Silberklang about Karski

[Karski]

The following sentence of historian David Silberklang is quoted on Internet : "Since Karski was very familiar wih Polish geogaphy, it is difficult to see how he could have erred." (David Silberklang, "The Allies and the Holocaust : A Reappraisal", Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 24, 1994, p. 148.) The matter is an error made by Jan Karski about the localization of Belzec. It is not possible for me to read Silberklang's article, but I would like to know if his quoted sentence was part of an objection against the Izbica thesis. (According to this thesis, Karski saw Izbica and erroneously thaught it was Belzec. This thesis appeared in 1994, the year of Silberklang's article.) Could anybody say if Silberklang, in his article, was skeptical about the Izbica thesis ? Thanks in advance.

[wm]

And what he meant by "very familiar with Polish geography" as Karski was a diplomat, not a geographer or cartographer...

[michael mills]

The most likely reality is that the account given by Kozielewski-Karski in "Story of a Secret State" of his having entered the Belzec extermination camp disguised as an Estonian guard is entirely fictional.

In that account, Koz-Kar described meeting two Jewish leaders, one Zionist and one Bundist, who were in hiding in Warsaw outside the ghetto. That part of the account is essentially true, since he brought back to London messages from those two leaders, and also gave an accurate description of them.

He claims that the two leaders smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto so that he could observe the conditions there and the process of deporting the Jews. He further claims that after that alleged visit, the leaders arranged for him to see the place where the Jews being deported from the Warsaw Ghetto were being taken, namely the Belzec extermination camp.

The problem with that story is that the Jews deported from Warsaw were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp, not to Belzec, and both the Jewish and Polish underground resistance leaders were very well aware of that fact, since members of the underground had followed the deportation trains to Treblinka, and had sent reports about that camp back to London.

It is therefore inconceivable that the two Jewish leaders Koz-Kar met in Warsaw would have told him that the deported Jews were being taken to Belzec rather than to Treblinka.

So why did Koz-Kar make that claim contrary to historical fact? The most likely explanation in that in his first report on the situation of the Jews in German-occupied Poland, written in 1940, he gave a description of a transit camp situated at Belzec where Jews wanting to cross into the Soviet Zone of Occupation were kept, and which he claimed to have seen in December 1939. His description of the miserable condition of the Jews kept in freezing conditions at that Belzec transit camp bears a certain resemblance to his description in "Secret State" of the extermination camp he claimed to have visited in 1942, although the latter account is more lurid.

My conclusion is that when Koz-Kar was asked by the Polish Government-in-Exile to write an account for presentation to the Anglo-American public that would refute the accusations of Polish anti-Semitism being made by Jewish groups in Britain and the United States, he simply had recourse to his 1940 description of the transit camp at Belzec, and made it more lurid. That would be the reason why he located the extermination camp he allegedly visited at Belzec, the same place as the earlier transit camp he also claimed to have visited in December 1939.

One strong resemblance of the camp described in "Secret State" to the transit camp described in the 1940 report is the statement that the Jews being held at the former camp were not killed there, but were loaded into trains and taken to some other location, which is more typical of a transit camp than an extermination camp.

The claim that Koz-Kar did indeed visit a camp for Jews in 1942, but that the camp was not Belzec but a transit camp at Izbica-Lubelska, and that he made an honest mistake, is an attempt to defend his reputation against insinuations of fraud made by Jewish historians such as the late Hilberg.

[Karski]

The replies are interesting, but I remind that I would be happy if somebody could say whether Silberklang's sentence was part of an objection against the Izbica thesis.
By the way, are there other testimonies about Jews trying to pass from the German zone into the Soviet zone of Poland in December 1939 and kept by the Germans ? Didn't the Germans encourage the Jews to cross the board from the German zone to the Soviet zone ?

