# Lidia Zamenhof

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: John T. Dale, Lidia Zamenhof, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Lidia Zamenhof
> 
> John T. Dale
> 
> 1996
> 
> In response to your request for information about Lidia Zamenhof, I
> offer here the briefest of sketches.
> 
> Lidia Zamenhof was the youngest daughter of Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof,
> the originator of Esperanto. Her life and actions as a Bahá'í of
> Jewish background and as a promoter and user of Esperanto and
> translator of many Bahá'í writings into that language make her a
> significant figure in the history of the European and American Bahá'í
> and Esperanto movements in the 1920s and 30s. Her life and tragic
> ending in the Warsaw Ghetto and the extermination camp of Treblinka
> have been rescued from obscurity in a very well researched book by
> Wendy Heller published by George Ronald (Lidia: The Life of Lidia
> Zamenhof, Daughter of Esperanto). Wendy's book remains the fullest
> account of Lidia to date.
> 
> Lidia was born on January 29, 1904 in Warsaw, Poland and died in
> the Treblinka death camp sometime after the summer of 1942. She
> learned Esperanto at the age of nine. After receiving a law degree,
> she became very active in promoting Esperanto and her father's own
> universal outlook called "homaranismo," meaning literally in
> Esperanto "human-group-member-ism."
> 
> In 1925, she attended the Universala Kongreso in Geneva, where, 19
> years earlier, her father had spoken of the pogroms against the Jews
> in his own home town and had urged the Esperantists to show forth the
> light of mutual understanding and friendship. During this congress,
> she attended a Bahá'í meeting and met Martha Root, who was already
> well known among the non-Bahá'í Esperantists for her fluency in the
> language and her whole-hearted and sincere support of the language
> itself and its aims. For Martha, the Bahá'í movement was the
> 'Esperanto of religions'.
> 
> At this meeting, Dr. Adelbert Muhlschlegel gave a short talk in
> Esperanto in which he explained Bahá'u'lláh's teaching, cited
> Abdu'l-Bahá's many praises of Esperanto and of Dr. Zamenhof,
> explained that Dr. Zamenhof had exemplified the spirit of Bahá'u'lláh
> and because of this was a true Bahá'í, and that Bahá'ís all over the
> world honored Dr. Zamenhof "as an ideal model and loved him as
> 'majstro' ('master') and brother." FOOTNOTE: This was no
> exaggeration at the time, and the Bahá'í attitude toward Esperanto
> has always been one of official support and encouragement, although,
> with the exception of the Persian Bahá'í communities who responded to
> Abdu'l-Bahá's direct request to them, the Bahá'ís have never
> seriously attempted to carry out Abdu'l-Bahá's basic guidance
> regarding this language, namely, to "introduce it into the schools as
> an introduction to the oneness of humanity." (See, Jeanne Bolles,
> "The Bahá'í Movement and Esperanto," Star of the West, Vol. 11, # 17,
> Jan. 19, 1921, pp. 287-291.) This was a practical piece of guidance
> which, if it had been carried out and generalized, could have made
> America's schools over the decades a far much better source of world
> citizenship and world vision than they have been.
> 
> In any case, Lidia and Martha met again a year later, and Martha
> felt that Bahá'u'lláh and Abdu'l-Bahá had guided her to Lidia. Lidia,
> who had been raised in a universalistic and largely secularized
> atmosphere, was at first sceptical. But Martha's prayers and patient
> personality eventually had their effect on Lidia's own, and after
> the two had lived together for a number of months (Martha to improve her
> Esperanto and Lidia to improve her English), Lidia began to see the
> Bahá'í model of progressive revelation and God's own universality as
> the extension and fulfillment of her own beliefs and identity. She
> became "profoundly convinced" (as have many other Bahá'ís who have
> delved into Esperanto) that "Esperanto was created directly under the
> influence of Bahá'u'lláh, although the author of the language did
> not know it." (i> p. 71.)
