In May an inquiry reached Adam Czerniakow, head of Warsaw's Jewish Council, from 'the Esperanto Union' asking if the Esperantists could transmit money to the Zamenhof family. He noted again in his diary for May 8 that Esperantists from Geneva were offering to help the Zamenhofs. Czerniakow 'instructed Sztolcman [a member of the Jewish Council] to discuss this matter with Messing [a German official] in the Districtchef s office,' but did not mention the matter again.
The two organizations, the UEA and the IEL, had difficulty coordinating their efforts to help the family. 'The schism in our movement', Esperanto commented bitterly, 'thus extends also to this area.' It begged the Esperantists not to let the division 'play its evil role' in this matter and hinder efforts to help the Zamenhof family. 'It is the sacred duty of the Esperantisfs to cooperate . . . Do not let the family of the Majstro perish!'
It was too late. Dr Adam Zamenhof had already been killed. At the end of January he was shot, along with a hundred other intellectuals and professional people who had been arrested and were being held as hostages. But it was not until July 30, 1940 that Adam Czerniakow noted in his diary: 'at the SS I was informed that Dr Zamenhof, his brothers-in-law, and Minc are dead.'* And only on 18 August did he note that his office was 'besieged' by the families of the dead hostages, 'who have just been notified' and were 'demanding further inform- ation; among others Mrs Zamenhof and Mrs Minc'. Nevertheless, Adam's family kept hoping that somehow he might still be alive.
On November 16, 1940 a section of thejewish quarter was sealed off from the rest of Warsaw by walls and walled-up streets and windows. There; in the Warsaw Ghetto, within an area of about one hundred square city blocks, half a million people would be imprisoned, including Warsaw's Jews as well as refugees and deportees from elsewhere in Poland and some from other parts of Europe. After the sealing of the Ghetto, only those with special permits could pass the guards. Even doctors who worked in the Jewish Hospital, outside the Ghetto boundaries, had difficulty getting permits. During the days of the sealing of the Ghetto, over two hundred thousand people - Poles living inside the Ghetto boundaries, and Jews living outside them - were forced to leave their homes and belongings, and move.
Ogrodowa Street, where Lidia and Zofia were living with relatives,
* Adam's son later notcd this was an error on Czemiakow's part. Dr Minc was Adam's brother- in-law.
was within the area that had been designated for the Ghetto. But Krolewska Street was outside the walls, dosed off to them forever. It did not matter anymore; nothing remained there but rubble.
Now, Lidia was unable to send her friends abroad more than a postcard written in German. Because ofcensorship, she could not give any details of the wretched conditions under which they were living. But several secret diaries that have survived, written by courageous Jews in order to record the grim events for posterity, give us a vivid picture of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, the archivist of the Warsaw Ghetto, recorded the day the Ghetto was sealed. 'The Saturday the Ghetto was introduced was terrible,' he wrote. 'People in the street didn't know it was to be a closed Ghetto, so it came like a thunderbolt. Details ofGerman, Polish and Jewish guards stood at every street corner searching passers-by to decide whether or not they had the right to pass. Jewish women found the markets outside the Ghetto closed to them. There was an immediate shortage of bread and other produce. There's been a real orgy of high prices ever since. There are long queues in front of every food store, and everything is being bought up. Many items have suddenly disappeared from the shops . . . On the first day after the Ghetto was closed, many Christians brought bread for their Jewish acquaintances and friends . . .
'. . . Those who are slow to take their hats offto Germans are forced to do calisthenics using paving stones or tiles as weights. Elderlyjews, too, are ordered to do push-ups. They tear paper up small, scatter the pieces in the mud, and order people to pick them up, beating them as they stoop over. In the Polish quarter Jews are ordered to lie on the ground and [the Germans] walk over them . . . A wave of evil rolled over the whole city, as ifin response to a nod from above.'
Because the Nazis erroneously considered the Jews a race, all those who had even one Jewish grandparent were treated as Jews, regardless of the religion they professed. Consequently, among those herded into the Ghetto to share the fate of the Jews were thousands of people who were actually Christians - and at least one Baha'f, Lidia Zamenhof.
In the days before the sealing of the Ghetto, a Polish Esperantist of Italian ancestry named Jozef Arszenik went to see Lidia. Mr Arszenik, a railway worker and a zealous Esperantist since 1925, apparently was one of the people to whom Lidia had been teaching the Baha'i Faith. He bravely offered to hide Lidia in his home on the outskirts of Warsaw.
Ever since Lidia had returned to Poland in late 1938, all she had feared had come true, and events were turning out even worse than she could have imagined - the firebombing of her house, the brutal Nazi invasion, confinement under impossible conditions in the Ghetto. Until now, all her friends' efForts to get her out ofPoland to safety had come to naught. WhenJozef Arszenik went to Lidia in those dark days of November 1940 to offer her a hiding place, she must have realized it might well be her last chance to escape.
But Lidia Zamenhof refused. After the war, Mr Arszenik wrote Ernfrid Malmgren, a prominent Swedish Esperantist: 'That noble woman refused my offer to save her, saying that I with my family could lose our lives, because whoever hides a Jew perishes along with the Jew who is discovered.' Indeed, this was true. Mr Arszenik was taking a great chance: any Pole caught concealing a Jew was subject to instant execution.
To Anne Lynch in Geneva, Mr Arszenik wrote that Lidia's last words to him were: 'Do not think ofputting yourselfin danger; I know that I must die, but I feel it my duty to stay with my people. God grant that out of our sufferings a better world may emerge. I believe in God. I am a Baha'i and will die a Baha'f. Everything is in His hands.'
After the war, Jozef Arszenik became a Baha'1. He died in 1978 at the age of eighty.
Accounts of another attempt to help Lidia escape are remembered by several German Baha'fs, including Mrs Ursula Mŭhlschlegel, who heard the story from her husband Dr Adelbert Mŭhlschlegel, and Mrs Anna Grossmann and her son Dr Hartmut Grossmann, who learned of it from Dr Hermann Grossmann and from Mrs Karla Macco, a Baha'f from Heidelberg. But in this case, Lidia's would-be rescuer was a German soldier named Fritz Macco.
Unlike the elite SS, the German Wehrmacht drafted men regardless of their moral views. To resist conscription meant death. Thus it happened that individual German citizens whose personal views were contrary to everything the Nazis stood for found themselves part of the German war machine, including some Esperantists and Baha'is.
After the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, an Esperantist checking on the condition of the Esperanto House in Arnhem had been astonished to find on the locked door a piece of paper with a message, evidently placed there by a German soldier. It was in Esperanto and read: 'The house is deserted. A visitor cannot go in. Will the "mighty call" no longer "go through the world"? Take courage, soon another time shall come! Long live Esperanto! — A German Esperantist.'
In the late 1930S as it became clear that war was inevitable, the German Baha'is who were of draft age saw the dilemma that was approaching. As Baha'fs, they were bound to obey their government; yet also as Baha'fs, they did not want to fight. It was clear that the German army would tolerate no conscientious objection to bearing arms. According to Hartmut Grossmann, a letter was written to Shoghi Effendi on behalf of several young Baha'is, who were worried about what to do. The Guardian reportedly replied to the effect that if their desire not to take life were sincere, God would assist them to attain it. The young men went into the army, but all of them died during the first week of the war except for one, twenty-four-year-old Fritz Macco. 'He did not understand why he was spared,' Dr Hartmut Grossmann recalled. Fritz's letters to his mother were full of self- doubt: why had he alone survived? Had he done something wrong? Was he not sincere enough? One of the boys who had been killed was his brother.