[Gorque]

By the way, are there other testimonies about Jews trying to pass from the German zone into the Soviet zone of Poland in December 1939 and kept by the Germans ? Didn't the Germans encourage the Jews to cross the board from the German zone to the Soviet zone ?

Yes, the German wanted the Jews to cross the border with the Soviet Union however, the Soviets had closed the border.

[wm]

Additional posts make a topic more visible, here on this forum and on internet so it's a good thing...

There are several testimonies of Jews trying to cross the border in the Ringelblum Archives (from or to the USSR).
Initially they usually weren't arrested but it was lottery, sometimes they were allowed to continue their journey, sometimes weren't and were sent back.
Thousands languished in the neutral zone because the Soviets didn't allow them to cross the border.
Frequently the Soviets handed over the Jews arrested on their side to the Germans.

According to the German-Soviet agreement the people from the annexed by the Soviets territories could return to their place of residence. It was made known, among the Jews too. It was easy to be included in such transports.
Sometimes the Germans organized death marches to the border, and the Jews were forced to cross it.

I don't think the Germans encouraged the Jews to cross illegally, it would be against their agreements with the Soviets. Legal emigration was certainly encouraged.
It seems Germans border guards didn't care much about this Jewish "problem", they generally robbed the Jews and let them go.

[wm]

The problem with that story is that the Jews deported from Warsaw were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp, not to Belzec, and both the Jewish and Polish underground resistance leaders were very well aware of that fact, since members of the underground had followed the deportation trains to Treblinka, and had sent reports about that camp back to London.

I would put much faith in very well aware, some people were, most weren't. All the places were just godforsaken villages, a few from many thousands. Their names meant nothing even for people well versed in geography.

According to Story of a Secret State the Jewish leaders promised to show him a Jewish death camp, not the camp the Warsaw Jews were exterminated. That the Jews from Warsaw were there he was told by the Estonian militiaman who accompanied him.
He himself wrote it was the Nazi execution grounds at Bełżec, he visited it on a day when executions were scheduled, and it was said every Jew who reached it was doomed to death.

Additionally his description of the 1939 Bełżec camp had nothing in common with the camp in Story of a Secret State. He merely says people there were in kept in ice cold weather without any shelter, and they had to constantly move around to keep warm. And that's all, its just a few sentences anyway.
There were no trains, sheds, executions, Estonian guards there.

His Story of a Secret State weren't a refutation of the 1941 Jewish press attacks on the Polish Government in Exile for the simple reason it was published three years later.
In 1944 nobody remembered 1941.

[Karski]

Additionally his description of the 1939 Bełżec camp had nothing in common with the camp in Story of a Secret State. He merely says people there were in kept in ice cold weather without any shelter, and they had to constantly move around to keep warm. And that's all, its just a few sentences anyway.
There were no trains, sheds, executions, Estonian guards there.

Did you read the entire decription of the 1939 Bełżec camp ? Was the entire decription published ? It seems to me that Wood and Jankowski (2d edition, 2014, p. 37) quote this description only partly : there are triple dots, but not in parentheses or brackets. (If these triple dots replace a part of the text and are not in parentheses or brackets, it is substandard practice.)

[wm]

This is the relevant page from his report:

He says there it was a camp for Jewish illegal border-crossers and those waiting for a permission to enter the Soviet territory, that they suffered from exposure to cold, it was terrifying mass human misery, and he was devastated by what he saw.

[michael mills]

Did you read the entire decription of the 1939 Bełżec camp ? Was the entire decription published ? It seems to me that Wood and Jankowski (2d edition, 2014, p. 37) quote this description only partly : there are triple dots, but not in parentheses or brackets. (If these triple dots replace a part of the text and are not in parentheses or brackets, it is substandard practice.)

The entire text of Kozielewski-Karski's 1940 report to the Polish Government-in-Exile on the situation of Polish Jewry under German and Soviet occupation, both the original and altered versions, was translated and published by the Jewish historian David Engel in "Jewish Social Studies" 45:1 (1983).

