Dawid Wdowiński

Dawid (David) Wdowiński (; 1895–1970) was a psychiatrist and doctor of neurology in the Second Polish Republic. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, he became a political leader of the Jewish resistance organization called Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Union, ŻZW) active before and during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Early life Dawid Wdowiński was born in 1895 in Będzin. He studied at universities in Vienna, Brno and Warsaw, and became a psychiatrist. Wdowiński was a member of the right-wing organization Hatzohar, which was founded in Paris in 1925.

Before World War II, Wdowiński gave up psychiatry through the influence of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who urged him to devote himself fully to the cause of Revisionist Zionism. Wdowiński was never a military commander, serving instead as political head of the ŻZW.

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Wdowiński was sent to various Nazi concentration camps, which he survived. Guttman's perspective continued in authoritative citations of Barbara Engelking and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, who described Wdowiński as a senior activist in the Polish branch of Jabotinsky's New Zionist Organization; i.e. the "revisionist leader in the ghetto [who, in his memoir] attributes himself in command of the fighting organisation of this political movement." Another ŻOB fighter (Icchak Cukierman) wrote, "The Revisionists had seceded from the World Zionist Organization; and before the war, all socialist movements, including the Zionists, saw them as the Jewish embodiminent of Fascism." Wdowiński candidly noted the pro-Soviet political orientation of some leftist Jews following the Soviet invasion of Poland: "The second, the confused political orientation, was largely because many Jewish leaders were reared in the spirit of the Russian Revolution, and they thought they could translate the ideas of the class struggle into Zionist terms."

In 1961, Wdowiński served as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Wdowiński was fiercely opposed to Jewish collaboration with Germany inside the ghettos, or any post-war reconciliation with them. This theme pervades his memoirs as well as his correspondence.

Death Dawid Wdowiński died in 1970 after suffering a heart attack at a commemoration ceremony in Tel Aviv for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.