An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

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wm
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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#16

Post by wm » 07 Mar 2011, 11:36

Sunbury wrote: It is a non question still, http://www.amazon.com/Karski-How-Tried- ... 0471145734 offers the book and for some serious research http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf187001bd/ is a good place to start.
My thoughts exactly. The reports he written are over 1000 pages long. Even Stanisław Jankowski admits he has read only a half of them. I think it's time to leave alone "Story of A Secret State".

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#17

Post by little grey rabbit » 07 Mar 2011, 11:56

wm wrote:
Sunbury wrote: It is a non question still, http://www.amazon.com/Karski-How-Tried- ... 0471145734 offers the book and for some serious research http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf187001bd/ is a good place to start.
My thoughts exactly. The reports he written are over 1000 pages long. Even Stanisław Jankowski admits he has read only a half of them. I think it's time to leave alone "Story of A Secret State".
To be honest with you, since the idea that Karski visited Izbica is so ludicrously against all the known facts of the time and his own descriptions (where he clearly states the town he visited had had its Jews expelled and their property taken over by Aryans) I tend to believe that those who make it secretly believe Karski to be a liar.

Perhaps if Janowski had not been so slap dashed in his research he would not have made such a basic error?

Having said that, there was probably like in those 1000 pages that concerned Jewish affairs. If you read JAN KARSKI'S MISSION TO THE WEST, 1942-1944 by David Engels in the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1990. You find the following:
In his memorandum Karski listed fifteen organisations that had presented him with
materials for transmittal, either written or oral. The eleventh position in the list read, 'Bund
(in the name of all of Jewry).' The Zionist-backed Jewish National Committee did not
appear. He also named sixteen individuals in London with whom he had been asked to
speak personally; the ninth and tenth names were those of Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart.24
Evidently whatever information he carried about the Jewish situation was to be conveyed
orally; at least no written report on this subject has been preserved.25 In the extensive
written materials that he presented to Sikorski on conditions in the homeland under
German occupation, Jews were not mentioned at all.26 Nor, apparently, did Karski make
haste to contact at least one of the two Jewish representatives to the Polish National
Council with whom he had been asked to speak: Schwarzbart, for one, recorded a meeting
with Karski in his diary only on 16 March 1943, four months following the courier's arrival in
London.
and
The peripheral nature of Karski's official obligations regarding the Jewish situation
was revealed also in his discussions with British public figures. In a five page report on
these meetings submitted to the Government-in-Exile he mentioned Jews only in passing
under the list of subjects discussed, stressing to a far greater extent what he had told his
listeners about German terror against Poles and about the nature of Polish resistance to
the Nazi occupation.31 Clearly, these latter subjects represented Karski's primary concern,
an inference also suggested by his statement in Story of a Secret State that his 'second
task' after reporting to the Polish government was 'that of informing the leaders of the
United Nations on the situation in Poland and the condition of the Underground.'32 The
'situation in Poland' may have included the plight of the Jews, but it was hardly dominated
by it.
and
Judging by the reports that he submitted to London, Karski appears to have viewed his
talks with Jewish leaders in the United States as most satisfactory. In particular, he noted,
'it made a good impression . . . that an "Aryan (aryjczyk)" raised Jewish matters.'78 He
reported his belief that those who had heard him speak had sensed that he was 'indeed
moved by the fate of the Jews in Poland and wanted to help them somehow, as much as
possible.' He also indicated that he had tried 'to create the impression that sympathy and
an understanding of Jewish affairs were to be found among the Polish population.' He did
this in the first place by stressing that the underground government delegacy was involved
in extending aid to Jews.
and
In the final analysis, though, the goal of mobilising aid for threatened Jews still appears
to have been far from central to his activities. For example, in an article that he wrote for
American Mercury magazine, entitled 'Inside Poland Today,' reference was made to the
Jewish situation only three times in nine pages, twice only in passing; and even the one
substantial reference — four sentences related to his visit to the camp — served
essentially to set the stage for the claim that executions of Jews were being conducted
largely in order to train German youth to show 'arrogance and ruthlessness towards inferior
races like the Poles.'99 Even articles specifically devoted to Jewish matters tended to
stress the efforts of the Polish underground to assist Jews rather than to exhort the
American public and government to rescue action.


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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#18

Post by wm » 07 Mar 2011, 12:02

little grey rabbit wrote: To be honest I think shows an absolute cynicism on behalf of Wood and Janowski that they even proposed the idea in the first place.
The idea was proposed by Józef Marszałek from Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#19

Post by little grey rabbit » 07 Mar 2011, 12:23

Well lets just be polite and say there is no positive evidence for it and a lot of evidence suggesting it highly unlikely. It would require Karski to be engaging in a series of bizarre falsehoods thoughout his journalism.

