Szmul Zygielbojm - Remembering Zygielbojm

Remembering Zygielbojm

In May 1996, a plaque in memory of Zygielbojm was dedicated on the corner of Porchester Road and Porchester Square in London, near Zygielbojm's home. The creation of the memorial had been a joint project of the Bund and the Jewish Socialists' Group. Among those who participated in the memorial's unveiling were members of Zygielbojm's family, the Polish ambassador, and the mayor of Westminster. Every May, supporters of the Szmul Zygielbojm Memorial Committee gather at the memorial.

A granite memorial to Zygielbojm was incorporated in the construction of the building at 5 S. Dubois Street in Muranów, a housing project built after the war on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. The monument, which is visible from Ulica Zamenhofa (formerly known as Ulica Żydowska, "Jewish Street"), is made up of three elements: an image of faceless people, a broken stone or tablet in front of the memorial, and an inscription in Polish and Yiddish. The engraved words are an unfinished sentence excerpted from Zygielbojm's suicide letter: "I cannot stay silent and I cannot live while the remnants of the Polish Jewry are dying...."

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 Jewish cemetery of Golder's Green 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 U.S. In 1961, his cremains were interred in an honored ceremony before a respectful assemblage of 3,000 at the New Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Ridgewood, New York, beneath a dignified funerary monument. His grave is located at the far side of the cemetery, opposite the entrance. The six-sided monument of pink-hued stone is about five feet high. It is surmounted by an eternal flame in stone. Three of the sides quote from Zygielbojm's suicide letter in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish: "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. By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the passivity with which the world observes and permits the extermination of the Jewish people."

Zygielbojm is the subject of a 2001 Polish documentary film titled Śmierć Zygelbojma ("The Death of Zygielbojm"). The film, which was directed by Dżamila Ankiewicz, won a special mention at the Kraków Film Festival.

In 2008, a plaque was added to the building in Chełm where Zygielbojm lived. Marek Edelman, a fellow Bundist, wrote a letter that was read at the plaque's dedication.