This is what was written in that report about the transit camp near Belzec:

III. The Jewish Camp near Belzec

Near Belzec (on the boundary of the territories occupied by the Bolsheviks) the Germans have created a camp of Jews. This camp includes for the most part those Jewish families who illegally wanted to cross over to the Bolsheviks or who waited for the reported and anticipated opening of the Bolshevik-German border for population exchanges. Besides this they are almost exclusively indigents. I saw this camp at the beginning of December 1939.

An enormous proportion walked and slept under the open sky. Very many people [were] without proper clothing or other covering. While one group slept, the other waited its turn, so that outer garments could be lent one another. Those who waited jumped and ran around so as not to freeze. A few hundred people, among them children, women, and old people, run around for hours or jump in place, for if they stand still, they will freeze. After a few hours [the groups] change places. [Those who have been waiting] go to sleep, and another few hundred people jump and run, jump and run. All are frozen, in despair, unable to think, hungry. [They are] a herd of harassed beasts - not people. This has been going on for weeks.

I watched this for a whole hour, riveted to my spot, frightened, confused. A nightmare - not real. Blue and red freaks - not people. I shall never forget it. Never in my life have I beheld anything more frightening.

I tend to the view that this passage in his 1940 report formed the basis on which he in 1944 created the account of his claimed visit to the Belzec extermination camp in 1942, with the addition of details drawn from the many reports on the death camps that had reached London by 1944. In both cases, he claims to have been in a position to observe the camp at close quarters for an extended period; in his 1940 account he does not explain how he managed that feat, whereas in his 1944 account in "Secret State" he gives the rather implausible explanation of borrowing the uniform of an off-duty Estonian guard, presumably because the Anglo-American audience at which the book was aimed would need some convincing.

The reports that had reached London from the Polish Underground contained a lot of factual inaccuracies, and some of them are repeated in Kozielewski-Karski's 1944 account, for example, that the Jews were gassed in the transportation trains rather than in gas chambers situated in the camps to which they were taken.

It should be noted that the description of the Jews held in the camp in 1939 borders on the comical, and the image of a crowd of ragged Jews milling about and jumping up and down is one that occurs quite commonly in popular anti-Jewish Polish rhetoric of that time.

[wm]

It should be noted that the description of the Jews held in the camp in 1939 borders on the comical, and the image of a crowd of ragged Jews milling about and jumping up and down is one that occurs quite commonly in popular anti-Jewish Polish rhetoric of that time.

Which one?
Jewish crowds never jumped up and down, milled around, even Jewish crowds were rarely seen - except during the occupation.

He didn't say he observed the 1939 camp at close quarters, only that he saw it.

He borrowed the uniform because people in such uniforms didn't have to show their papers at the gate.

[michael mills]

The essential problem with the story told by K-K in "Secret State" is that it is totally implausible. It rests on the proposition that one of the Trawniki men posted at the Belzec extermination camp would be prepared to lend his uniform to a member of the Polish Underground, so that the latter would be able to penetrate the camp in disguise.

That proposition is implausible, since such an action would be extremely dangerous for the Trawniki man, since if he were found out he would be considered a traitor and almost certainly executed. Because of that danger, the Trawniki man would have no incentive to help the member of Polish Underground to penetrate the camp.

To be sure, there are known cases of Trawniki men deserting and joining anti-German partisan groups, but such cases of desertion occurred later in the war, when the German forces were retreating before the advancing Red Army, and the Trawniki men realised that they had joined the losing side. That was not the case in the summer of 1942, when K-K claimed to have penetrated the Belzec extermination camp; at that time the German Army was again advancing on the Eastern Front, and the Trawniki men had no reason to believe that it would not be victorious. Accordingly, a Trawniki man posted to Belzec would have had no incentive to risk his life by aiding the Polish Underground.

