May 12: Shmuel Zygelboim

“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.” These words were part of the suicide letter written by Arthur (Shmuel) Zygelboim, a Jewish Bundist and member of the Polish government-in-exile who survived life in the Warsaw Ghetto and then committed suicide in London on this date in 1943. Zygelboim’s suicide was an act of protest: “The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland,” he wrote, “rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime.” A unionist and a member of the Bund’s Central Committee whom the Nazis made a member of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat (Jewish governing council), Zygelboim escaped the Ghetto in 1939 and hopscotched from Belgium to France to the United States to Great Britain, all the while pressing for the Nazi atrocities against the Jews to become a central focus of Allied war and immigration policies. He was among the first figures to testify to the death of millions of Jews. The New York Times published the full text of his letter, but it would take eight months more for the U.S. government to establish the War Refugees Board and involve itself in the rescue of the victims of genocide. “My comrades in the Warsaw Ghetto fell with arms in their hands in their last heroic battle. It was not given to me to die together with them, but I belong to them and to their mass graves.” —Shmuel Zygelboim