Warsaw  - Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, died Friday in Warsaw at age 87, local media reported.

Edelman took part in both the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, when Jews rose up against the Nazis during World War II, and the 1944 uprising lead by Poland's underground army.

Edelman was a cardiologist who later became a member of the opposition during Poland's communist regime.

"He left as a fulfilled person," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a Polish intellectual who also took part in the Warsaw Uprising. "But the entire time he lived in awareness of the tragedy he lived through."

Bartoszewski added that he remembered Edelman best when he lay flowers at a monument to ghetto uprising heroes in 1993, shortly after Poland became independent following years of communist rule.

Edelman received honorary degrees from Yale University and the Universite Libre in Brussels and is an honorary citizen of the city of Lodz in central Poland.

He was born in what is today Belarus to a Jewish family, which soon moved to Warsaw.

Edelman moved to Lodz after the war and in 1998 he received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor. (dpa)