This is from America Views the Holocaust by Robert Abzug, page 191. Karski describes leaving the camp and going back to the town to his Aryan contact shop owner:
I was still standing near the gate, gazing after the no longer visible train, when I felt a rough hand on my shoulder. The Estonian was back again.
“Wake up, wake up!” he was scolding hoarsely. “Don’t stand there with your mouth open. Come on, hurry or we’ll both be caught. Follow me and be quick about it.”
I followed him at a distance, feeling completely benumbed. When we reached the gate he reported to a German officer and pointed at me. I heard the officer say, “Sehr gut, gehen sie” and then we passed though the gate.
The Estonian and I walked a while together and then separated. I walked to the store as quickly as I could, running when there was no one about to see me. I reached the grocery store so breathless that the owner became alarmed. I reassured him while I threw off my uniform, boots, stockings and underwear. I ran into the kitchen and locked the door. In a little while my bewildered and worried host called out to me:
“Hey, what are you doing in there?”
“Don’t worry. I'll be right out.”
When I came out , he promptly entered the kitchen and called back in despair:
“What the devil have you been doing? The whole kitchen is flooded!”
“I washed myself,” I replied, “that is all. I was very dirty.”
Then I collapsed. I was completely, violently, rackingly sick. Even today, when I remember those scenes, I become nauseated.
How on earth is this compatiable with a transit ghetto?

My understanding is the ghetto towns were virtually cut off anyway, so that passenger trains wouldn't stop there.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#20

Post by wm » 07 Mar 2011, 12:33

little grey rabbit wrote: Evidently whatever information he carried about the Jewish situation was to be conveyed
orally; at least no written report on this subject has been preserved.
No it wasn't. Everything of importance was on a microfilm he was carrying. A message was conveyed orally only if the secrecy was important and the message was destined solely to the recipient and no one else. The Jewish situation was not a secret warranting such treatment.
little grey rabbit wrote: little grey rabbit wrote:How on earth is this compatiable with a transit ghetto?
My understanding is the ghetto towns were virtually cut off anyway, so that passenger trains wouldn't stop there.
I see nothing about passenger trains here. The "no longer visible train" was a train carrying Jews from Izbica transit camp to to their deaths.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#21

Post by little grey rabbit » 07 Mar 2011, 14:30

No it wasn't. Everything of importance was on a microfilm he was carrying. A message was conveyed orally only if the secrecy was important and the message was destined solely to the recipient and no one else. The Jewish situation was not a secret warranting such treatment.
The claim was not mine, but Professor David Engel of Tel Aviv University who extensively looked at the Polish Government in Exile and the activities of Jan Karski - and certainly never to my knowledge endorse the ridiculous suggestion of Izbica (or it is ridiculous if we accept that Karski had any level of accuracy in his description.)

The passenger train I refer to is the train Karski says he took from Warsaw to another train station, which he called Belzec. If this train station was Izbica that would imply that the Germans were running regular passenger trains to closed ghetto towns.

Reason #327 why Izbica is simply not a contender.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#22

Post by wm » 07 Mar 2011, 20:27

little grey rabbit wrote:
The passenger train I refer to is the train Karski says he took from Warsaw to another train station, which he called Belzec. If this train station was Izbica that would imply that the Germans were running regular passenger trains to closed ghetto towns.
According to Aniela Rolnik (http://www.jews-lublin.pl/?page_id=185) , who lived in Izbica during the war, there was a place called ghetto, surrounded on all sides by barbed wire but Izbica was a town not that different from others in the same area.
The trains run through Izbica because it was on an important local railway line. Of course you could take train to Izbica.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#23

Post by little grey rabbit » 08 Mar 2011, 12:02

Although I do not read Polish I am fairly confident either she is wrong or you are misrepresenting here.

The pdf link I posted before made it clear the township was not closed.

This link adds further details
http://holocaustresearchproject.blogspo ... hetto.html
Until the First World War Izbica was inhabited exclusively by Jews – there was a synagogue and there was no Roman Catholic Church. In fact Izbica remains even today the only town in Poland without a parish church.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the town grew in fame largely because of tzaddik Josef Mordechaj Leiner, the founder of the Izbica – Radzyn Hassidic dynasty that exists in Israel to this day.

