Poles March to Honor Warsaw Ghetto Heroes

About 5,000 Poles staged an unauthorized rally here Sunday to commemorate the heroes of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising and marched along the route by which condemned Jews were taken for deportation to Nazi concentration camps.

The marchers were mostly Poles who sympathize with the idea of remembering the World War II uprising, but they also included a broad cross section of dissident and opposition groups. Despite official government warnings against such a march, Polish police stayed well clear of the commemoration services, organized largely by the banned Solidarity trade union, dissident intellectuals and other opposition groups.

The opposition ceremonies Sunday were in two parts--one at the old Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, the other at the monument for the uprising. They marked the 45th anniversary of the rebellion in which the last 45,000 to 50,000 of the original 500,000 inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto were crushed by Nazi troops.

Worldwide Attention

About 4,500 people have come to Poland from around the world for a weeklong program, mostly organized by the Polish government, marking the anniversary.

Opposition figures and intellectuals here have charged that the unprecedented observances are an attempt by the government to paper over an anti-Semitic image resulting from 1967 and 1968, when thousands of Polish Jews were purged from the government, the Communist Party and the military.

Opposition figures also say they believe the observances are being held because the financially strapped Polish government believes that it is being shut out of international credit markets by “Jewish banking interests.”

Marek Edelman, 64, the last surviving commander of the ghetto uprising, and a group of Solidarity activists dedicated a monument in the Jewish cemetery to two Jewish socialists from the Ghetto Bund who were ordered executed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1943.

First Deported in ’39

The two Jewish Bundists, Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter, were first deported to the Soviet Union in 1939 after the Red Army occupied eastern Poland.

Iza Erlich of New Haven, Conn., Erlich’s daughter-in-law, attended Sunday’s ceremony.

“I’m happy,” she said, “but I am also bitter that it is taking place only now. It is very belated.”

Edelman said the two men had been members of the Warsaw municipal council. They were executed, he said, because they had signed an official protest against the Soviet occupation.

The atmosphere was hushed and dramatic as Edelman spoke to the crowd in the old cemetery.

“The stones which are standing here,” he said, “are the symbol of the disgrace of the Nazis’ fascism. They are the symbol of struggle against force and tyranny and are a warning for all generations.”

As the ceremonies in the cemetery were going on, Israelis from the Yad Vashem Institute of Jerusalem honored about 100 Poles for their efforts to rescue or protect Jews from the Nazis.

The honorees received silver medals, presented for the “righteous among nations of the world,” which bear an inscription from the Talmud saying that “he who saves one life also saves the world.”

Among the Israeli delegation here is Deputy Prime Minister Yitzhak Navon. His trip is considered private, since Poland and Israel have had no full diplomatic relations since 1967, but Navon met Sunday with Mieczyslw Rakowski, a Politburo member and deputy Speaker of the Polish Parliament. Although low-level diplomatic relations were re-established in 1986, the meeting between Navon and Rakowski represents the highest-level meeting ever between Poles and Israelis.

Navon said he told Rakowski that he hopes that Poland and Israel can normalize their relations eventually.

“I see some change in the attitude of Poland toward Israel,” he said.