Captain Mieczysław Dawid Moryc Apfelbaum, who fought in the defence of Warsaw in 1939, Second Lieutenant Henryk Lifszyc (Lipiński), cadet Kalmen Mendelson (after the war Madajewski) and others. Dawid Wdowiński wrote about them, and the Jewish Military Union organised with their participation, in his book , "And we are not saved" (New York, 1963), and the second edition of 1985 includes a description of the activities of the Jewish Military Union by Chaim Lazar. Wdowinski was president of the Polish Zionist Party Revisionist Organisation before the outbreak of the Second World War. His name never appeared in the official literature describing the uprising in the Polish People's Republic. The book remained untranslated. Why?

Members of the ŻZW represented right-wing political Jewish organisations active in the Second Polish Republic. For example, Dawid Wdowinski - Hatzohar, ZZW military commander Pawel Frenkel - Betar party, journalist Leib ,,Leon" Rodal - Revisionists. The ŻZW was organisationally divided into ten departments. Informational was headed by Rodal, Organisational by Frenkel, Communications (contacts with the Aryan side, the Security Corps and the Home Army) by Appelbaum, Military jointly by Rodal with Appelbaum. This is how it was presented in his book by Wdowinski, with this spelling of the name - Appelbaum, which I repeated in my publications.

In 2002, Marian Apfelbaum's book 'Retour sur le ghetto de Varsovie' was published in Paris, translated into Polish a year later and published by the Krakow-based Wydawnictwo Literackie under the title 'Two Banners. On the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising'. In 2004, the book appeared in Israel, published by Yad Vashem. The author, a professor of medicine, dedicated it to his relatives: Mieczysław Dawid Apfelbaum and Irena Apfelbaum, who were killed in the Warsaw uprisings. He and his parents - his father Emil, a doctor, was head of the cardiology department at the Czyste hospital before the war - got out of the ghetto through sewers to the Aryan side. "We survived," he wrote, "thanks to the help of wonderful people, and throughout my adult life the desire not so much to repay the debt as to show gratitude has never left me'. Professor Apfelbaum used all the sources, documents and accounts available to him in the book, including reports by the German SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, who liquidated the resistance in the ghetto.

In the second half of December 2003, I was invited to the Jewish Historical Institute for a meeting with academics, historians and publicists. The topic of the discussion was my article " Appelbaum in the shadow of Anielewicz", which appeared in issue 239/2002 of "Plus Minus", a supplement to "Rzeczpospolita". In it, I used, among other things, documents and accounts of Colonel Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki, head of the Home Army intelligence service, and Lieutenant "Bednarz" Tadeusz Bednarczyk of the Military Organisation - Security Cadre, from November 1943 the Security Corps (OW-KB). My interlocutors questioned the number and origin of the armaments given by the AK to the Jewish Military Union and the credibility of Bednarczyk's account of the numbers, training and armaments of the ŻZW and its superiority in all respects to the Jewish Combat Organisation.

The meeting followed the promotion of the Polish edition of Marian Apfelbaum's book, of which I was one of the reviewers. At the meeting, I proposed setting up a team of Polish and Jewish historians to compile a true history of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. This is not just Jewish history, it is our common history. My proposal was followed by a silence that continues to this day.

Jewish fascists

Barbara Engelking, a psychologist and sociologist (post-doctoral) who heads the Holocaust Research Centre at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, expressed doubts about the existence of the ŻZW even at the beginning of the 21st century. How difficult it is to unmask history is evidenced by the book "The Warsaw Ghetto. A Guide to a Non-Existent City" (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences Publishing House, Warsaw 2001). In it, authors Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak write: "According to the account of Władysław "Żarski" Zajdler, on 27 April an 18-man AK unit under the command of Henryk Iwański "Bystry" and "Żarski" himself, together with a ŻZW unit under the command of Dawid Apfelbaum, fought a day-long battle with the Germans in the ghetto. This joint fight, however, is not confirmed in other sources, and it is also known that the ŻZW fighters left the ghetto earlier."

Collaborating historian (graduate of the Catholic University of Lublin) Dariusz Libionka, together with Laurence Weinbaum (graduate of the University of Warsaw and Georgetown University in Washington, DC) wrote and published in 2011 the book 'Heroes, hoaxers, describers. Around the Jewish Military Union'. They are the authors of the sentences: "Without denying the goodwill of the advocates of the commemoration of the ŻZW in Warsaw, we warn against the danger of entrenching the historical falsehood of further glorifying 'Major' Apfelbaum and his Polish comrades. We have searched unsuccessfully for traces of this figure in the archives of Yad Vashem, the Jabotinsky Institute, the archives of the Kibbutz of Ghetto Heroes, Polish archives, independent accounts." They did not look where historians establishing the service history of soldiers, non-commissioned officers, cadets and officers of the Polish Army should have looked. In the military archives.