The danger of being discovered was very great, since a member of the Polish Underground trying to enter the camp in a Trawniki uniform would almost certainly have been detected as an interloper by the other Trawniki men in the camp. The number of Trawniki men at each of the extermination camps was not large, and they would have known each other by sight, such that an interloper disguised as one of them would have been recognised.

So far as I know, K-K is the only member of the Polish Underground who claimed to have penetrated one of the Globocnik extermination camps disguised as a Trawniki man. Although the Trawniki men posted to the extermination camps were a major source of information to the Polish Underground about the extermination process taking place in those camps, that was by way of their gossiping to local people during their days off, and the local people then passing the information on to agents of the Underground.

On the balance of probabilities, I consider K-K's claim of having entered the Belzec camp disguised as a Trawniki man to be almost certainly fictional. What is demonstrably true is that he met two leaders of the Jewish Underground in Warsaw, that they gave him a message to take back to the two Jewish representatives on the Polish Government-in-Exile, Zygielbojm and Szwarcbart, and that he did hand over the message to them, although not until several months after his return to London, since for him conveying that message had a very low priority compared with his main task as a courier for the Polish Underground.

[michael mills]

In July 1943, Kozielewski-Karski and the Polish ambassador to the United States, Ciechanowski, had a meeting with President Roosevelt, to inform him about the situation in Poland.

This is what K-K told Roosevelt about the situation of the Jews:

http://www.karski.muzhp.pl/karski_en/mi ... zmowa.html

I am certain that most people are not aware of the horrific fate of our Jewish population. Over 1,800,000 Jews have been murdered in our country. There is a difference between the terror used against the Poles and the Jews. The Germans want to destroy the Polish nation as a nation, but they want the Polish population on these territories, deprived of their political, intellectual, religious and economic elites, with only farmers, workers and the city middle class. With the Jews, they want to destroy the entire Jewish nation biologically [organically]. I brought an official announcement for my Government from the Government Delegate [for Poland] and the Home Army Commander, saying that if the Germans don't change their methods toward the Jewish population, or if there is no Allied intervention – whether it is through repressions, or other methods - if there are no unexpected circumstances, in a year and a half from my departure from the country, the Jewish population in Poland, with the exception of those working in the Jewish Underground resistance, will cease to exist.

PRESIDENT: Do you cooperate with the Jews?

KARSKI: Yes. In two ways: the Jewish workers (socialist) movement participates in the Underground resistance in close cooperation with the Polish Socialist Party. Independently, there is a special committee for the aid and protection of the Jews (Zegota, which is affiliated with the Government Delegate). There are Poles in the committee, which is run by a Jew, and which has relatively large sums of money at its disposal.

We managed to hide a fair number of Jews. Unfortunately, this help is limited to those active in the Underground movement, or the prominent and valuable Jewish individuals. We cannot develop these efforts on a large scale because Jews can very often be recognized by their Semitic features. There is only one punishment for helping, hiding or facilitating a Jew's escape - the death penalty, executed on the entire family of the helper. If anything could help, we suppose it would be an Allied intervention, and, most importantly, repressions on the German population – in Germany and outside of Europe. That is the point of view of the Underground Jewish authorities, which I am to relate to both international Jewry and the Allied governments.

Note that K-K does not claim to have seen the extermination process with his own eyes. It is implausible that if he had in fact been inside an extermination camp, he would have failed to tell Roosevelt what he had personally seen, since that would have had a major impact, and would have bolstered the message that he was trying to convey.

In fact, very little of K-K's conversation with Roosevelt concerned the fate of the Jews; by far the greater part of it concerned the situation of the ethnic Polish people, with the main emphasis being a litany of complaints about what the Communists were doing.

