You Don't See This in The Economist Everyday

As a subscriber of The Economist I'm looking for two things. One, a point of view other than the "Obama should be deified" and "Obama is the anti-Christ" lenses that the U.S. media offers. Two, reading The Economist on the train makes me look smarter than I actually am. And unlike Penthouse Forum, it doesn't get me any dirty looks.


So I was flipping through the October 10th issue and was getting to the end. This is the point in which I usually just look at the job ads to see if the International Monetary Fund is in the market for a monolingual chap with less financial acumen than Lenny Dykstra. And there's always an obit. Usually it's for a very distinguished economist, politician or scholar, but this one caught my attention.

The Economist does a much better job eulogizing this man but let me offer my thoughts. At the age of 14 he is orphaned, but instead of disappearing into obscurity he goes to school and becomes fluent in 3 languages. That story upon itself is After School Special worthy, but we're not even halfway home. You see, Mr. Edelman was Polish. And Jewish. And it's 1939 in Warsaw.

Unless you're Mel Gibson Sr you don't need a history lesson on how being Jewish in Warsaw in 1939 is probably the worst set of circumstances one could find yourself in... Stalin to your East, Hitler to your West. @$*&, that's not good. Even Dana Barrett had someone to turn to when she was turned into a dog by an obscure 19th century religious cult.

And Mr. Edelman had some notice. He was a messenger and regularly journeyed out of the ghetto, so he got an early wind of what the Nazi's were up to. He didn't run. He didn't hide. He did what even the bravest could talk of doing in a hypothetical sense, he took up arms and organized an armed resistance against the Nazis in the ghetto. And when the ghetto burned to the ground he continued to resist the Nazis, ultimately participating in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. That moves us from After School Special territory to a direct-to-video movie starring Michael Ironside. But it doesn't stop there.

After Poland is "liberated" he doesn't leave Poland, getting a medical degree, becoming a noted cardiologist and staying in Poland until the day of his death. And all during this time he was active politically in a number of organizations that weren't exactly in good status with the communist powers in Poland, at one point getting interned. But once again Mr. Edelman outlasted his opponent; he lived to eventually serve in the post-communist Polish Parliament. Now we're officially in Oscar winning Spielberg flick starring Russell Crowe and Daniel Craig.

But just to add a little more intrigue, Mr. Edelman smoked two packs of heaters a day... and lived to 90. So, to sum it up, he faces down being orphaned at 14; Hitler, the Nazis and Stalin at 20; and communist rule and heart disease for his last 60 years. This guy is making every character John Wayne ever played look like Stuart French.

So my words can't do this man justice. Nor can Adam Sandler's. So let me leave you with the opening paragraph to Mr. Edelman's obit in The Economist.

"HE WAS sure that once he started fighting, he was going to die. No point in being scared about it. Death was death; there was nothing more, nothing bigger, that could happen to him. At least in this way, taking up arms, he could die on his own terms rather than theirs. His time, his place. Suicide would have been another way to do it, but he never considered that. Going to the gas chamber or the mass grave with quiet, considered dignity, like many of the residents of the Warsaw ghetto, was another way: far more admirable and more difficult, he thought, than running through random bullets as he did. But it was not for him. Only by dying as publicly as possible, loudly and with his gun blazing, could he let the world know what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in Poland."