Szmul Zygielbojm

Szmul Zygielbojm was a Polish Jewish socialist and a member of the Polish government in exile in London. On the night of 11 May 1943, in his flat at 10 Porchester Square in Bayswater, he killed himself with veronal. His suicide note, addressed to the President and Prime Minister of Poland, said that he could no longer live while the rest of his people were being murdered and the Allied governments were doing nothing. He was forty eight.

Zygielbojm had been a leader of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party, in interwar Poland. He had been a city councillor in Łódź and Warsaw. He had escaped Poland in late 1939 after refusing the German order that he, as a Jewish leader, sign a paper acknowledging the legitimacy of the regime, and had reached London in 1942 by way of Belgium, France and the United States. The Polish government in exile gave him a seat on its National Council, the parliamentary advisory body, where he represented the Polish Jewish community.

From his arrival in London he campaigned for Allied governments to act on the news from occupied Poland. He had received the report from Jan Karski, the Polish underground courier who had been smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and into the transit camp at Izbica that fed Bełżec, in late 1942 and early 1943. He had read the deportation figures. He knew the death camps were operating. He briefed the British government, he briefed Roosevelt’s people, he wrote articles, he spoke on the BBC. The response was minimal. The British and American governments did not want to make the war a war about the Jews and feared that an explicit rescue policy would feed antisemitic propaganda at home.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising began on 19 April 1943. By early May it was clear the uprising had been crushed and that the surviving Jews of Warsaw, including Zygielbojm’s wife Manya and his son Tuwia, were dead. He spent the night of 11 May writing his letter and took the dose. The note ended with the line that by his own death he hoped to break the indifference of those who could rescue and were not rescuing.

The suicide had no immediate political effect. The Allied policy did not change. The Bermuda Conference of April 1943, called to discuss the refugee question, had ended in deliberately empty resolutions. The bombing of Auschwitz was not on the agenda for another year and was rejected when it was finally raised. Zygielbojm’s death was reported in the British and American press but did not move the policy.

His name is on the memorial wall at the Warsaw Ghetto monument. There is a plaque at Porchester Square. The historian David Engel argued in the 1980s that the suicide had a longer-term effect on Jewish memory and on the postwar argument about Allied rescue policy. That may be true. But Zygielbojm killed himself because the policy had failed, not because he expected the suicide to change it. He died because he could not bear the silence that he could not break.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards