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

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

#1

Post by little grey rabbit » 24 Feb 2011, 07:25

Jan Karski wrote in The Story of the Secret State about visiting Belzec (although there has been a claim, fairly easily disprovable, that he meant Izbica).

I was reading Into That Darkness by Gita Sereny which on page 141 has this
On September 26 Myron Taylor delivered a far more explicit note to Cardinal Maglione, communicating information received by the Geneva office of the Jewish Agnecy for Palestine from "two reliable eye-witnesses (Aryan)," one of whom came on August 14 from Poland:
"(1) Liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the ghetto in groups and shot. Their corpses are utilized for making fats and their bones for the manufacture of fertilizer. Corpses are even being exhumed for these purposes.
"(2) These mass executions take place, not in Warsaw, but in specially prepared camps for the purpose, one of which is stated to be in Belsec..."
As Jan Karski didn't arrive in London until November 1942 and wasn't supposed to have visited the camp until end of August 1942, this means the informant was not Karski.

Information collected by Michael Mills and written in a letter to David Irving are relevant to the discussion and I take the liberty of posting a portion of Mills' letter here
Investigation of the background to Karski's account given in his 1944 book "Story of a Secret State" raises doubts about his claims. His 1944 account seems to have its origin in a report written in late 1942 by the two Jewish members of the Polish National Council in London, Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart. This report was sent by diplomatic pouch to the Polish embassy in Washington, which passed it on to the Jewish Labor Committee.

The report purports to be an eye-witness account written in the first person, by an unnamed narrator. It was published in the 1 March 1943 edition of "The Ghetto Speaks", a newsletter produced by the US branch of the General Jewish Workers Union of Poland affiliated with the Bund, and again in the 1943 book "The Black Book of Polish Jewry".

The narrator of the Zygielboim/Schwarzbart account states that only a small number of Jews remain alive out of the three and one half million Jews of Poland and the five to seven hundred thousand who had been brought there from other German-occupied countries, and that "it is not any longer a question of oppressing Jews, but of their complete extermination by all kinds of especially devised and perfected methods of pain and torture".

The narrator continues: "In Warsaw I saw the first part [of the deportations].and later on the outskirts of Belzec the second and last part." He says that the first lap of the journey of the deportees lasts from two to eight days, and ends at a "sorting point" ("oboz rozdzielczy") "located about fifty kilometers from the city of Belzec".

The narrator then states: "In the uniform of a Polish policeman I visited the sorting camp near Belzec. It is a huge barracks, only about half of which is covered with a roof. When I was there about five thousand men and women were in the camp. However every few hours new transports of Jews, men and women, young and old, would arrive for the last journey toward death."

After describing how the guards keep shooting at the throng, the narrator states that the Jews are crammed into cattle cars and either left to die there or taken to nearby Belzec, where they are killed by poison gas or electric currents. They are only taken to Belzec "because there are not enough cars to kill the Jews in this relatively inexpensive manner". The corpses are said to be burned near Belzec; "thus, within an area of fifty kilometres huge stakes are burning Jewish corpses day and night".

The question that immediately arises is whether the narrator of the Zygielbojm/Schwarzbart account actually was Karski, or perhaps some other person, or perhaps was entirely fictional.

One scholar, David Engel, has questioned whether Karski did meet with Jewish leaders so soon after his arrival in London ("The Western Allies and the Holocaust: Jan Karski's Mission to the West, 1942-44", Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5, no. 4 , 1990, pp. 363-380). He believes that Karski did not meet the Jewish leaders until months after his arrival in Britain, since the emphasis of his mission was on the Polish underground, not on carrying messages for the Jews.
Would the Myron Talor note of September 1942 not suggest that that the Zygielbojm/Schwarzbart account is indeed from a different source than the Karski account?

Alternatively, they could all be fictional and just slowly developing the one fictional narrative. Does anyone know what source the Myron Taylor note was based on?

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

#2

Post by Sunbury » 24 Feb 2011, 09:44

Alternatively, they could all be fictional and just slowly developing the one fictional narrative
Ah, Denialism creeping in under the door?

Its interesting quoting one of the forum members as a source, particularily for Irving. Irving lost his court case against Lipstadt and his appeals. Note Irving sued Lipstadt and chose the country to have the case.
http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/e ... /judgement has the whole court case, its always good to revisit the Court Case but for those not able to.
Finding as to Irving's motivation
13.163 Having reviewed what appear to me to be the relevant considerations, I return to the issue which I defined in paragraph 13.138 above. I find myself unable to accept Irving's contention that his falsification of the historical record is the product of innocent error or misinterpretation or incompetence on his part. When account is taken of all the considerations set out in paragraphs 13.140 to 13.161 above, it appears to me that the correct and inevitable inference must be that for the most part the falsification of the historical record was deliberate and that Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence.
Poor Micheal Mills then, it must have been hard, to be taken in so completely by Irving and his love of Hitler and hatred of Jews. Indeed there is a long thread on things already http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... &start=300

So back to the question, it is a non question, it matters little. There were numerous accounts circulating in 1942, so the slight of hand on asking if it was a fantasy is addressed.

http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/allies.html has details of most of them.
The United States Office of Strategic Services received a report dated 20 June 1942 from Lisbon, that began with the words, "Germany is no longer persecuting the Jews. It is systematically exterminating them."
The information came from a British officer who had escaped from captivity and had hidden for a time in the Warsaw Ghetto before reaching Portugal. The officer reported that Heinrich Himmler had visited Hans Frank in April 1942 to inform him that the Jews were not disappearing fast enough to please the Führer. The Jews were to be "virtually exterminated" by a specified date. A trial speeding up had been ordered at Lublin, "where for a time trainloads were taken daily to Sobibor station in the suburbs, thence to an isolated area where they are machine-gunned". Peasants had left nearby farms because of the stench of unburied corpses....................................

