LEYZER (ELIEZER) GELER

LEYZER (ELIEZER) GELER (September 17, 1918-October 1943)

            He was born in Opotshne (Opoczno), Poland, into a commercial household.  He received a religious Zionist education.  He studied in a public school, later in a middle school in Lodz.  At age fifteen he joined the Zionist socialist youth movement Gordonia.  He was later the most active leader of the Lodz circle and an editor for the Gordonia publications in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew.  He contributed pieces to: Dos folk (The people), Słowo młodych, pismo socjalistycznej młodzieży chalucowej “Gordonia-Hamakabi Hacair” (Word of youth, socialist youth magazine of the pioneer “Gordonia-Maccabee Youth”), Gordonia, and Davar hatseirim (Matters of youth), as well as in other publications of Gordonia and Poale Tsiyon Hitaḥadut (Labor Zionist organization) in Poland.  During the war, he was captured by Germans as a Polish soldier.  Later, he settled in Warsaw, where he was one of the leaders in the underground Gordonia movement and one of the most active in the realm of self-defense, and he participated in organizing the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  He was also one of the organizers of the Jewish uprising group in Zaglembie where he came as an emissary from the Jewish fighters’ organization under the Aryan name of “E. Kowalski.”  He was the commandant of a fighting group during the first uprising in Warsaw in January 1943, and later commandant-in-chief of the groups at Tobbens Workshop, and he succeeded with a group in surviving via the sewer system on the Aryan side.  Until the summer of 1943, he remained active on the Aryan side of city.  He was later sent to Bergen-Belsen.  On October 21, 1943 he and 1800 Jews were transported allegedly to Bergau camp which was in fact his last stop before Auschwitz or Birkenau where he was murdered.

Sources: N. Ek, in Idisher kemfer (New York) (September 27, 1946); M. Nayshtat, Khurbn un oyfshtand fun di yidn in varshe (Holocaust and uprising of the Jews in Warsaw) (Tel Aviv, 1948), pp. 403-8.