During the period between the wars a few Polish families settled down in Izbica, but the Jewish population, mostly impoverished and Orthodox, still exceeded ninety two percent.
Then of course it had lots of Jews from Western Europe forced into it. The idea there was an Aryan Izbica and a Jewish Izbica is just not supported by the historical record.
There are a number of suvivor testimonies from Izbica including Thomas Blatt, which clearly describe the town train station being used for deportations and arrivals - not some fictitious station half an hour away in an isolated camp with a single barrack.

A passenger train can pass a station and yet not to stop at it. Unless there was a pressing need for the Germans to allow Jews to take shopping trips to Lublin and Lvov, common sense would suggest that traffic in and out of Izbica station would be tightly controlled - to the extent it occured at all.

I said before, I find it difficult to accept the sincerity of people who propose Izbica

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#24

Post by little grey rabbit » 08 Mar 2011, 12:15

wm wrote:
little grey rabbit wrote:
The passenger train I refer to is the train Karski says he took from Warsaw to another train station, which he called Belzec. If this train station was Izbica that would imply that the Germans were running regular passenger trains to closed ghetto towns.
According to Aniela Rolnik (http://www.jews-lublin.pl/?page_id=185) , who lived in Izbica during the war, there was a place called ghetto, surrounded on all sides by barbed wire but Izbica was a town not that different from others in the same area.
The trains run through Izbica because it was on an important local railway line. Of course you could take train to Izbica.
If I understand your source correctly she is saying the "Ghetto" was just the fire station [you sort of capture that by saying "there was a place called ghetto, surrounded on all sides by barbed wire" but you seem to be concealing as much as you reveal]

We can't speculate why this elderly woman might have said this or even if she was correctly reported. But if you took this claim seriously then you would have reported her more accurately.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#25

Post by uberjude » 08 Mar 2011, 15:07

For whatever it's worth, it should be kept in mind that Izbica, although overwhelmingly Jewish, did have a small non-Jewish population, so when one speaks of it being "completely cut off," I'm not sure what that means. According to this document, there were approximately 1,000 non-Jews living in Izbica in 1939. ( http://www.fodz.pl/download/fodz_izbica_broszura_EN.pdf) Are you suggesting that Izbica's Poles weren't allowed to leave? If there are non-Jews living there anyway, why is it so absurd to argue that trains would pass through? The non-Jews were allowed to travel, so if an Izbica Pole could travel to some other place from Izbica, why wouldn't a non-Izbica Pole be allowed to travel to Izbica? Are you going to argue that the thousand or so Poles in Izbica--like the woman cited by WM--were also trapped, and not allowed to take the train?

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#26

Post by wm » 08 Mar 2011, 19:07

little grey rabbit wrote: If I understand your source correctly she is saying the "Ghetto" was just the fire station [you sort of capture that by saying "there was a place called ghetto, surrounded on all sides by barbed wire" but you seem to be concealing as much as you reveal].
The place with the fire station inside was called "getto" by inhabitants of Izbica but of course it wasn't a ghetto. I was a small concentration camp.
But one could call Izbica a ghetto in the traditional sense: "an area traditionally inhabited by Jews".

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#27

Post by wm » 08 Mar 2011, 19:51

uberjude wrote: According to this document, there were approximately 1,000 non-Jews living in Izbica in 1939. ( http://www.fodz.pl/download/fodz_izbica_broszura_EN.pdf)
To be fair, the link says: "two hundred Christians" according to Tomas Toivi Blatt. Aniela Rolnik says that four polish families and a number of Volksdeutsches lived there during the war.
uberjude wrote: Are you going to argue that the thousand or so Poles in Izbica--like the woman cited by WM--were also trapped, and not allowed to take the train?
And there were tens of Polish villages nearby, a Gestapo headquarters was in Izbica, camp guards lived there. Railway was a backbone of local economy. The trains had to stop there.
little grey rabbit wrote:Although I do not read Polish
Don't you think this is the main problem with you research? The Information is in Poland and nowhere else, there are archives, diaries, ten of thousands of books about occupation, Jews, concentration camps, thousands of still living witnesses and you will never be able to use them.
little grey rabbit wrote: A passenger train can pass a station and yet not to stop at it. Unless there was a pressing need for the Germans to allow Jews to take shopping trips to Lublin and Lvov, common sense would suggest that traffic in and out of Izbica station would be tightly controlled - to the extent it occurred at all.
The control mechanism you talking about is called tickets. A Jew was not allowed to buy one and he would be killed on the spot if he tried.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#28

Post by uberjude » 08 Mar 2011, 22:27

For whatever it's worth, on the bottom of page 11 on the document I posted, there's a timeline that says that in 1939, there were 6,000 inhabitants, of whom 5,098 were Jews.

