Lidia

In Poland fighting did not end with the armistice that brought the Great War to a close. Though the nation had been declared independent, its borders were not immediately decided. A state ofwar existed with Poland's neighbor, the new communist state of the Soviet Union, and Polish troops clashed with the Red Army.

In 1919 Adam Zamenhof was called up to serve as a military doctor in the Polish Army. The next year Zofia, still in the Ukraine, was mobilized into the Red Army as a regimental doctor. In a tragically ironic twist of fate, the children of Dr Zamenhof found themselves serving in armies at war with each other.

In the spring of 1920 the Polish Army advanced east into the Ukraine to Kiev. Soviet troops began to push back the Poles and counter- attacked until by June Warsaw itself was in danger ofinvasion. But in August the Red Army was stopped on the banks of the Vistula River and forced back.

It was not until two years later that Adam and Zofia were both released from military service and allowed to go home. Adam soon took up his practice again. His father's patients accepted him in place of their beloved doctor, and Adam was able to provide for his mother and younger sister Lidia.

Zofia retumed to Warsaw exhausted and weak. The terrible conditions she had lived under for years had drained her strength: she had had typhus three times. When she regained her health she began to practice intemal medicine and pediatrics in a hospital. At last the Zamenhof family were together again, and Lidia, Zofia and Adam were living under the same roof with their mother.

Many years later, cousin Stephen Zamenhof, who was also Klara's godson, recalled Lidia, Adam and Zofia as they were at that time. Zofia was, he said, 'the official physician of the family. Whenever anybody in the family was sick, Zofia would come, especially for the children.' She had 'short hair and a rather deep voice. She looked like a typical Bolshevik doctor - energetic, masculine, and she had such a manner with children; so we were kind of afraid of her. But she was a very good-natured person.'

Adam was tall and thin, and, Stephen Zamenhofremembered, 'very kind and intelligent'. In 1923 Adam married Dr Wanda Frenkel, also an ophthalmologist, whom he had known since childhood. She had been inspired by Ludwik Zamenhof to study ophthalmology. Adam became absorbed in his medical field, writing books and scientific articles on eye diseases. He was one of the first European surgeons to perform operations on the retina and became highly respected for his research, eventually becoming a docent (associate professor) at the University of Warsaw - a remarkable achievement at a time when Jews werebeing excluded from Polish universities.

Lidia, as a teenager, was of slight build and 'not handsome at all', Stephen recalled, 'but she had an interesting face'. Stephen remembered that his cousin Lilka was 'always busy translating literature into Esperanto . . . She believed that she had a mission in life, from her father, to propagate Esperanto.'

It was expected, Stephen recalled, that Zamenhof children would study to become doctors - or at least dentists or pharmacists. 'It was so ingrained that everyone had to be a doctor - everybody was a doctor - that the bones and books were passed from one member of the family to another, depending on what he or she was studying in medical school,' hesaid. InLidia's generationofZamenhofs, Adam, Zofia, and cousins Julian and Mieczyslaw, Stephen's brother, became doctors. Several other cousins became dentists. Stephen recalled feeling like an outcast because he was in polytechnical school, not studying medicine. Eventually, however, he became a professor of microbiology and immunology in America.

Unlike her brother, sister and cousins, Lidia showed no inclination to become a doctor, and the treasured bones and worn medical books were never passed to her. If she ever wanted to follow the family tradition of medicine, or if she, like her cousin, felt an outcast because she was not doing so, she did not say. It would be some years yet until Lidia found what she really wanted to do - a profession that would allow her to carry out her mission of spreading Esperanto.

Lidia's mother, however, had definite ideas about what she wanted for her daughter's future. Klara wished her to study law and perhaps become a lawyer. No Zamenhof had yet done that. Surely Klara also wished for her daughter to have long life and a family of her own. But none ofthose would be Lidia's lot. In a reminiscence about her mother which Lidia wrote years later, she alluded in a melancholy way to Klara's dreams for her, dreams that would never come true. 'Your wishes were not fulfilled,' she wrote, 'and you painted on the canvas of hope pictures to which destiny did not add its signature.' What those pictures were, Lidia never revealed.