Lidia Zamenhof
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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.

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-- Lidia Zamenhof (Used by permission of the curator)