Lidia

Although conditions were difficult in Warsaw during the early years of the war, life went on. Lidia worked at her studies and played with her dolls, and the war raging in Europe was little more than a topic of conversation for the adults at the weekly family meetings. But now, when she went to the wastebin in her father's study to retrieve the colorful stamps from foreign countries, there were none.

It was Lidia's father who explained to her the meaning ofthe war. 'I was a ten-year-old child when the cataclysm happened,' she wrote many years later. 'I did not think much about [the war] although it had already shaken the world, uprooted many lives, destroyed many homes. I played gaily and amused myself, free ofcare. Then my father, whose eyes, since the beginning of those black days, were always sad, pointed out to me how much blood and tears now flowed in the world, how many children cried for their papas.'

Years later, Lidia reflected on why her father had talked to her about the war, and why he had made her aware of the suffering so many others endured, among them children like herself. Would it not have been better to allow her the comer of sunshine she had found in a world in which the light had gone out? She realized that her father had not made her think about the war to cloud her happiness, but to instill in her 'sympathy for the suffering of human beings, for the tom, wrenched humanity'. Those feelings, Lidia wrote, 'planted in the soul of a child, grow until at last they bear fruit in the soul of the mature person. This fruit is the sense of human solidarity, of the brotherhood of all men from whatever nation or race, of the unity of mankind.'

The painful realizations that once shattered the gaiety of a child's play would become the guiding force behind her life's work, just as it had been for her father. This work would be, as she later described it: 'to construct a bridge between the peoples, to help them to unite beneath the banner of humanity.'

In 1915 the German army's plan was to hold off the Allies on the Western Front while sending its main forces east, against Russia. The German lines advanced across Poland. In August Warsaw fell.

The Russian government, giving ground to the German armies, had blamed the Jews for its military defeats and accused them ofbeing spies for the Germans. Thousands of Jews were deported farther east into Russia. When early in the war Russian troops overran cities in Austrian Poland, bloody pogroms were carried out against the Jews there. In Warsaw, under the German occupation, things were not easy but in some ways they were better than they had been under the tsar, for the Germans wanted to have the population of Poland on their side, against the Russians, from whom they promised to liberate them.

When Warsaw was occupied by the German army, Lidia's sister Zofia found herself separated from her family by the Eastem Front. She had been assigned a post as a village doctor in Shtepovka, a village between Kiev and Kharkov, and was unable to retum home. Nor could she write letters directly to her family, who were in enemy- occupied territory. However, through an Esperantist in Denmark, Margarethe Noll, Zofia and her family were able to exchange a few messages.

Usually Zofia had to confine her messages home to a postcard, which might arrive in Denmark months later, stamped with the post offices it had passed through and, of course, the stamp of the imperial censor. In October 1916 a worried Zofia wrote Miss Noll that she had leamed from a French Esperantist that her father had been gravely ill. She asked Miss Noll to find out about his health, 'But don't write that I know something,' she said, 'because then father will not write the truth. Ask in your name about his health and write to me the truth, I beg you.'

Two months later, Edmond Privat, as a citizen of neutral Switzerland, was able to visit Ludwik Zamenhof. It would be Privat's last interview with his mentor, who was very ill and 'could only speak softly'.

Zamenhof confided to Privat his wish to convene a congress to create a universal society for people of various races and religions who felt themselves united by common ethics and tolerance - the Homaranist community he had always longed for. The thought that he would never complete the task chagrined him. 'It was the goal ofmy whole life,' he repeated. 'For it, I would sacrifice everything.'

According to Marjorie Boulton, 'Zamenhof wamed Privat not to put too much hope in the coming liberation of many subject peoples: set free, they would refuse to others the rights they wanted for themselves; there would never be real harmony in the human family until all its members were free and there was some kind of sovereign world govemment.'

11. Dr Zamenhof (center) anddignitariesat theformal opetiing oftheBern congress,

1913

'fkn**'