While the international movement was primarily preoccupied with itself, the Yugoslav Esperantists criticized it for its passive attitude to fascism. Struck by the prohibitions in Germany and growing pressure in their own country, they confronted the widespread acquiescence to such persecutions by initiating a counter-offensive against the enemies of Esperanto. In 1937, the April editorial in La Suda Stelo attacked the false understanding of neutrality afflicting the Esperanto movement as a 'can- cerous wound'. The writer of the editorial, the young Croatian lawyer Ivo Lapenna, suggested that some Esperantists expected others 'to be neu- tral in an impossible way, empty of thought and opinion, or to remain silent and by silence to assent to everything!' Lapenna insisted that the 'principles of freedom of thought and of democracy' have to accompany neutrality if it is to be anything other than a negative phenomenon.[514]Two months later he went further by proposing that the Esperanto move- ment, finding itself on the defensive more or less everywhere, should take as its common basis 'that ideology that is the opposite of the principles of our enemies', namely 'the ideology of full democracy, which at the same time signifies freedom, equality, tolerance, culture and progress'. The movement should once again grow conscious of these values if it was to survive and recover confidence in a time when the Esperantists were persecuted simply because 'they see in people of other countries fellow humans and not inferior beings—people with whom they wish to exchange ideas, with whom they wish to remain in contact and friend- ship and with whom they wish to enjoy collaboration rather than recipro- cal destruction'.[515]
Such were the words of the person who in September 1937 was elected president of JEL, a year later joined the board of the International Esperanto League, and after the war was for many years general secretary and later president of UEA.[516]
At about the same time as the Yugoslavs called for active opposition to the external dangers confronting Esperanto, such sentiments began to emerge in other countries as well, in the form of discontent at the ostrich- like behavior of those who clung to the principle of absolute neutrality. Among IEL and UEA members, at least as of the mid-1930s, there was a growing desire to stop identifying neutrality with silence. This new activism was evident, for example, at the World Congress in Warsaw in 1937. A telegram of greetings from the Catalan government was met with thunderous applause,[517] and a member of SAT who, attending the Congress and expecting to find it populated with apolitical members of the bourgeoisie, noted with surprise that the opening plenary became 'a demonstration for liberalism, humanitarianism, democracy'. He summed up his impressions with a conclusion almost heretical for a member of SAT, namely that the bourgeois Esperanto movement 'is in its essence antifascist'.[518]
This opposition became even more evident a year later, during the World Congress in London. There, Ivo Lapenna won the sympathies of the participants with a stirring speech in which he named Esperanto's inter- nal idea as 'a bastion against fascism',[519] and in November 1938, when, following the annexation of Austria, the independence of Czechoslovakia was annihilated, even UEA's journal Esperanto uttered the cry, far too long delayed, 'Away with illusions!', along with the following confession:
To remain indifferent, that is, neutral in the old sense, would be a betrayal of our ideals. Esperanto stands and prospers only under a regime that respects individual freedom.[520]
When the Second World War broke out, the journal Esperanto no lon- ger ignored the evident fact that 'further successes by this regime [the
Nazi regime] would wipe out our cause completely'.[521] Finally, then, the experience of the advance of fascism became a healthy lesson for the inter- national movement—in the sense that it abandoned its neutrality where such neutrality equaled political blindness, and actively reconfirmed the internationalist and humanistic basis of the Esperanto movement. In May 1939 a congress of Yugoslav Esperantists in Karlovac accepted a resolution to be proposed to the World Congress in Bern that noted that the IEL had never protested when the movement in a given country was banned. The resolution went on to insist 'that we state clearly what we want and that we fight against those who persecute our movement'.[522]
Soon, even La Suda Stelo was forced to go silent. Its last issue appeared in March 1941. On 10 April, German troops entered Zagreb, whose streets were still hung with posters advertising spring Esperanto courses. The following day the Croatian fascist police broke into the headquarters of the Esperanto clubs, destroying or burning their contents and arresting a large number of Esperantists.[523] Among the first victims of the Ustasha terror were several members of JEL's board.[524]
The inferno of the Second World War, as we have seen, did not bypass the movement in other countries. By serving as intermediaries for corre- spondence and by sending medical supplies and food, the IEL and UEA sought to mitigate the hardships of many of those suffering in various parts of Europe, but such Esperantist relief could no longer be as effective as it was during the First World War. Occasionally, Esperantists were saved in some crisis situation when a soldier or even a member of the SS turned out to be an Esperanto speaker.[525] In the Dachau concentration camp a
Fig. 4.2 With renewed hope after the war, on 14 April 1946 Polish Esperantists marked the 29th anniversary of Zamenhof's death by gathering among the ruins of the building where Zamenhof once lived. His grandson Ludovic holds the flag
Yugoslav prisoner, Joze Kozlevcar, taught an Esperanto course attended by fellow victims from a number of nationalities.[526] In the Stutthof con- centration camp near Gdansk, a textbook compiled on the spot from memory by the Polish Esperantist Albin Makowski circulated from hand to hand.[527] In the years 1942-45, the Hamburg Jew Felix Epstein orga- nized secret meetings of a half-dozen Esperantists in the Theresienstadt concentration camp;[528] the Hungarian Elek Tolnai taught fellow victims at Bergen-Belsen.[529] And in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation two Esperantist women Gesine and Ali Obbes risked their lives by hiding a Jewish couple in their home.[530] Similarly, the Lithuanian Antanas Poska hid Akiva Gersater, a fellow-Esperantist, in his home in Vilnius for ten months.[531] Valdemar Langlet, of Sweden, and his wife Nina (daughter of the Russian Esperanto pioneer Nikolai Borovko) used their diplomatic status in Budapest in 1944-45 to provide Jews with 'letters of protection' issued by the Swedish Red Cross, thereby shielding many from the death that would otherwise have been their destiny.! 88 We could give many other examples showing how during the war Esperantists continued to use their language or how it brought assistance to the afflicted. In this regard we should add that Esperanto also performed the function of a 'secret language'. For example, the Austrian parents Rudolf and Emma Fischer, when they needed to talk about politics, used Esperanto to pro- tect their children against compromising information.[532]