Dawid (David) Wdowiński (1896–1970) was a psychiatrist and doctor of neurology. He was a member of the right-wing Jewish organization Hatzohar and political leader of the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (ŻZW – Jewish Military League) resistance organization before and during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Before World War II, Wdowiński was a chairman of the Revisionist Zionism party in Poland. Together with many Jews in the Polish Army and Polish Jewish political leaders (Dawid Apfelbaum, Józef Celmajster, Henryk Lifszyc, Kałmen Mendelson, Paweł Frenkel and Leon Rodl), he founded the ŻZW group in the Warsaw Ghetto.[1] He was never a military commander, serving instead as political head of the ŻZW. In 1963 he published his memoir, in which he told about his involvement with the ŻZW and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.[2]
After the war, accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising were filtered through former members of the left-leaning ŻOB. These accounts (also adopted by the postwar Polish Communist state) diminished both the roles and the importance of the ŻZW and Wdowiński. One writer, Israel Guttman, was an activist in Ha'Shomer Ha'Tsair.[3] Guttman's perspective continued in authoritative citations of Barbara Engelking-Boni and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, who described Wdowiński as "a senior activist in the Revisionists' movement (formed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky's New Zionist Organization); revisionist leader in the ghetto, he attributes himself in command of the fighting organisation of this political movement. After the war he prepared his memoirs."[4] 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 ebodiminent of Fascism."[5] Wdowiński candidly noted the pro-Soviet political orientation of the leftist Jews: "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."[6]