Post-modern American has debased noble words: artist, classical, original, and hero. Everyone it seems is a hero today. Both the rescue workers and their saved victims are often bestowed with that title. But it is a fallacy. The former are heroes because they confront danger while the latter are those whom through no action of their own find themselves in it.

That is why one can be forgiven for changing the channel or the page every time he comes across a new “hero.” But every now and then, a real hero is profiled. Marek Edelman is a such a man.

A Polish Jew, Mr. Edelman was one of hundreds of thousands cramped into the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis forced Jews from Warsaw and the rest of Poland, and Germany into the ghetto in 1940 to separate them from the rest of the city, the rest of the world behind barriers and barbered wire. Living conditions were unimaginable. Roughly 1,500 died each week from hunger and diseases inborn though poor sanitation; the Nazis rounded up 6,000 Jews a week to death camps.

Mr. Edelman knew something most be done. He had no illusions. He commanded an “army” of 220 untrained Jewish boys with nothing more than hand guns and homemade grenades against the heavily armed SS numbering in the thousands with planes, tanks and all else one can image in warfare. But, at least, he would not die silently sent into the chambers to be written about as an object of sympathy in the history books. Fighting the Nazis, he would probably die but standing up and on his own terms.

As a messenger in the ghetto hospital in Warsaw, he often had permission to leave and during which collected weapons from the outside world. That world could have done more. The Poles did not welcome the Nazis, but the Polish underground still could not bring itself to cooperate with the mistrusted Jews.

Mr. Edelman sparked the Warsaw uprising. The Nazis were planning to massacre all the remaining Jews on the eve of Passover on April 19, 1943. Mr. Edelman did not win in the end, but for a month he and a handful of others bravely held back the Nazis for a month. The Nazis eventually bombed the camp and at the end sent 50,000-60,000 Jews to death camps. Mr. Edelman and an even fewer handful managed to escape through water-filled-nearly-to-the-top tunnels.

He is a hero. But he did not seek the title and often dodged questions about his leadership in the uprising. He did not want to speak about his virtues.

In the summer of 2002, Edelman, still going strong, intervened in Israel’s show trial of the now jailed Palestinian resistance leader, Marwan Barghouti.

He wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian movement, and though he criticised the suicide bombers, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press. Edelman had always resented Israel’s claim on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a symbol of Jewish liberation.

Now he said this belonged to the Palestinians. He addressed his letter to “commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations — to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations”.

The old Jewish anti-Nazi Ghetto fighter had placed his immense moral authority at the disposal of the only side he deemed worthy of it.

Mr. Edelman supported the NATO bombing of Serbia to defend Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims on the grounds that pacifism only benefited tyrants.

The last commander of the uprising, he remained a doctor, and he died at the age 90 on October 2nd in Poland which despite all the horror remained his home. He was an honorable man. And a true hero.