Both authors have shown a modest understanding of the AK unification action and the history of the Military Organisation - Security Corps (OW-KB), which has already been thoroughly described by historians. They write about the Security Corps as "a marginal and insignificant organisation, located on the periphery of the Polish Underground State" (Dariusz Libionka classified the accounts and publications of Polish officers from the OW- KB cooperating with the ŻZW as apocrypha).

Dariusz Libionka and Laurence Weinbaum demonstrate too much trust in the contents of the post-communist archives of the ZBOWiD (Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy), the Ministry of Public Security and the Security Service (now in the Institute of National Remembrance). This was pointed out to them by two young historians, August Grabski and Maciej Wójcicki, in their publication Jewish Military Union - history restored' (2008).

Nevertheless, their book is richly documented. They reached out to various sources, mainly accounts in Israeli and Polish archives, confronting them and trying to establish the true picture of the events described. They documented the battles of the ŻZW units in Muranowski Square, where the largest battle of the uprising took place on 27 April, and the display of the white-red and white-blue flags. General Jürgen Stroop, pacifying the ghetto, reported about these two flags by telephone to Adolf Hitler, who shouted into the receiver: , "Listen Stroop, you must take down both flags at all costs".

Concluding the more than 600-page publication, the authors self-critically stated: "In the course of our research and investigation, we have become convinced that there is no key to solving all the mysteries surrounding the functioning of the revisionist militant organisation in the Warsaw Ghetto. The most important participants in the events died, while those who remained were either unable or unwilling to write down the story".

Dariusz Libionka confessed in an interview that writing about and glorifying the Jewish Military Union has one aim - to diminish the role and merits in the ghetto struggle of the Jewish Combat Organisation commanded by Mordechai Anielewicz. By creating such a thesis, he seems convinced that he has succeeded in debunking many myths about the ŻZW.

For Marek Edelman, the Jews of the ŻZW remained Jewish fascists to the end of his life. - 'The boys from the ŻZW were half-bullies who hung out with suspicious elements,' Edelman said in an interview with Krakow journalists Witold Beres and Krzysztof Burnetko. - They didn't exist in the ghetto then, they didn't mean much. They created an organisation out of a suspicious gathering. They had a lot of money, they made a dig, they shot each other with a German tank on the first day. Probably they were the ones who hung up that Polish banner... But then they immediately escaped through the dig. But they were unlucky - the caretaker, the same one who had done the digging for them, turned them in that same night, and the Gestapo came and shot them on the roof....

A participant in the uprising who reached London in June 1943, quoted by Libionka and Weibaum, depicted the situation differently: "The white and blue flag was still flying from the roof of that house. It took the Germans eight hours to seize this house. They had to fight for every floor. The defenders slowly retreated until there were only a few left on the fourth floor, who were also killed. Only one, Haluc, remained on the roof, raising a blue and white banner. It was midnight. The Germans pointed a searchlight at the roof. In its light a young man with a flag could be seen. Then he disappeared. He wrapped himself in the flag he had defended for 42 days and nights and threw himself down."

The editor Marian Turski asked Marek Edelman in an interview with the weekly magazine 'Polityka' (no. 13/1993) whether, after half a century, he had changed his attitude to the ŻZW, which he does not mention in his memoirs of the fighting ghetto. Edelman replied that there was a group of revisionists who wanted to lead the armed struggle in the ghetto, but they had little support. The revisionists quickly wanted to break through to the Aryan side, and had no influence on the course of the uprising, on the mood, on the formation of the psyche and resistance. All that is known about their fighting on Muranowska Street is what German General Stroop reported.

Almost the entire leadership of the Jewish Military Union died fighting in the uprising or trying to get out of the ghetto. Almost the entire leadership of the Jewish Combat Organisation committed suicide.

Cleaning the history

After my text "Was the Jewish underground in Warsaw divided by the Katyń crime? "on TVP Weekly (6 August 2021), I received an invitation for an interview with Minister Wojciech Kolarski from the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland. The Minister, referring to excerpts from my article, stated that there is still a lot of work to be done on the full history of the ghetto uprising and that Dawid Wdowinski's book "And we are not saved" (second edition from 1985) should be translated into Polish. It was a nice meeting.

After a few weeks, the Minister telephoned me to contact the Director Zygmunt Stępiński at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw. He spoke to the director, who appeared puzzled, as he did not know some of the facts cited in my text.

On the minister's recommendation, I telephoned the director's secretariat. The secretary kindly informed me that the Director would call back. He has not called back to this day. Glory to the heroes.

– Maciej Kledzik
– Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists