Interlinguistics / Interlingstica / Interlinguistik / Interlingvistiko

Chaos in Esperanto-Land
Echoes of the Holocaust*

Humphrey Tonkin
University of Hartford

The Holocaust had a profound effect on the Esperanto movement. Many of the
leading members of the Esperanto language community perished, and some
survived. Recent years have seen a revival of interest in those who died and those
who lived. Among the dead were most of the family of L. L. Zamenhof, author
of Esperanto. Among the survivors was the father of the financier George Soros,
Tivadar Soros, whose memoir of survival in Nazi-occupied Budapest, written
originally in Esperanto and published in 1965, was published in English transla-
tion in the year 2000. An important player in the effort to protect the Jews of
Budapest was the Esperantist Valdemar Langlet, of Sweden, whose memoir of
his experiences was adapted and published, first in Swedish, then in Esperanto,
by Nina Langlet, his widow. In 2003, Zofia Banet-Fornalowa published a memo-
rial volume for six Esperantist victims of the Holocaust. Among other relatively
recent Holocaust-related books in Esperanto are a translation of Imre Krteszs
novel Fateless and a biography of Tilla Durieux.

Keywords: Holocaust, Esperanto, Hungary, Tivadar Soros, Valdemar Langlet,

Tilla Durieux, Imre Kertsz

To this day, the Esperanto movement is haunted by the catastrophe of the Holo-
caust. In 1959, as a young Esperanto enthusiast, I made my first pilgrimage to the
grave of L. L. Zamenhof (18591917), the author of Esperanto, in the Jewish Cem-
etery in Warsaw, and to the city of his birth, Biaystok. Particularly in Biaystok,
I was aware not only of the normal passing of time since the era of Esperantos
founder, but also of the violent passing of one huge element in its cultural mix,
indeed of the cultural confluence of Poland. Recently, visiting the once primar-
ily Jewish village of Tykocin, near Biaystok, I had the impression that the village
was somehow caught in amber, providing a largely disembodied glimpse of what
once was there a sentiment made the stronger by the presence in the village of
a Jewish museum in what was formerly the synagogue. Over the years I have vis-
ited Poland many times, either for professional reasons or as a tourist. The sense

Language Problems & Language Planning 35:2 (2011), 161171. doi 10.1075/lplp.35.2.04ton
issn 02722690 / e-issn 15699889 John Benjamins Publishing Company
162 Humphrey Tonkin

of a limb amputated from its history, the phantom pain accompanying it, seems
evident at every street corner, every field and forest, in this country so rich in
history. The past accuses us in the ancient walls, the street names, the overgrown
graveyards. Of course Jews disappeared from other countries of Central Europe,
particularly from Germany itself, but the ambiguities of the past have somehow
endured longer in the gradually reconstructed Poland, partly because of the sheer
size of the pre-war Jewish population, as compared with, say, Romania or Hun-
gary. When, in 2009, the World Congress of Esperanto took place in Biaystok,
this absence was once again made manifest, in part because of the commendable
efforts of the local authorities to address the history of the citys Jewish population
and the Jewish contribution to Biaystok, including the opening of a new Zamen-
hof Center with a permanent exhibition on the topic and a library.1
The Esperanto movement itself is a kind of Poland: memories of the Jewish
connection are apparent at every turn in its history not just the almost com-
pletely vanished Zamenhof family, murdered in Treblinka, but the disappearance
of a generation of Esperantist pioneers.2 Hitler was not entirely wrong when, in
Mein Kampf, he described Esperanto as a language of Jews and communists. To
be sure, Esperanto is no-ones language and everyones, and it has been used over
the years for every conceivable purpose but the number of Jews and leftists as-
sociated with it, particularly in the inter-war years, was disproportionately high.
Ulrich Lins, in his book La danera lingvo (1988)3 describes their fate: victims of
violent regimes of both the left and the right, exterminated either because of their
ethnic identity or because of their internationalist convictions.
Linss study, along with the first Esperanto translation of The Diary of Anne
Frank (1959; a new, expanded edition appeared in 1997), and the memoir by Te-
odoro varc (Tivadar Soros), Maskerado irka la morto (1965), helped to open
the eyes of members of the Esperanto movement to the anti-Semitic atrocities of
the Nazis. But while Lins wrote as a historian of the Esperanto movement, varc,
though writing in Esperanto, described his own experience. His book, dealing
with survival in Nazi-occupied Budapest, was one of a genre of works, initiated
by Anne Franks famous Diary (1950; published in English in 1952) that soon
produced a torrent of works in most of the languages of Europe, about the struggle
to survive often with complex feelings of relief and guilt that resulted from
survival itself.4
The 1965 memoir of varc/Soros, which I edited and republished in 2001
(following the successful launch of my English-language translation in Britain in
the year 2000) was one of a number of books to appear in Esperanto at about
the same time, all of them dealing directly or indirectly with the Nazi extermina-
tion of the Jews. They were particularly welcome in the Esperanto movement as
a counter-balance to the optimism, and sometimes lack of self-examination, that
 Echoes of the Holocaust in Esperanto 163

