Zygielbojm's Last Protest

All his life Zygmunt Zygielbojm fought the good fight for the Jewish people of Warsaw. When the Germans came he organized workmen's battalions. At the hour of surrender he stood before the Germans, defying them in a fiery speech and prophesying: "We shall perish, but we will never go to your ghetto."

Zygielbojm's wife & children perished in the terror that followed. But the Jews helped Zygielbojm to escape. He carried their appeals and exhortations to France, then to America and to Britain. There he became a member of the Polish National Council, was in continuous touch with the Polish underground.

From those who escaped Zygielbojm learned the full story of the battle of the Warsaw ghetto, in which the Jews killed 1,000 Nazis before they were slaughtered or packed and locked in box cars until they smothered to death. The last visitor also brought a message wrung out of the bitterness and frustration of the Jews who still survive.

The message said that if Jewish leaders abroad had not forgotten the misery of their race, they should go to the U.S. Embassy and the British Foreign Office and stay there until arrested--and, if arrested, they should go on a hunger strike until death. But the ghetto despaired of action: "At 11 in the morning you will begin telling . . . [the exiled Jewish leaders] about the anguish of the Jews in Poland, but at 1 o'clock they will ask you to halt the narrative so they can have lunch. That is a difference which cannot be bridged."

Alone in his room in London, Zygielbojm sat brooding over the message. The U.S.-British conference at Bermuda had ended in rationalizations. The disease of anti-Semitism festered among the exiled Poles and throughout the world was infecting minds which thrived on prejudice and bigotry. Zygielbojm was only one man, and a tired one. He went to a closet, took down a bottle of poison and drank it.

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