There is a brutal, dark joke about two fisherman's sons whose father drowned during a storm. After a few days of mourning, they set out to fish again to sustain themselves. When they pulled in their net, they found their father's body inside, filled with dozens of fat eels. The sons looked at each other with a knowing glance, and one said to the other: "You know what? Let's take the eels out and cast the old man back in one more time."
This macabre metaphor perfectly illustrates Anka Grupińska’s relationship with the legacy of Marek Edelman. During his life, he was utilized as a moral authority. Now, even though he has been dead for nearly twenty years, his body is still being "re-cast" into the public arena because the fishing season for his legacy never ends.
Grupińska—(along with Joanna Żuchowska and Joanna Szczęsna) spent decades building her career on her proximity to Edelman, but her actions expose a profoundly warped, pathologically corrupt set of journalistic ethics. Grupińska (along with Żuchowska and Szczęsna) was engaged in a literal "fishy business," refusing to stop exploiting him even when severe old age and failing health deprived him of his cognitive control. This is explicitly evident in the video materials they recorded and unethically published on Vimeo and YouTube, where Grupińska specifically pressed an ailing Edelman for stories about other historical figures, including ŻOB commander Mordechaj Anielewicz.
The attached Vimeo transcript of Edelman speaking about Janusz Korczak and Anielewicz shows how these reporters highlighted what can only be described as absolute absurdities and historical inaccuracies, treating the ramblings of a very sick man as credible material. For instance, they captured and preserved Edelman’s famous yet completely fake story that Anielewicz's mother was a poor fishmonger and that Mordechaj used to paint the gills of rotting fish red to make them look fresh. While Hanna Krall first recorded this myth in Shielding the Flame, the historical reality is well-documented: the Anielewicz family actually owned a regular vegetable shop. By pressing a deteriorating Edelman on these exact "fishy" narratives for their Vimeo recordings, the journalists were actively painting the gills of a dying man's memory to sell their own media products.
The video itself captures a tragic loss of dignity, showing an incapacitated Edelman shouting at the reporters: "Why don't you agree with me? Just nod your head." By publishing raw transcripts of these sessions, Grupińska has committed a double betrayal. First, she humiliated a historical hero by putting his decline on display. Second, she manufactured a false historical record. Future researchers who only read the printed text without seeing the physical and mental state of the dying man will dangerously mistake these confused utterances for the rational, deliberate stance of a healthy mind.
Yet, death has not stopped the harvest. One must ask: How much longer will Grupińska continue to use Edelman’s corpse to fuel her own career and bolster her personal status?
Recently, at a turbulent meeting at the Marek Edelman Center for Dialogue in Łódź—which bore a chilling resemblance to Stalinist-era ZMP rallies where no dissenting opinions were tolerated—Edelman’s past words on Palestinians were instrumentally weaponized by Grupińska to silence others and elevate herself. Just like the sons in the joke, she refuses to let him rest in the depths of history as long as there are still "eels" left to catch.