accompanies any movement centered on the present and the future. Several of
these works, as was the case with Soross book, also had an effect beyond the con-
fines of the Esperanto language community.
Teodoro varc or Schwartz, otherwise known as Tivadar Soros, probably
chose to publish his memoir of the Nazi occupation of Budapest in Esperanto
rather than some other language because he knew that Juan Rgulo Perez was
interested in publishing it. Rgulos small publishing operation in the Canary Is-
lands, Stafeto, had established itself as a leading publisher of high-quality books
in Esperanto. There was no point in writing the memoir in Hungarian, Soross
native language, because, having fled Hungary in 1956, he knew that it would not
find a publisher, particularly at a time when the Hungarian authorities seemed
to be actively avoiding the unearthing of the ambiguous records of the war years.
His earlier memoir, Modernaj Robinzonoj (1924; republished in 1999; published
in English in 2010 as Crusoes in Siberia), on his experiences in World War I, was
a brief account written in Esperanto during the period when he was associated, as
founder and publisher, with the literary journal Literatura Mondo and the publish-
ing house of that name. Although he withdrew from the Literatura Mondo team
shortly thereafter, he remained in contact with the Esperanto movement. In 1947,
he arranged to attend the World Congress of Esperanto in Bern, accompanied
by his son George. Tivadar returned to Budapest after the Congress, but George
Soros went on to a conference of Esperanto-speaking young people in Britain,
managing to acquire a student visa with the assistance of Esperantist friends, and
staying on to attend the London School of Economics. Now, in the 1960s, having
fled during the abortive Hungarian uprising of 1956, Tivadar had less connection
with the Esperanto movement, but, given that he had already published in Espe-
ranto, Esperanto seemed a suitable mode of communication for this second more
substantial and more urgent literary effort.
My work on Maskerado began with my completion of a new English transla-
tion, requested by the Soros family for their own use. This was their second com-
mission: they had already asked me for an English translation of Modernaj Rob-
inzonoj, which, while completed a decade ago, was published only in 2010. The
latter book is of particular interest not only for what it tells us about the father of
Paul and George Soros, but also because it deals with a little-known episode in
World War I, the opening of a Far Eastern front.5 But the family also had in its
possession a typewritten text of Maskerado in poor English, apparently translated
by a Hungarian-speaking family friend. The relationship between the published
Esperanto work of 1965 and this typescript was unclear. Possibly the English text
represented an attempt by Tivadar to get the book published in English (his widow
recalled such an effort), but whether it was prepared before or after the publication
in Esperanto there appears to be no way of knowing.
164 Humphrey Tonkin

