The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland 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. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility.
I am obliged to state that although the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world, it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimensions of the tragedy taking place in Poland.
Of close to 3.5 million Polish Jews and about 700,000 Jews who have been deported to Poland from other countries, there were, according to the official figures of the Bund transmitted by the Representative of the Government, only 300,000 still alive in April of this year. And the murder continues without end.
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.
I know that there is no great value to the life of a man, especially today. But since I did not succeed in achieving it in my lifetime, perhaps I shall be able by my death to contribute to the arousing from lethargy of those who could and must act in order that even now, perhaps at the last moment, the handful of Polish Jews who are still alive can be saved from certain destruction.
My life belongs to the Jewish people of Poland, and therefore I hand it over to them now. I yearn that the remnant that has remained of the millions of Polish Jews may live to see liberation together with the Polish masses, and that it shall be permitted to breathe freely in Poland and in a world of freedom and socialistic justice, in compensation for the inhuman suffering and torture inflicted on them.
And I believe that such a Poland will arise and such a world will come about. I am certain that the President and the Prime Minister will send out these words of mine to all those to whom they are addressed, and that the Polish Government will embark immediately on diplomatic action and explanation of the situation, in order to save the living remnant of the Polish Jews from destruction.
I take leave of you with greetings, from everybody, and from everything that was dear to me and that I loved.
— S. Zygielbojm
Alav hashalom.
Click here for events that happened today (April 16).
1934: Wernher von Braun completed his thesis ‘Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket’, but the Reichswehr kept it a secret, and it went unpublished until 1960.
1939: As Hermann Göring met with Benito Mussolini in Rome, London rejected Moscow’s last offer to form an antifascist alliance.
1940: Fascist submarine U‐3 and British submarine HMS Porpoise engaged in combat with torpedoes ten miles southwest of Egersund, Norway, but the battle was uneventful.
1941: Yugoslavians negotiated with the Third Reich for armistice terms in Belgrade, but the first emissary dispatched had insufficient authority to sign the surrender document. In Zagreb, Croatian leader Ante Pavelié formally came into power as the head of the Independent State of Croatia. In Greece, the Wehrmacht attacked the Platamon Pass between Mount Olympus and the Aegean Sea, forcing New Zealand troops to withdraw across the river at the bottom of the Tempe Gorge, a move that greatly alarmed Allied leadership. Meanwhile, the Reich’s 6th Mountain Division attacked across Mount Olympus using goat paths, taking heavy casualties, and the Axis’s troops of the 62nd ‘Trento’ Regiment attacked Tobruk, Libya in the late afternoon; Erwin Rommel personally observed the attack. The heavy artillery fire drove the attack back, and the Allies captured the entire 1st Battalion of the Fascist 62nd Regiment (775 men and 25 officers). That earlier that morning, the Axis air raid on Belfast ended; the 203 tons of high explosive bombs, 80 parachute mines, and 800 incendiary bombs dropped killed 758, wounded 1,500, and destroyed 56,000 homes; one hundred thousand residents became homeless. At the end of the day and into the next, 681 Axis aircraft bombed London.