[michael mills]

Here is part of what Kozielewski-Karski wrote about the Belzec camp he claimed to have visited in "Story of a Secret State":

http://www.karski.muzhp.pl/karski_en/misja_oboz.html

It was on a large, flat plain and occupied about a square mile. It was surrounded on all sides by a formidable barbed-wire fence, nearly two yards in height and in good repair. Inside the fence, at intervals of about fifteen yards, guards were standing, holding rifles with fixed bayonets ready for use. Around the outside of the fence, militia men circulated on constant patrol. The camp itself contained a few small sheds or barracks. The rest of the area was completely covered by a dense, pulsating, throbbing, noisy human mass Starved, stinking, gesticulating, insane human beings in constant, agitated motion. Through them, forcing paths if necessary with their rifle butts, walked the German police and the militia men.

To my left I noticed the railroad tracks which passed about a hundred yards from the camp. From the camp to the track a sort of raised passage had been built from old boards. On the track a dusty freight train waited, motionless. It had at least thirty cars, all filthy. [...] The Jewish mass vibrated, trembled, and moved to and fro as if united in a single, insane, rhythmic trance. They waved their hands, shouted, quarreled, cursed, and spat at each other. Hunger, thirst, fear, and exhaustion had driven them all insane. [...] When they had been rounded up they were given permission to take about ten pounds of baggage. [...] On the train, the Germans who accompanied them stripped them of everything that had the slightest value, even snatching away any article of clothing to which they took a fancy. [...]

Those who left the train without any food starved continuously from the moment they set foot in the camp. [...] The sheds could not accommodate more than two to three thousand people and every ‘batch’ included more than five thousand. This meant that there were always two to three thousand men, women, and children scattered about in the open, suffering exposure as well as everything else. The chaos, the squalor, the hideousness of it all was simply indescribable. There was a suffocating stench of sweat, filth, decay, damp straw and excrement.

In the above passage, I have emphasised sentences that bear a very strong resemblance to what he wrote about the Jews held in the transit camp at Belzec described in his 1940 report. I think it likely that the description of the Belzec camp in "Story of a Secret State" represents a lurid elaboration of what he wote about the transit camp in his 1940 report, which itself was lurid enough.

[Karski]

and that he did hand over the message to them [= Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm], although not until several months after his return to London

It seems that on 4th December 1942, Schwarzbart sent a telegram to the Jewih World Congress in New York. According to Robin O'Neil, "Poland and her Jews 1941-1944", (2005), here :
http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/poland/pol001.html
"Szwarcbart cabled confirmation of Karski's testimony to the Jewish World Congress in New York on 4th December 1942. Because of wartime censorship regulations, a copy of the telegram, which was passed to the Foreign Office, has survived in the British Public Records Office."
Robin O'Neil doesn't quote the text of this telegram.

Perhaps it is the same telegram as this one :
"To: Jewish Congress
330 West – 42nd Street
New York City
From: Ignacy Schwarzbart
Queensway
Bayswater
Special Official envoy Gentile escaped and arrived here left capital this October – saw Warsaw Ghetto on last August and September witnessed mass murder of one transport six thousand Jews at Belzec.
Spoke to him yesterday 3 hours confirm all most horrible mass atrocities- still living all remnants of Jews facing death Stop. Brought desperate appeal of this remnant to World Jewry sending report Stop
Constantly negotiating Raczynski Jewish Joint Committee for diplomatic and rescue action settled details shortly – Governments published full report sent inform representatives but press only without

Censors Note: Mentioning"

The text of this telegram is reproduced by Chris Webb & Victor Smart, "The Allied Reaction Regarding the Holocaust During 1942", 2009, here :
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org ... llies.html
but they don't indicate the date of the telegram.

(They indicate as their sources :
The History of the Second World War – published by Purnell London 1966
Holocaust Historical Society
Polish Library London
The BBC
NARA
PRO = Public Records Office)

Note that the "envoy" is not named in the telegram quoted by Chris Webb and Victor Smart. If the envoy is Karski and if the telegram quoted by Chris Webb and Victor Smart is the same as the telegram alluded to by Robin O'Neil, then Karski met Schwarzbart already on 3d December 1942.