Szmul Zygielbojm

Szmul Zygielbojm was born on February 21, 1895, in the village of Borowica, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). His family moved to Krasnystaw in 1899. Due to poverty, he left school and began working in a factory at the age of 10. Zygielbojm left home for Warsaw when he was 12, but he returned to Krasnystaw at the beginning of World War I and moved with his family to Chełm.[3]

In his 20s, Zygielbojm became involved in the Jewish labor movement, and in 1917 he represented Chełm at the first Bundist convention in Poland. Zygielbojm so impressed the Bund leadership at the convention that he was invited to Warsaw in 1920 to serve as secretary of the Trade Union of Jewish Metal Workers and a member of the Warsaw Committee of the Bund. In 1924 he was elected to the Bund's Central Committee, a position he held until his death.[4]

By 1930, Zygielbojm was editing the Jewish labor unions' journal, Arbeiter Fragen ("Worker’s Issues"). In 1936, the Central Committee sent him to Łódź to lead the Jewish workers' movement, and in 1938 he was elected to its city council.[3]

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After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Zygielbojm returned to Warsaw, where he participated in the defense committee during the siege and defense of the city. When the Nazis occupied Warsaw, they demanded 12 hostages from the population to prevent further resistance. Stefan Starzyński, the city's president, proposed that the Jewish labor movement provide a hostage, Ester Iwińska. Zygielbojm volunteered in her place.[4]

On his release, Zygielbojm was made a member of the Jewish Council, or Judenrat, which the Nazis had appointed. The Nazis ordered the Judenrat to begin the creation of a ghetto within Warsaw. Because of Zygielbojm's public opposition to the order, his fellow Bundists feared for his safety and arranged for him to leave. In December 1939, Zygielbojm reached Belgium. Early in 1940, he spoke before a meeting of the Labour and Socialist International in Brussels and described the early stages of the Nazi persecution of Polish Jewry.[3]

When the Nazis invaded Belgium in May 1940, Zygielbojm went to France and then the US, where he spent a year and a half trying to convince Americans of the dire situation facing Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.[3]

Zygielbojm's last letter, addressed to Polish president Władysław Raczkiewicz and prime minister Władysław Sikorski and dated 11 May 1943.

On 19 April 1943, high-ranking officials of the Allied governments of the UK and the US met in Bermuda, ostensibly to discuss the situation of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. By coincidence, that same day the Nazis attempted to liquidate the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and met with unexpected resistance.

By the beginning of May, the futility of the Bermuda Conference had become apparent.[11] Days later, Zygielbojm received word of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and of the ghetto's final liquidation. He learned that his wife Manya and 16-year-old son Tuvia had been killed there.[12] At his home in west London, 12, Porchester Square, Paddington,[1] on 11 May Zygielbojm committed suicide with an overdose of sodium amytal, as a protest against the indifference and inaction of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust.[12] He died at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, on 12 May 1943.[1]

In a long suicide note addressed to Polish president Władysław Raczkiewicz and prime minister Władysław Sikorski, Zygielbojm said that while the Nazis were responsible for the murder of the Polish Jews, "the whole of humanity" was also indirectly culpable. He accused the Western Allies of "looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions of tortured children, women and men," and the Polish government of not doing enough.

I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.[13]

He wished his letter to be widely publicized and hoped that "the Polish Government [would] embark immediately on diplomatic action... in order to save the living remnant of the Polish Jews from destruction."[13]

After his death, Zygielbojm's seat in the Polish exile parliament was taken over by Emanuel Scherer.[14] Zygielbojm's younger son, Joseph, survived the ghetto's destruction. After taking a leadership role in the Polish resistance during the war, he emigrated to the United States. He became a scientist at NASA. He died in 1995, survived by his sons, Arthur and Paul.[15]

Zygielbojm did not leave a will, but administration of his estate, valued at £360 and 17s, was granted to Lucjan Blit, a journalist.[1]

Warsaw memorial inscription

Zygielbojm's body was cremated in symbolic protest and unity with the murdered millions of the Holocaust. In 1959, his surviving son located the cremains in a shed in the Golders Green Jewish Cemetery in London. Because Zygielbojm had been cremated, the religious community would not permit his ashes to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. With the assistance of the American Jewish labor movement, Zygielbojm's cremains were brought to the US and interred at the New Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Ridgewood, New York, in 1961.[16]

In May 1996, a plaque in memory of Zygielbojm was dedicated at the corner of Porchester Road and Porchester Square in London, near where he had committed suicide.[17] The creation of the memorial was a joint project of the Bund and the Jewish Socialists' Group. The Polish ambassador and the mayor of Westminster were present.[18][19]

A granite memorial to Zygielbojm was incorporated into a building at 5 S. Dubois Street[20] in Muranów, a housing project built after World War II on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.[21]

In 2008 a plaque was added to the building in Chełm where Zygielbojm had lived. A Bundist commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Marek Edelman, wrote a letter that was read at the plaque's dedication.[22]

Zygielbojm is the subject of a 2001 Polish documentary, Śmierć Zygielbojma ("The Death of Zygielbojm").[23] The film, directed by Dżamila Ankiewicz, won a special mention at the Kraków Film Festival.[24]

In 2021, he was the subject of a Polish drama film Śmierć Zygielbojma ("The Death of Zygielbojm"), which tells the story of an investigation by a British journalist into the life of Szmul Zygielbojm and his attempts to expose Nazi Germany's war crimes. It was directed by Ryszard Brylski and stars Wojciech Mecwaldowski in the title role.[25]

• Dzamila Ankiewicz and Marek Nowowiejski. 2001 [Video]. Zygielbojm's Death. New York NY: Filmakers Library, 44min.
• Aviva Ravel. 1980. Faithful unto Death: The Story of Arthur Zygielbaum. Montreal: Arthur Zygielbaum Branch, Workmen's Circle. 208pp. ISBN 0969043503
• Aleksander Rowiński. 2000. Zygielbojma śmierć i życie [Zygielbojm's Life and Death]. Warsaw: Oficyna Literatów "Rój", 271pp. ISBN 9788385049463
  • German translation: Aleksander Rowiński. 2004. Zygielbojms Reise. Eine Spurensuche [Zygielbojm's Journey: A Search for Clues] (translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Karaś). Osnabrück: fibre and Warsaw: Oficyna Literatów "Rój", 369pp. ISBN 9783929759808[26]
• Szmul Zygielbojm. 1947. זיגלבוים-בוך Zigelboym-bukh [The Book of Zygielbojm's Writings (edited by J.[acob] S.[holem] Hertz[27]). New York: Farlag "Unzer Tsayt", 408pp.[28]

• List of Poles (Holocaust resistance)
• International response to the Holocaust

• The Last Letter From Szmul Zygielbojm, The Bund Representative With The Polish National Council In Exile, May 11, 1943
• Suicide telegram sent to Emanuel Nowogrodski, now at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York
• Ruwin Zigelboim, Al Kiddush HaShem [In the sanctification of God's name], Dedicated to the Illustrious Memory of my brother, Shmuel Mordekhai (Arthur) Zigelboim, Commemoration Book Chelm (Translation of Yisker-bukh Chelm, published in Yiddish in Johannesburg, 1954), pp. 295–302.f
• Szmul Mordekhai "Artur" Zygielbojm, The Terrible Choice: Some Contemporary Jewish Responses to the Holocaust.
• Papers of Shmuel Mordkhe (Artur) Zygielbojm.; RG 1454; YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, NY.