Aleksander Zamenhof had been an army doctor during the Russo- Japanese War. He had viewed such sufFering among the casualties he treated that he vowed never to take part in another war. When Aleksander was again ordered into the Russian Army, rather than serve in the war he had taken his own life.
The news of Aleksander's death, unexpected and terrible, was a great blow to Ludwik Zamenhof. 'Though he never complained, because he did not wish anyone else to suffer when he sufFered,' Adam recalled, 'he looked more wretched and pitiful than we had ever seen him. But it seems that till death he did not think about himselfso much as about his beloved idea, through which he wanted to bring happiness to mankind, and he felt truly unhappy that because of illness he no longer could complete his daily task, which would lead to victory.'
On the fourteenth of April, Dr Zamenhof seemed somewhat improved, and the prospect ofbeginning his work again put him into a good humor. At five in the afternoon, the doctor came to call and they had a friendly conversation. Feeling tired, Zamenhof asked the doctor if he could rest on the divan. When Klara approached to help her husband, she found him dead.
Later, the family discovered on Zamenhofs writing desk some notes for a manuscript he had been working on when he died. As weakness and pain had overcome him at last, Ludwik Zamenhof had struggled to set down his thoughts about a subject he had never mentioned publicly before: God and immortality. He acknowledged that many people who had been uninterested in religion often became 'believers' at the end of life. Atheists would explain this, he said, as insincerity or senile deterioration of the brain, or as a last self-deception in the face of inevitable death. Zamenhof foresaw that people would want to apply those explanations to him. He knew that, just as he had faced suspicions of being a crank when he had first put forward Esperanto, once again he risked being considered demented if on his deathbed he began to speak of religion. But as always, Zamenhof resolved to express his beliefs honestly although it would bring him no sympathy from anyone. 'While in the scientific and free-thinking world I shall lose all respect,' he wrote, 'at the same time, in the world of believers I will find no compensating sympathy, but probably only attack, because my faith is completely different from their faith! . . .
'My mother was a religious believer,' he wrote, 'my father was an atheist. In my childhood I believed in God and immortality ofthe soul, in the form in which my religion ofbirth instructed. I do not remember exactly in which year of my life I lost my religious faith, but I remember that I reached the highest degree of my unbelief at around the age of fifteen or sixteen. That was also the most tormented period of my life. In my eyes, life lost all meaning and value. . . All seemed so senseless, useless, aimless, so absurd!
'I came to feel that perhaps [death is] not disappearance, perhaps
death is a miracle . . . that something is guiding us for a high purpose »
He never finished the essay.
The sixteenth of April was dark and rainy. The streets were black with crowds of people as the funeral procession slowly moved toward the Jewish cemetery. The cantor chanted the ancient Hebrew prayers, the men wept, the women behind their black veils wailed with grief. The coffin was lowered into the ground.
In the empty flat on Krolewska Street, the typewriter stood in its little corner, covered with a black cover. 'It stood quiet,' Lidia wrote years later, 'indifferent, without feeling - the machine.'
As a child Ludwik Zamenhof had once vowed that when he grew up he would do away with the evils of the adult world which affiicted his native Bialystok. He had created Esperanto, had seen it spread around the world and bring together peoples of different races, religions and nationalities under the green banner of brotherhood. Now, on his death, Ludwik Zamenhof s thirteen-year-old daughter determined to carry on his sacred work. Lidia had learned Esperanto well by now, and some time during the war she began to make her first, unsure attempts at translating Polish literature into Esperanto.
That old typewriter, shrouded by its black cover, seemed almost a symbol of Ludwik Zamenhofs spiritual bequest. 'Months passed,' Lidia later wrote. 'On the little oak table the machine stood - closed. I hesitated a long time before I dared lift the cover again. And it seemed to me then that I was lifting the cover of the coffin . . .
'I began to type - the keys reverberated. Slowly, fearfully, as with wonder, like someone who awakens after a long sleep and asks where he is, who are those around him. And its wordless sounds seemed perhaps the most touching words of consolation . . .'
SEVEN
Pictures on the Canvas
The Zamenhof family was plunged into griefafter Ludwik's death, but Klara took it hardest. To those around her she seemed like a person who had lost her purpose in life. Lidia watched as her widowed mother aged 'suddenly, incredibly suddenly'. The mother's grief made a deep impression on her daughter, whose 'child's eyes', Lidia later recalled, 'could not help but see how your thoughts and memories flew back to the past, to happier days'. For the rest ofher lifeLidia would remember her mother's sorrowful Sunday pilgrimages to the cemetery and how she would come back from those walks 'aching and broken'.
Eventually, left with the care of the thirteen-year-old Lidia, Klara recovered from her grief. She plunged herself into Esperanto work, still fulfilling her 'sacred task' to carry out her husband's dream. Now her goal in life was to see a suitable monument raised upon his tomb.
In 1918 the war ended, and Poland became an independent nation for the first time in over a hundred years. The three empires that once ruled it had not survived the war: the emperors of Germany and Austria- Hungary were defeated, the tsar ofRussia overthrown by revolution.
But independence only brought fresh turmoil to Poland. The nation had been under foreign domination for so long that it had no experience governing itself, and its new government faced grave problems. Although the nation was now free, it was also poor and overpopulated. In the rural areas its peasant population was much larger than the land could support. Cities were crowded as welclass="underline" there was nowhere for the landless peasants to go, and few industries to provide jobs. After the borders of Poland were finally fixed, the country contained a population that was only two-thirds Polish. The restincluded Ukrainians, Jews, Byelorussians, Germans, Lithuanians, Russians and Czechs. The presence of so many people who considered themselves of a different nationality from the rest of the population was a problem Poland was never able to solve.
Once again, the Jews suffered. The war had hardly ended when the pogroms began. The winter of 1918-19 saw ferocious outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in 130 towns and villages, carried out with the support and participation of soldiers in the new Polish Army. Jewish shops were boycotted; homes were looted; synagogues were desecrated; hundreds of men, women and children were tortured and beaten; and untold numbers of people were killed. In several towns, large amounts of money were extorted from thejewish communities as fines for alleged disloyalty and as the price for providing protection against the violence, protection later refused them.
As a result of reports about the pogroms, which the Poles denied, the Allies decided that, as a condition ofindependence, Poland must sign a treaty guaranteeing full civil rights and religious freedom to its national minorities. Many Poles, however, resented this as an insult to the national honor. Poland's government never enforced the Minorities Treaty and in 1934 renounced it entirely.
After the war, great empires had fallen and millions of people lay dead, but the 'war to end all wars' and its aftermath merely laid the groundwork for new conflict. The territorial divisions made at Versailles and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into republics released a wave of nationalism. Germany itself was left nearly intact, but the allocation of territory to Poland - even though that same land had been taken from Poland long ago - and of the Rhineland to France, was deeply resented.