The translation contained some passages which did not appear in the Esperan-
to edition of 1965, but the Esperanto edition contained sentences and sometimes
whole paragraphs not present in the typescript. Were these changes a product of
Tivadars polishing and refining the Esperanto edition, perhaps as a result of R-
gulos intervention as the text was prepared for publication? Efforts to locate cor-
respondence between Rgulo and Soros were largely unsuccessful: only a single
letter appears to have survived.6
In any event, the textual differences raised problems for the translator. Un-
able to decide which text had the more authority, I chose to create a composite
text, using as much of both versions as I could. This text, later published as the
second Esperanto edition in 2001, formed the basis for the translation. The British
publication of the translation (2000) was a considerable success: two major British
newspapers published extended excerpts, and the book was well reviewed. Unfor-
tunately the launch of the American edition occurred in 2001 a few days after the
September 11 disaster and accordingly received less attention (this edition was
reissued in 2011).
Both editions (and also the second Esperanto edition) were accompanied by
prefaces by the Soros brothers and by my extensive commentary. The Esperanto
text was translated into Hungarian by Istvn Ertl (2002) and the book appeared in
several additional languages, translated from the English-language edition: Turk-
ish (2001), Russian (2001), and German (2003). Translations into Chinese and
Italian are forthcoming in 2011.
Istvn Ertl played a key role in two other book projects Kaoso en Budapeto
by Nina Langlet, translated into Esperanto from the Swedish by Kalle Kniivil
with Ertls encouragement, and the novel Sensorteco (Sorstalansg, translated into
English as Fateless), by Imre Kertsz, translated from Hungarian by Ertl himself.
Nina Langlet, daughter of the famous correspondent of Zamenhof, Nikolai Boro-
vko,7 was widow of the Swedish Esperanto pioneer Valdemar Langlet, who, having
moved to Hungary before the war, was lecturer in Swedish at the University of
Budapest. At the beginning of the German occupation, Langlet and his wife de-
voted their energies to the rescue of Jews, under the protection of the Swedish Red
Cross, of which Valdemar Langlet became the Budapest representative. As is now
well-known, Raul Wallenberg was only the most famous foreigner who worked
to protect the Jews of Budapest: collaborating with him was a whole diplomatic
team from the Vatican, Switzerland, Spain, and several other countries. Notable
among the Swedes were Per Anger and Valdemar Langlet himself.8
The period of the Nazi occupation of Budapest was relatively short some
ten months beginning in April 1944. But it was a time in which events seemed
telescoped together. The drawn-out agony of the Jews of Germany and Poland,
where the Nazis tested and refined their system of extermination, occurred in
 Echoes of the Holocaust in Esperanto 165

