In the countryside around Treblinka that summer, the villagers saw the crowded transports arrive from Warsaw. One of those who took special note was Franciszek Z^becki, the traffic superintendent of the Treblinka railway station. He observed the entire operation of the death camp and passed reports on to the underground Polish Home Army, of which he was a member.
When the trains approached the station, he saw that the Lithuanian guards sitting on the roofs of the freight cars were holding guns. 'They looked as if they had killed; as if they had had their hands in blood and then washed before arriving,' he later told Gitta Sereny, author of Into That Darkness. 'The train was very full - incredibly full it seemed. It was a hot day but, bewildering to us, the difference in temperature between inside the cars and out was obviously such that a kind of fog came out and surrounded the train . . .'
Some Polish peasants from the village — and even some German railway workers - pitying the Jews who cried out to them, brought water to the trains, 'until', Mr Z^becki recalled, 'the Germans began to shoot to keep them away . . .' Pity soon turned into 'sharp fear' that anyone who saw what was going on at Treblinka would be killed.
The quiet, pleasant pine woods had been transformed into a place of horror. The reek ofdeath and the smoke ofthe ever-burning fires in the camp lay heavy over the district. The 'dark foggy clouds that hung over us, that covered the sky in that hot and beautiful summer, even on the most brilliant days,' Mr Z^becki recalled, created 'an almost sulphuric darkness bringing with it this pestilential smell'. The constant hammering sound of the mechanical ditch-digger that excavated the burial pits reverberated through the countryside for miles, day and night. Escapees oriented themselves in the woods at night by its infernal, steady sound.
When the trains arrived at the camp, the people were brutally driven from the cars. Men and women were separated and sent to the undressing barracks. There they were ordered to strip, even of artificial limbs and eye-glasses, and told to turn in valuables at the window. Women and girls had their heads shaved; their hair was shipped to a factory in Germany to be used in upholstery.
Then, whipped along mercilessly by Ukrainian guards, the people were forced to run through a narrow corridor about a hundred meters long, with high barbed wire fences on either side. At the end of this corridor, which the SS guards jocularly called the Himmelstrasse, the 'Road to Heaven', the people, pushed by those in back, climbed little wooden stairs to enter the gray-white building. Inside, the chambers looked like those of a public bath, with white tiles halfway up the walls, sloping floors, and what appeared to be ordinary shower heads. But there were no drains, and the doorway was oddly narrow, so that the people could only pass through one by one.
Under the whip of an SS guard, they were crowded into the chambers, hundreds of people, pressed tightly together. The doors closed.
Franciszek Z^becki counted the transports that came to his station, first from Warsaw, then from other Polish cities and nine other countries. By his calculations, 1,200,000 Jews died at Treblinka. Although in 1943 the SS demolished the camp and tried to obliterate the signs of what had been done there, it will never be forgotten. Among the ashes in the ground at Treblinka are those of Lidia Zamenhof.
EPILOGUE
Out of the Abyss
The fourteenth of April had always been a solemn day for the Esperantists as they gathered at the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw to mark the anniversary of the death of Ludwik Zamenhof. In 1946 that day came with ineffable sorrow. Miraculously, the Jewish cemetery had not been destroyed in the war. Like a symbol, the weathered granite monument on Zamenhofs tomb still stood; it had escaped the incendiary bombs and the liquidation of the Ghetto. The rest of thejewish quarter was a vast, silent stretch of rubble.
How often, on other anniversaries of this date, the Esperantists had lamented the Majstro's death as premature. Now they called it a blessing that he had not lived through the Great War to see another world war even more devastating in its effect, to see the depths of savagery to which hatred between the races could goad human beings, to see the brutal murder of his own children. Had he lived, they realized, he himself might well have died in a Nazi gas chamber.
This year there were so many more to mourn. No longer would the oratory of Leo Belmont ring out through the April air, assuring the solemn gathering ofsamideanoj that Ludwik Zamenhof s legacy would triumph; Leo Belmont had died in 1941. Thousands of Jewish Esperantists had been murdered in Germany and the occupied countries; many other non-Jewish Esperantists had fallen in battle or been killed as subversives. Emile and Marie Borel's son Guy had been arrested by the Gestapo as a resistance fighter and died in 1944 during transport to Dachau concentration camp.
In the years after the war, the Esperanto movement rose out of the ashes of Europe, phoenix-like, as it had done before, but the war had dealt it a terrible blow.
After the war the neutral movement became reunited, the two estranged organizations, the UEA and IEL, merging under the name of the Universal Esperanto Association, which in 1954 achieved consultative status with UNESCO. The language problem continued to plague the new United Nations, which found itself burdened with large expenses for translation and a growing list of official and working languages. Yet efforts to encourage the United Nations to consider the matter of an intemational language, or to persuade it of the value of Esperanto, met a fate similar to that of earlier efforts at the League of Nations. A declaration bearing almost a million signatures, presented by UEA to UNESCO, resulted in a resolution recognizing the common ideals of Esperanto and UNESCO, but a second proposal submitted to the United Nations in the mid-i96os, with signatures of almost one million individuals from seventy-four countries as well as four thousand organizations representing almost seventy-three million members, never moved beyond the Secretariat.
The center of the Esperanto movement remained in Europe, but the movement continues to be tolerated in countries with opposite political orientations. In the United States, however, during the 'cold war' era, the secretary of the Esperanto Association of North America viewed the spread of Esperanto in communist countries with alarm and began a campaign of attacks against the UEA and the Esperanto League for North America (ELNA), which had been formed of EANA members dissatisfied with his leadership. Just as the EANA was about to be expelled from the UEA in 1956, it resigned from membership. It has since been superseded as the official Esperanto organization by ELNA, which is affiliated with the UEA. Elsewhere in the world, the Esperanto movement's significant membership in Japan and a recent upsurge of interest in the language in China - with the scheduling of the Seventy-First Universal Congress of Esperanto in 1986 in Shanghai - hold interest and promise for the future.