This may be the sort of thing that ultimately depends on how one defines "Izbica," i.e., if there places on the outskirts which were officially part of "Greater Izbica" but which local residents might not have thought of as being Izbica.

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#29

Post by wm » 09 Mar 2011, 02:56

Sorry about it, I didn't notice that. Polish wikipedia gives similar numbers: 6,000 inhabitants and about 10% Poles in 1939.

In this video, at 6:25 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xn8sV19Z2A Thomas Blatt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Blatt, one of the few survivors who successfully escaped Sobibór, talks how he and 7 other Jews boarded a train in Izbica in 1942, trying to escape from there.

little grey rabbit wrote: To be honest with you, since the idea that Karski visited Izbica is so ludicrously against all the known facts of the time and his own descriptions (where he clearly states the town he visited had had its Jews expelled and their property taken over by Aryans) I tend to believe that those who make it secretly believe Karski to be a liar.
from http://www.fodz.pl/download/fodz_izbica_broszura_EN.pdf:
Along with the flow of the European Jews came the deportations of the Polish ones.
The first one took place on March 24th, 1942, when the Nazis deported 2,200 local Jews to the death camp in Belzec to make place for the incoming transports. A few days later another 2,500 Jews were deported to Belzec. All deportations were extremely brutal; many people were murdered in the streets, in their houses, and on the train ramp. their bodies, along with those who died from “natural causes”, were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Izbica, probably in mass graves. It is known, that in the summer of 1942 alone about 1,000 Jews who died or were murdered in Izbica were buried there.
The largest wave of deportations began in October and November 1942. At the same time the Polish Jews from the districts of Zamosc and Krasnystaw were moved to Izbica.


There weren't that many Jews in Izbica between March and October, 1942...

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Re: An earlier report than Jan Karski of a visit to Belzec?

#30

Post by little grey rabbit » 09 Mar 2011, 11:22

uberjude wrote:For whatever it's worth, it should be kept in mind that Izbica, although overwhelmingly Jewish, did have a small non-Jewish population, so when one speaks of it being "completely cut off," I'm not sure what that means. According to this document, there were approximately 1,000 non-Jews living in Izbica in 1939. ( http://www.fodz.pl/download/fodz_izbica_broszura_EN.pdf) Are you suggesting that Izbica's Poles weren't allowed to leave? If there are non-Jews living there anyway, why is it so absurd to argue that trains would pass through? The non-Jews were allowed to travel, so if an Izbica Pole could travel to some other place from Izbica, why wouldn't a non-Izbica Pole be allowed to travel to Izbica? Are you going to argue that the thousand or so Poles in Izbica--like the woman cited by WM--were also trapped, and not allowed to take the train?
While I don't know the specific details of Izbica, it was normal German policy to forcibly remove all non-Jews (or suggest it was an excellent idea in their own interests that they did not stay) in areas which they declared Judenwohnbezirk. In theory this was supposed to involve the swop of accommodation. As such you would expect the Aryan residents to have been moved out or to have moved out when the Judenwohnbezirk was declared - I hasten to add that this was just general practice and I don't have specific information on Izbica.

On the brochure I orginally linked to and you have relinked you will see no indications at all of an Aryan district or a predominantly Aryan center of Izbica. The clearest statement is
Practically from the beginning of the occupation there was another problem which harassed the town: famine. While in theory it was not a closed ghetto, Izbica was nonetheless surrounded on three sides by hills, making the town a death trap for the people inside. Those natural borders were marked by the Nazis as lines, the crossing of which meant immediate execution.
I don't really care one way or other - I presume the frequency of stops is something that probably could be uncovered by Polish historians should they choose - however supposing the Germans did see the need to allow frequent stops at their declared Judenwohnbezirk, one would imagine extremely strict controls at the train station as to who got on and off. Karski makes no mention of this in arriving at the town he calls Belzec. It is just a normal town with no heavier police presence than normal, he goes to an Aryan shop in the middle of the town. If Karski had somehow failed to notice the sign "Izbica" on the train station, surely he would have noticed and mentioned all the yellow stars in the street? And all the Austrian, German, Czechoslovakian accents?

I said it before, there is no positive reason to identify his description with Izbica and I find it difficult, despite great efforts, to believe in the sincerity of those people who somehow say it has been "proved". It has been asserted but without any meaningful evidence pro-offered.

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