Hungary with lightning speed. The leader of the Final Solution in Hungary, Adolf
Eichmann, who had long desired to apply his methods without the restrictions
and obstacles that he faced elsewhere, began, within a few weeks of the German
march into Hungary, the first mass deportations to the death-camp at Auschwitz,
in Poland. In her book, Nina Langlet describes the details of the daily life of those
who worked to protect the potential victims of the Nazi extermination machine.
Tivadar Soros approaches the subject from the viewpoint of one of those po-
tential victims an individual who, along with his family, succeeded in surviving
through cunning and good luck. Kertszs book recounts in the spare, simple
language of a brilliant stylist the life of those who fell into Nazi hands. It is hardly
possible to retell this story in anything other than a strictly personal way: the facts
are now well-known. But the existential experiences of such people as the Italian
Primo Levi or the Hungarian Imre Kertsz (or the German Victor Klemperer) are
notable precisely because the human desire to understand is repeatedly frustrated
by the cold logic of the surrounding circumstances. The Holocaust and the style of
those who seek to tell its story seem to resemble the fictional world of Franz Kafka:
the impossibility of explaining the facts through human logic in effect symbolizes
the human condition in the twentieth century: human beings facing the machine,
which devours them systematically, undemonstratively, anonymously.
Next to this, the biography by the Croatian writer Spomenka timec, Tilla, is
of a quite different form and style. Tilla Durieux (18801971) was a well-known
German actress, the wife first of an artist, then of a famous art collector and dealer,
then of an industrialist. Her second husband, Paul Cassirer, successfully negotiat-
ed his way through the years following World War I, even arranging for an elderly
Renoir to paint the lively Tilla. When their marriage came apart, the proud but
fundamentally unstable Cassirer shot himself, and Tilla soon married the Jewish
financier Lutz Katzenellenbogen. Accused of financial improprieties, under the
Nazis he found his luck and his capital gradually evaporating. Tilla and Lutz fled
to Prague, then to Switzerland, and finally to Croatia, where they found relative
tranquility for a while. But the war followed them. Lutz finally disappeared some-
where in the Skopje area as the pair tried in vain to reach the United States by way
of Turkey. Tilla went to live with her new-found aristocratic friend Zlata in Zagreb,
where during part of the day she sewed costumes for the Zagreb puppet theatre,
while at night she buried Partisan documents in her garden or carried messages to
the Partisans in the forest.
Through all of these upheavals, all of these dangers, Tilla remained faithful to
art: she sold paintings to stay alive, but she also kept and enjoyed works of art and
helped others to enjoy them too. She had the same capability as Tivadar Soros to
improvise, to survive, with dignity and self-assurance. In spite of all catastrophes,
Tilla and Maskerado are optimistic works.
166 Humphrey Tonkin

In all of these works, the question arises as to the extent to which we are deal-
ing with facts and the extent to which we are watching the creation of fictions.
Kertsz claims he is writing a novel, but clearly his novel closely follows his own
experiences as a prisoner. Although on occasion Soross memoir has been called
a fiction (notably, Golden Bernard so names it in a particularly bilious moment),
but I have been impressed by the fact that more or less everything that Soros men-
tions coincides with the facts as we know them. Soros, despite his appearance of
modesty, has a high opinion of himself, but he is repeatedly saved by his irony and
his capability to see things objectively. More focused, less self-absorbed, is Nina
Langlets Kaoso en Budapeto, whose goal is evidently to present a positive picture
of her own activities and those of her husband, although between the lines one is
aware of tensions among the Swedes, whose dedication in the chaos of Budapest
was not always matched by coordination. In contrast with these three biographical
works, Spomenka timecs Tilla provides details that could not possibly be known
to the author, even to the extent of an encounter with a small Polish gentleman on
the way to an Esperanto congress in Paris in 1914 evidently Zamenhof himself.
A quite different goal lies behind Zofia Banet-Fornalowas La pereintoj in me-
moriam (2003). It deals very directly with the theme with which I began the dis-
appearance of Esperantists from the Esperanto landscape during the period of the
Nazi exterminations. Banet-Fornalowa provides biographical sketches of six Poles
of Jewish origin, all of whom died during those terrible years, and all of whom
played a significant role in the Polish and international Esperanto movement
Leo Belmont (18651941), Halina Weinstein (19021942), Edvardo Wiesenfeld
(18921942?), Jakobo apiro (18971941), Izrael Lejzerowicz (19011942), Salo-
mon Kornfeld-Grenkamp (18961943). Her purpose is quite simple: to keep the
memory of these dedicated Esperantists alive, and in this way to contribute to a
balanced assessment of Esperanto history. The focus, then, is not on the horrors
themselves, but rather on the brilliant lives that were cut off with brutal effective-
ness by the simple decisions of the Nazis. As in Poland, so in Esperanto, the Holo-
caust wounded the collective heart.
Soros mentions Esperantists only once in his book: he alludes at the begin-
ning of his sixth chapter to an Esperantist who did not give him help, perhaps (as
Soros himself suggests) because Soros did not treat his submissions well when
he was editor of Literatura Mondo. Nina Langlets book deals with the work of
Esperantists mostly outside the Esperanto movement. In Tilla, however, there
are occasional allusions to the connection between Tillas life and the activities of
Croatian and Yugoslav Esperanto circles. Mladen Serment and Srdjan Flego, who
later founded the so-called Internacia Arta Teatro in Paris, play minor roles. And
of course Banet-Fornalowa deals with Esperanto history directly.
 Echoes of the Holocaust in Esperanto 167