> 
> After becoming a Bahá'í, Lidia of course encountered the
> disapproval of some members of her own family and also of some
> Esperantists who wanted the issue of inter-communication delinked
> from the issue of religious affiliation. (There were significant
> movements for Esperanto in socialist quarters, which tended toward
> anti-religious sentiments.) She also encountered the scepticism of
> some Bahá'ís about Esperanto. In later years she eventually met with
> Shoghi Effendi, who, although he sincerely supported Bahá'í efforts
> to use and publish in the language, apparently never learned it
> (unlike Abdu'l-Bahá, who had learned at least the basics of the
> language with the help of Dr. Esslemont).
> 
> At various points in her
> Bahá'í career she apparently weathered some spiritual crises, and if
> I read between the lines of Wendy's biography, probably Lidia
> suffered from depression -- a certainly understandable problem given her
> sensitivity, her basic shyness, her ideals, and the darkness of the
> world surrounding her. She translated many Bahá'í writings into
> Esperanto (most of which unfortunately still remain unpublished).
> 
> She came to the United States in late 1937 at the invitation of the
> US NSA and with the encouragement of Shoghi Effendi. Her stay here
> was for the most part successful for both the Bahá'í and Esperanto
> movements, but in a year the question of immigration status arose,
> and the Immigration Service denied a request for an extension of stay
> because, in its opinion, she had "worked" in the US while on a
> non-working visitor's visa by having been "paid" for teaching
> Esperanto classes. Any competent immigration attorney could have
> gotten her out of this mess, and it was negligent and careless on
> the part of the NSA, as her sponsor, to have failed to structure her
> stay in the US in a way which would not have triggered these
> problems to begin with. (I speak here as an immigration attorney
> myself.) Efforts to reverse the decision of the Immigration Service produced
> only a small extension, and in December 1938, Lidia sailed back to
> Poland.
> 
> In her last years, she travelled in Poland teaching Esperanto and
> the Faith and producing translations of the Writings. She was
> eventually arrested by the Nazis because of her Jewish background,
> was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, where she cared for those around
> her and attempted to obtain medicine and food for them. She was finally
> killed at the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka some time after
> the summer of 1942.
> 
> I might add that Lidia's memory was honored in December 1995 at a
> special meeting at the US Jewish Holocaust Museum in Washington,
> D.C. which focused generally on the efforts of Esperantists to help
> rescue Jews during World War II from fascist and communist persecution.
> 
> One further note is Lidia's inspiration to the life and work of
> Roan Orloff Stone, another Bahá'í of East European Jewish background
> who learned Esperanto and carried on Lidia's pioneering work of
> translating Bahá'í writings (including Nabil's Narrative) into
> Esperanto. Roan was known across the United States and
> internationally as a Bahá'í Esperantist. She was instrumental in
> obtaining the approval of the House of Justice for the formation of
> the Bahá'í Esperanto League in the early 1970s.
> 
> I hope this terribly brief sketch of Lidia's life and efforts will
> begin to stimulate Irfanians into a greater appreciation of the role
> Esperanto played in the early Bahá'í movement and among the early
> heroes and heroines of the Cause. The role of Esperanto could have
> been much greater and much more beneficial if the Bahá'ís had simply
> followed Abdu'l-Bahá's advice and used Esperanto as a pedagogical
> tool in the schools rather than always intermixing it with the
> diplomatic question of an official international language, in which
> Esperanto always "loses" by comparison with English. Esperanto's
> vocabulary, despite its great increase since the time of Abdu'l-Bahá,
> is still not large enough for it to serve as an official
> international language for specialists in many fields. As a first
> foreign language for children, however, Esperanto offers unparalleled
> benefits which Bahá'í school teachers should finally begin to start
> exploiting.
> 
> METADATA
> 
> Views26053 views since posted 1997; last edit 2025-04-05 13:19 UTC;
> 
> previous at archive.org.../dale_lidia_zamenhof;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
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> Citation: ris/530
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> — *Lidia Zamenhof (Used by permission of the curator)*