One day, on the way home from giving a talk on the Cseh method at the Esperanto Club, Lidia fell and injured her knee badly. It became painfully swollen and would not bend, so she had to cancel her Esperanto classes for several days and rest. 'But', she wrote Roan, 'one can translate very well lying down, and during those days I translated ten pages a day.'
She knew that her translation of Some Answered Questions would not be published soon, but she hoped it would be published sometime. She could not wait for that 'sometime' to come, so she was laboriously typing the text with six carbon copies. 'When I have enough typed copies', she wrote, 'they can serve those who are interested.'
While others in Warsaw were preparing for the war, Lidia quietly went on with the work she considered far more important. 'This morning I knew I would have a free afternoon, and I prayed Baha'uilah would guide me how to spend it in a way somehow useful to His Cause,' she wrote Roan.'At the beginning I wanted to visit an ill Esperantist with whom I had left a Baha'f book, but when I telephoned, I leamed that she was not well enough to receive my visit. Afterward I thought of going to see a lady I know, to whom I have already spoken of the Faith, but strangely I did not feel inclined to do that, so I gave up the idea.'
A letter had arrived from an Esperantist in Portugal with whom Lidia had been corresponding. 'Instead of going to see anyone, I felt a strong inclination to reply to her immediately, and I spent more than two hours at my typewriter writing a long letter to her - about the Faith. The rest I place in the hands of Baha'uilah . . . Last week I made two new contacts for the Faith. Several people have become interested. One must "sow and sow", even if "a hundred seeds are lost, a thousand seeds are lost.'"
Summer came to Warsaw, and Lidia's Esperanto classes were almost over. After the classes ended, she wrote Roan, 'I will be more free to go and see people. And I find also that the post is a very useful institution and helps the spiritual work in this Era very much.'
Lidia was quite touched to receive a cable from the Esperanto Congress in New York. It 'really made me very delighted because I did not suppose that the American samideanoj would remember me so,' she wrote modestly.
In July Lidia wrote Roan that there was a new Bahai' in Poland, a woman in Bielsko whom Lidia had met during a visit to Mrs Haas. Lidia further told Roan of an Esperantist in Warsaw with whom Lidia walked in the park every Saturday and who had recently admitted to Lidia that she was beginning to believe in God. Lidia reported joyfully to Roan that at their last meeting, this woman had expressed her belief '"that Baha'u'llah is the latest Messenger of God". She is still not completely convinced,' wrote Lidia, 'but she seems very inclined to accept.'
A few weeks later, Lidia again wrote to Roan with happy news. 'I think I wrote you about an Esperantist in Warsaw with whom I spend time every Saturday and talk about the Faith. Yesterday she said to me, when I mentioned that I hoped to write soon to Shoghi Effendi: "Tell him that there is a new Bahai' in Warsaw." But I said, "I would like you to write that to him yourself," and she did so. So now, counting the writer of this letter, there are in Poland five people who believe in the Bahai' Revelation. Very few indeed, and because of that every new soul is such an important addition and a cause for joy.'
'One can never count very certainly on the post, especially overseas,' Lidia told her friend, 'but I still trust that this letter will reach you in time, that means while you are still at Green Acre. I want it to carry to you in that beloved spot, blessed once by the presence of the Master, my dearest greetings and thoughts full of memories.
'I am astonished sometimes how quickly time passes. We were just together in Green Acre working together for the course, rehearsing the scene in the pageant for the last day, in Boston visiting the radio station and the hairdresser,' where she had a permanent wave. 'Not even a trace of his work remains.'
Lidia was hopeful that she could go to the Netherlands in October to teach classes for several months. It seems that the people at the Cseh Institute were trying to arrange this for her, but by mid-August Lidia had not yet received a permit to work there. In September she planned to go to the Polish Esperanto Congress in Lvov. 'They have already printed in thick letters on the congress program that I will give a speech!' She had finished translating Some Ansivered Questions into Polish, 'and instead of resting', she told Roan, 'I immediately began the Kitdb-i-Iqan.' She asked her friend to give her regards to those she had met last year. It was the last letter Roan ever received from Lidia.
August had come, and with it, as every year, the Universal Congress of Esperanto, which was to be held this fateful summer of 1939 in Bern, Switzerland. Lidia, unable to leave Poland, could not attend. The congress president, who had also presided at the Ninth Congress in Bern in 1913, noted in his speech that the 1913 congress had been the last one Dr Ludwik Zamenhofhad ever attended, because the next year war had broken out. The 1939 congress in Bern would be the last until the end of the Second World War, because within weeks the Catastrophe came to Europe at last.
TWENTY-NINE
A Wave ofEvil
On September i, 1939, after SS troops in Polish uniforms staged a fake attack on a German radio station, the armies of the Third Reich invaded Poland, drawing Europe, and eventually the world, into a second global war. The besieged city of Warsaw held out for three weeks. When the bombardment was over, the civilian areas, especially thejewish quarter, had suffered worst- the Germans had directed their fire especially at that part of the city. For the second time in her life, Lidia saw German troops march into Warsaw. The first time had been in 1915 when she was eleven. But in 1915 the German army had wanted to gain the support of the populace against Russia. This time they marched in to make the populace slaves.
Once again, Poland ceased to exist as an independent nation and was divided up, Germany incorporating a large part of territory into the Reich, and the Soviet Union seizing nearly half of the country in the early days of the war. The part of Poland that included Warsaw was designated the General-Govemment and was ruled by a German official.
Now, under the Nazis, as in the Middle Ages, Jews had to be distinguished from the rest of the population at all times. In Warsaw this meant having to wear a white arm band with a blue Star of David. Jewish businesses were confiscated, schools closed. Rations were cut. And the Nazis began to isolate theJews ofWarsaw from the rest of the population. First, the Jewish quarter was set apart as a quarantine area by fences and barbed wire.
The occupying German army roamed the city, subjecting Jews to the casual violence thatJews in Germany had learned to fear. Soon the Jewish quarter was full of refugees from other Polish cities and provinces, but the refugees found no safety in Warsaw. Thejews never knew what kind of terror they might meet when they stepped out of their door - whether they would be seized for forced labor, robbed by Polish mffians, or killed by German soldiers for no reason at all.
After the invasion, news of Lidia's whereabouts came rarely and unreliably to her friends in Europe and America. In early November, several Jewish newspapers in the US reported that Lidia Zamenhof and
all of the family had been arrested on the charge that Lidia had gone to the United States to spread anti-Nazi propaganda. The same report appeared in the Polish Daily News. Lidia's friends in America were shocked to learn of her arrest. 'The American 8aha'is . . .' Horace Holley wrote Shoghi Effendi, 'are deeply concerned about her fate in Warsaw, although we know that the purity and firmness ofher faith in God raises her spirit above the darkness of human cruelty . . .