Stylistically, the books also offer a contrast. Soross knowledge of Esperanto

is sometimes less than perfect, so that even the original requires translation on
occasion translation into what Soros evidently intends to say rather than what
he actually writes down (another of the many dilemmas facing the translator). His
own references to favorite writers (he was particularly fond of adventure stories)
gives some idea of the style that he sought in his own writing. He occasionally
stumbles, loses his own train of thought, or misuses terms (the great Esperanto
stylist Kalocsay, his colleague in Literatura Mondo, told me in an interview in 1963
that he obstinately attached himself to unsuitable stylistic oddities). The accom-
plished translations of Kniivil (Nina Langlet) and Ertl (Imre Kertsz) suggest that
Langlet is workmanlike in her narrative, and that Kertsz intentionally creates a
nave voice for his narrator. timecs great strength as a writer is her mastery of
style and her ability to hold the attention of the reader.
Esperanto literature, while far more abundant than many who do not speak
the language tend to assume (Sutton 2008), is still a relatively limited milieu. The
engagement of these books with the larger context in which Esperanto has thrived
or suffered reversals, along with many of the other cultural products and actors of
the time, is an important addition to the canon. We might end by noting that, just
as the engaged assessment of world affairs is thus brought to Esperanto, so Espe-
ranto is increasingly recognized by those outside its circle as constituting an ele-
ment in the cultural history of the twentieth century. An important player in this
process was Umberto Eco, whose exploration of the search for a perfect language
helped locate Esperanto in contemporary intellectual history (Eco 1993, 1995,
1996).9 Ecos book may be a long way from our immediate subject, but it does sug-
gest a certain awareness of intellectual and historical intersections that is relatively
new for Esperanto, and that helps give Esperanto a larger place in the mainstream.

Notes

* An earlier version of this paper appeared in Esperanto in the journal Beletra Almanako 2
(2008) 2:5865.

1. http://www.centrumzamenhofa.pl.

2. On Zamenhofs life, see Korenkov 2009 and its abridged translation Korzhenkov 2010, and
Knzli 2010.

3. The first, shorter edition appeared in 1973, and much of the material was also included in
Esperanto en perspektivo (Lapenna, Lins and Carlevaro 1974).
168 Humphrey Tonkin

4. A few very early efforts Szp 1945 for example, and Primo Levis If This Is A Man (1947)
met with limited response from the reading public. Levis book was republished in 1958 to
much greater public attention.

5. See my commentary in the 2010 edition, and also the second Esperanto edition of 1999. The
book has recently appeared, with my commentary, in Italian translation, as Robinson in Siberia
(2010).

6. Rgulos papers are at the University of La Laguna, where Rgulo was a professor of linguis-
tics. I am told that they do not contain correspondence relating to the publication of Maskerado.
The letter to which I refer is in my possession.

7. Zamenhofs long autobiographical letter to Borovko, reprinted in the journal Lingvo Interna-
cia (vol. 1, 1896, 115119), is widely cited by biographers.

8. See, for example, Bierman 1995, Braham 1981, Derogy 1994, Langlet 1946, Marino 1999,
Rosenfeld 1995, Skoglund 1997, Tschuy 2000.

