Esperanto is an “artificial” language that is based on natural languages. It was created by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof (1859–1917), who was a Jew from Lithuania and worked as an ophthalmologist. Zamenhof’s goal was to create a common language that would be free from ethnical boundaries. In his home town, Białystok, Zamenhof was, particularly, worried about the hostility between Polish and Belarusian Jews who spoke Yiddish. In the 1870’s, Zamenhof began to create a new, culturally neutral language.
Unfortunately, Esperanto, “doctor Hoper’s” language did not save the Jews in Biyalstok. Zamenhof’s adult children all died during the Holocaust. His daughter Lidia (1904–1942 in Treblinka) had worked as a teacher of Esperanto in different locations in Europe. However, the language Esperanto lived on. At the same time when Lidia’s oldest brother Adam, who had continued his father’s legacy within medicine, was killed in the concentration camp Palmiry, Sordavala in Karelia was evacuated and in the chaos that followed, the first version of Johan Edvard Leppäkoski’s translation of the Kalevala into Esperanto was lost.
Leppäkoski, who firmly believed in the philosophy of hope and cosmopolitanism started the work again and the Esperanto version of the Kalevala was published in 1964.
