Marek Edelman

Marek Edelman: Being on the Right Side by Witold Bereś and Krzysztof Burnetko is the first biography of this hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, renowned physician, and defender of human rights. This book was almost 30 years in the making, from the moment when the authors first met Edelman. That was in the 1980s, when the opposition Solidarity movement was forced underground after the communists introduced martial law in Poland. Bereś and Burnetko, active in the democratic opposition, interviewed him for the first time on behalf of an illegal paper they published clandestinely. From that moment on, meetings with Edelman became a part of their lives.It took a long time to finish the book. Edelman was not an easy man to deal with, moral issues were muddled under the communist dictatorship, and above all there was the vexed question of the Holocaust.To top it all off, new eyewitness accounts and previously unknown documents kept surfacing.Bereś and Burnetko ended up devoting no fewer than three books to Edelman (Marek Edelman: Just Life; Marek Edelman: Life to the End; and Marek Edelman: God Is Asleep). Each one was a bestseller, and translations were published in Israel, Germany, and Russia.The English-language version of their biography of Edelman is based on all three of these books.