9. The early history of Esperanto, and specifically its Jewish background, provides a backdrop
to Joseph Skibells novel A Curable Romantic (2010) and, to a lesser degree, Michael Chabons
The Yiddish Policemens Union (2007). It is also featured in Julia Chos comedy The Language
Archive, which was first performed at the South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, Cali-
fornia, early in 2010, and was later brought to New York for an extended and successful run.
The play includes a language spoken by only two people, an encounter with Zamenhof, and
an Esperanto lesson. Cho perhaps takes her inspiration from David Ivess short play Universal
Language (1993), part of a set of six short plays called All in the Timing. Ivess absurdist approach
to constructing languages might prove distressing to the average Esperanto enthusiast, but it is
evidence of the recognition of a contemporary phenomenon.

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Zusammenfassung

Chaos im Esperanto-Land: Echos des Holocaust

Der Holocaust hatte nachhaltige Auswirkungen auf die Esperanto-Bewegung. Viele fhrende
Mitglieder der Esperanto-Sprachgemeinschaft sind umgekommen, und einige berlebten. In
den letzten Jahres gibt es ein Wiederaufleben des Interesses an jenen, die starben und an je-
nen, die berlebten. Unter den Toten befand sich fast die gesamte Familie L.L. Zamenhofs, des
Autors des Esperanto. Zu den berlebenden gehrte der Vater des Finanziers George Soros,
Tivadar Soros, dessen Memoiren vom berleben im von den Nazis okkupierten Budapest im
Jahr 2000 in englischer Sprache erschienen. Sie waren 1965 im Original in Esperanto verffent-
lich worden. Eine wichtige Rolle in dem Bemhen, die Budapester Juden zu beschtzen, spielte
der Esperantist Valdemar Langlet aus Schweden. Seine Erinnerungen wurden von seiner Wit-
we Nina Langlet adaptiert und publiziert, zunchst in Schwedisch, danach in Esperanto. 2003
verffentlichte Zofia Banet-Fornalowa einen Gedenkband ber sechs Esperantisten, die Opfer
des Holocaust wurden. Weitere auf den Holocaust bezogene Bcher in Esperanto sind in der
jngeren Vergangenheit eine bersetzung von Imre Kertszs Roman Sorstalansg (Esperanto
Sensorteco) und eine Biografie von Tilla Durieux.

Resumo

Kaoso en Esperantio: Eoj de la holokasto

La Holokasto havis profundan efikon e la Esperanto-movado. Multaj gvidantoj de la Esperan-
ta lingvokomunumo pereis, kaj iuj transvivis. La lastaj jaroj montris revivion de intereso pri
tiuj kiuj mortis kaj tiuj kiuj transvivis. Inter la mortintoj estis preska la tuto de la familio de L.
L. Zamenhof, atoro de Esperanto. Inter la transvivintoj estis la patro de la financisto George
Soros, Tivadar Soros, kies rakonto pri transvivo en Budapeto sub la Nazioj, verkita origina-
le en Esperanto kaj eldonita en 1965, aperis en angla traduko en la jaro 2000. Grava rolanto
en la strebo irmi la Budapetajn judojn estis la esperantisto Valdemar Langlet, el Svedio, kies
prezento de siaj spertoj estis adaptita kaj publikigita, unue en la sveda, poste en Esperanto, de
lia vidvino Nina Langlet. En 2003, Zofia Banet-Fornalowa aperigis rememoron volumon pri
ses esperantistaj viktimoj de la Holokasto. Aliaj relative lastatempaj verkoj en Esperanto pri
aspektoj de la Holokasto estas traduko de la romano de Imre Krtesz, Sensorteco, kaj biografio
de Tilla Durieux.
 Echoes of the Holocaust in Esperanto 171

Authors address
Mortensen Library
University of Hartford
West Hartford, CT 06117, USA
[email protected]

About the author

Humphrey Tonkin is University Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the
University of Hartford. He has published widely on English literature, international studies, and
interlinguistics. Recent publications include his translation from Esperanto of Tivadar Soross
Crusoes in Siberia (New York: Mondial, 2010), and The Translator as Mediator of Cultures, a vol-
ume of essays edited with Maria Esposito Frank (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010).
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