Her postcard could tell very little outwardly, for it had to pass the censor. She could not tell her friends that not all the mail reached the inmates of the Ghetto and that parcels were often confiscated. Nor could she reveal what she might have had to do without in order to send them a postcard: one had to bribe the postmen to send or receive mail, especially parcels. Perhaps she could not afford the price that was being demanded for the package they had tried to send.
The Zamenhof name had come to the attention of the Nazi authorities again. In February 1941 Zamenhof Street in Warsaw was changed back to Dzika. *
* It was changcd back again to Zamenhof after the war.
Lidia's friends in America had not forgotten her, but their efforts were not enough to save her. The National Spiritual Assembly's letters of protest had had no effect; in 1941 the National Spiritual Assembly reported that American Baha'fs had 'volunteered to finance the cost of transportation of Lidia Zamenhof and to guarantee her support in this country; but despite efforts put forth through every available official channel, Miss Zamenhofs whereabouts and condition are not accurately known nor has it yet been found possible to arrange for her travel to America through the authorities in charge ofher country. . .'
The area of the Warsaw Ghetto was decreased, yet more and more refugees poured in. Now a tremendous number of people were crowded into the old buildings of the Ghetto, and the threat of disease grew. With it came another, more terrible threat. Rumors began to spread that thejews, whom the Nazis blamed for the spread oftyphus, were to be removed from Warsaw altogether.
'Next to hunger,' Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote, 'typhus . . . has become the burning question of the hour . . . The doctors calculate that every fifth Jew will be sick with typhus in the winter. Consequently, persistent rumors have spread about the possible resettlement of thejews from Warsaw. This is said to be considered one possible way of removing the peril of typhus.' To some, resettlement in a camp, no matter how hard the conditions there, seemed infinitely preferable to another solution: 'The Pomiechowek affair, in which 800 people were exterminated because they were sick, caused the Jewish populace of the Ghetto to tremble,' Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote, 'because it demonstrates what can be expected to happen here if the attempt to arrest the spread of disease inside the Ghetto should fail.'
By November the first frosts had appeared and the people in the Ghetto were 'trembling at the prospect of cold weather. The most fearful sight is that of freezing children. Little children with bare feet, bare knees, and torn clothing, stand dumbly in the street, weeping.' That winter the Jews of the General-Government were ordered to surrender their fur coats to the Germans. Although the decree was 'a severe blow to the poorer people, who sometimes had nothing but an old tattered fur coat to wear,' some burned their coats rather than give them to the Nazis.
On January 12, 1942 Lidia managed to send a postcard to the Isbruckers in Holland. She thanked them for a letter and for their remembrance. 'We think often ofyou and would like to see you again. Zofia and Wanda work as doctors. Ludwik, who will be seventeen, works in an office. We are happy to know you are well and we wish you and Mr Cseh all good in 1942 . . .' Lidia called her sister and nephew 'Sofio' and 'Ludoviko', the Esperanto forms of their names.
This was something she had never dared to do before. In her postcard, Lidia said nothing of what work she herself was doing - teaching English. At first, under the occupation, schools and courses had been severely curtailed. Later with permission, some vocational courses were allowed. Other schools and classes existed secretly, at the gymnazium or even university level. But teaching English was unlikely to be sanctioned by the Germans - it was the language of the enemy. Nevertheless, many people in the Ghetto were eager to learn English. It gave them hope. 'Everyone is assiduously studying English,' Emmanuel Ringelblum recorded in his diary, 'in preparation for emigration after the war.'
The Spring of 1942 brought the terror ofdeportation. Word reached the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto that other Jewish Ghettos in Poland were being liquidated. Thousands of people- at first the young and the old, but later everyone, regardless of age or ability to work - were sealed in freight trains and told they were being resettled in work camps in the east. But by now many knew that one did not go to a camp to work, but to die. 'Resettlement to the east' was the Nazis' euphemism for annihilation. Some people, swollen and apathetic from hunger, welcomed death, for it would bring the end of sufFering. When the Germans offered rations of bread and marmalade to those who would volunteer for 'resettlement', this drew such large numbers that some days they exceeded their quota.
In July 1942 the dreaded order came to Warsaw. AIl thejews of the Warsaw Ghetto were to be deported 'to the east'. Their destination was a camp called Treblinka. Adam Czerniakow, head of the Jewish Council, was told by the SS to provide a quota of five thousand people per day. The SS demanded that the quota be raised to seven thousand, and soon to ten thousand per day. He finally realized that the Nazis intended nothing less than the total extermination of Warsaw's Jews, and he committed suicide.
At the Umschlagplatz or 'trading place', the people wereherded by the thousands into freight trains, as many as 150 people to a boxcar. When the day's quota was not met, people were seized randomly on the street. Neighborhoods were cordoned-off and all the inhabitants taken to the trains. Many thousands were killed outright during the operation: those not expected to survive thejourney were simply shot. The Umschlagplatz was a nightmare. Yet, 'for believing Jews the conviction that their sacrifice was required as a testimony to Almighty God was more comforting than the supposition that He had abandoned them altogether,' Lucy Dawidowicz writes in The War Against theJews. 'Morale was sustained by rabbis and pious Jews who, by their own resolute and exalted stance, provided a model of how
Jews should encounter death. On the Umschlagplatz that August an elderly piousJew exhorted the despondent masses, sunk in the misery and squalor of their surroundings: "Jews, don't despair! Don't you realize we are going to meet the Messiah?'"
In August 1942 the Zamenhofs were taken to the Umschlagplatz. But, in doctor's smocks, Wanda and her sister Janina Minc escaped with Wanda's son, Ludwik. Changing their name to Zaleski, Adam's wife and son were able to survive outside the Ghetto until the war's end.
But Lidia's sister Zofia went deliberately on one of those grim trains, Adam's son Ludwik later recalled. She was 'convinced', he wrote, 'the deported people would need medical help she would provide them with. Lidia followed her several months later.' The train took them 120 kilometers from Warsaw to Treblinka.
In April 1943 the physical liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto began, but the Nazis met armed resistance from a courageous band of young Jewish men and women. Although they were vastly outnumbered, the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters held off the well-equipped SS troops during April and May amid the rubble. At last they were overcome, but scattered remnants of the fighting organization persisted, in the tunnels and sewers of the Ghetto, until the end of the war. One of the last of those shot amid the ruins was historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, along with his wife and twelve-year-old son.
Near the hamlet of Treblinka, there was a small slave-labor camp with mostly Polish inmates, but by the summer of 1942 a new and different kind of camp had been constructed a few kilometers away in an area of woodland and sandy hills. It was not a concentration camp where some inmates survived as slave laborers, but an extermination camp where all went to their deaths.
The death camp Treblinka covered only about fifty acres and was surrounded by antitank barriers and barbed wire, with watch towers at each comer. In the lower camp were the sorting square and the living quarters for the SS and Ukrainian guards and the 'work-Jews' who sorted the goods seized from the victims. At the northeast end of the lower camp was a separate barbed wire enclosure. It contained a gray- white masonry building with at first three, then ten additional airtight chambers, connected to a room where a diesel engine generated lethal carbon monoxide fumes. The gas was piped into the chambers through false shower heads. Beyond the gas chambers were the burial pits, where the bodies of the dead were disposed of, originally by lime, later by buming on large iron racks. When the Nazis became worried that the mass grave might be discovered, the bodies that had been buried during the early days of the camp's operation were exhumed and bumed.