Lidia

12. Part of the audience at the Bern congress

 

 

 

 

14■ From left: Lidia, Klara, Adam and Ludivik. Taken in 1916 during the war, while Zofia was in the Ukraine

i6. Thefuneralprocession through the streets ofWarsaw, 17 April 1917

 

17- Lidia, the schoolgirl

In January 1917 Zofia wrote Miss Noll of the tragic news that Ludwik Zamenhof s youngest brother Aleksander was dead. Miss Noll's letter relaying this sad information reached Warsaw in April. It had a shattering effect.

Aleksander Zamenhof had been an army doctor during the Russo- Japanese War. He had viewed such sufFering among the casualties he treated that he vowed never to take part in another war. When Aleksander was again ordered into the Russian Army, rather than serve in the war he had taken his own life.

The news of Aleksander's death, unexpected and terrible, was a great blow to Ludwik Zamenhof. 'Though he never complained, because he did not wish anyone else to suffer when he sufFered,' Adam recalled, 'he looked more wretched and pitiful than we had ever seen him. But it seems that till death he did not think about himselfso much as about his beloved idea, through which he wanted to bring happiness to mankind, and he felt truly unhappy that because of illness he no longer could complete his daily task, which would lead to victory.'

On the fourteenth of April, Dr Zamenhof seemed somewhat improved, and the prospect ofbeginning his work again put him into a good humor. At five in the afternoon, the doctor came to call and they had a friendly conversation. Feeling tired, Zamenhof asked the doctor if he could rest on the divan. When Klara approached to help her husband, she found him dead.

Later, the family discovered on Zamenhofs writing desk some notes for a manuscript he had been working on when he died. As weakness and pain had overcome him at last, Ludwik Zamenhof had struggled to set down his thoughts about a subject he had never mentioned publicly before: God and immortality. He acknowledged that many people who had been uninterested in religion often became 'believers' at the end of life. Atheists would explain this, he said, as insincerity or senile deterioration of the brain, or as a last self-deception in the face of inevitable death. Zamenhof foresaw that people would want to apply those explanations to him. He knew that, just as he had faced suspicions of being a crank when he had first put forward Esperanto, once again he risked being considered demented if on his deathbed he began to speak of religion. But as always, Zamenhof resolved to express his beliefs honestly although it would bring him no sympathy from anyone. 'While in the scientific and free-thinking world I shall lose all respect,' he wrote, 'at the same time, in the world of believers I will find no compensating sympathy, but probably only attack, because my faith is completely different from their faith! . . .

'My mother was a religious believer,' he wrote, 'my father was an atheist. In my childhood I believed in God and immortality ofthe soul, in the form in which my religion ofbirth instructed. I do not remember exactly in which year of my life I lost my religious faith, but I remember that I reached the highest degree of my unbelief at around the age of fifteen or sixteen. That was also the most tormented period of my life. In my eyes, life lost all meaning and value. . . All seemed so senseless, useless, aimless, so absurd!

'I came to feel that perhaps [death is] not disappearance, perhaps

death is a miracle . . . that something is guiding us for a high purpose »

He never finished the essay.

The sixteenth of April was dark and rainy. The streets were black with crowds of people as the funeral procession slowly moved toward the Jewish cemetery. The cantor chanted the ancient Hebrew prayers, the men wept, the women behind their black veils wailed with grief. The coffin was lowered into the ground.

In the empty flat on Krolewska Street, the typewriter stood in its little corner, covered with a black cover. 'It stood quiet,' Lidia wrote years later, 'indifferent, without feeling - the machine.'

As a child Ludwik Zamenhof had once vowed that when he grew up he would do away with the evils of the adult world which affiicted his native Bialystok. He had created Esperanto, had seen it spread around the world and bring together peoples of different races, religions and nationalities under the green banner of brotherhood. Now, on his death, Ludwik Zamenhof s thirteen-year-old daughter determined to carry on his sacred work. Lidia had learned Esperanto well by now, and some time during the war she began to make her first, unsure attempts at translating Polish literature into Esperanto.