The Times of London carried a report on 10 July 1942 to the effect that Polish Vice-Premier S. Mikolajczyk had received information from the Home Army (AK – one of the two main groups of underground forces in Poland itself) about the liquidation of Poles and the most terrible situation of the Jews, who had been murdered en masse, or transported to unknown destinations. The Newsweek magazine commented in its issue of 10 August 1942 that trainloads of Warsaw Jews were vanishing into a "black limbo". On 20 August 1942, The New York Times quoting the previous day's edition of the French Paris Soir, stated that Jews from France were being deported to "Polish Silesia"..........................

Information was also available in the summer of 1942 from more direct sources. In Switzerland, quite independently of each other, three Germans provided the details. Ernst Lemmer, a journalist, spoke of gas chambers, both stationary and mobile, but he was not considered reliable. An economist, Artur Sommer, passed a note to Edgar Salin, a professor at the University of Basel. In it, Sommer stated that camps were being prepared in the East for gassing. The BBC should broadcast daily warnings. The message passed unheeded.

The third informant was a businessman, Eduard Schulte. His report of 30 July 1942 eventually reached the chief of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, Gerhart Riegner, who cabled via diplomatic channels to Rabbi Dr Stephen Wise in the United States and to British Member of Parliament Sidney Silverman. Riegner reported that a plan had been discussed and was under consideration in the Führer's headquarters for the deportation of the European Jews to the East, where they were to be "exterminated at one blow". Among methods under discussion was the use of prussic acid. Silverman received the cable; mysteriously, Wise did not, until Silverman sent him a copy.................................................

A train carrying Jews from Poland, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands arrived in Palestine on 14 November 1942. Most of those arriving were Palestinian citizens who had been caught in Poland at the outbreak of war. The Nazis had agreed to exchange them for German detainees in the West. The refugees had witnessed countless atrocities. The Jewish Agency in Palestine made public details of the Nazi extermination policy obtained from these witnesses on 23 November 1942. The following day, Wise called a press conference to release the Riegner telegramme. On 25 November 1942, The New York Times published information received from the Polish Government in Exile that mentioned Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In the same edition, the newspaper carried an item providing details of concrete buildings on the former Russian frontier used as gas chambers and of crematoria at Oswiecim (Auschwitz), as well as an estimate from Wise that the Jewish dead already numbered 2 million. The next day, The New York Times quoted Dr Ignacy Szwarcbart (Schwartzbart), a Jewish member of the Polish National Council in London:
"Jews were being gassed and in Belzec they were being killed by electrical current."...............................................

Reports of the genocide were not limited to the United States in the autumn and winter of 1942. Szmul Zygelbojm, another Jewish member of the Polish National Council in London, released the text of a speech he had made on 1 September 1942, the third anniversary of the outbreak of war. 700,000 Jews had been murdered by May 1942. Some had been shot, some starved, some gassed. 7,000 Jews were being deported daily from Warsaw.
Zygelbojm appealed for immediate help, before Europe became a cemetery. In another speech broadcast by the BBC earlier that year, he had said:
"It will be a disgrace to go on living, to belong to the human race, unless immediate steps are taken to put a stop to this crime, the greatest that history has known."
Zygelbojm spoke again on the BBC in December 1942, saying:
"If Polish Jewry's call for help goes unheeded, Hitler will have achieved one of his war aims – to destroy the Jews of Europe irrespective of the final military outcome of the war."......................................
Who discovered we could get milk from a cow? and come to think of it what did they think they were doing at the time? Billy Connolly


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

#3

Post by David Thompson » 24 Feb 2011, 17:16

Sunbury -- Our rules forbid personal comments about other posters. Please avoid this mistake in the future.

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

#4

Post by michael mills » 26 Feb 2011, 03:32

We can be reasonably certain that Karski did not visit the Belzec extermination camp at any time during 1942, and that the account of such a visit he included in his 1944 book "Story of a Secret State" was entirely fictional, obviously based on the account published in early 1943 by Szwarcbart and Zygielboim.

One reason we can be certain that Karski simply plagiarised the Szwarcbart-Zygielboim account is that he repeats their most egregious error, namely that Jews deported from Warsaw in the summer of 1942 were taken to a camp in the vicinity of Belzec and exterminated there. In fact, the Jews deported from Warsaw were taken in the direction of Bialystok as far as Malkinia, from where most of them ended up in the Treblinka extermination camp.

The large camp mentioned in the Szwarcbart-Zygielboim account, and copied by Karski in "Secret State", was most probably situated at Malkinia; the other camp stated to be at Belzec would then have been Treblinka II, which is situated on a branch line leading from Malkinia to Siedlce. The person who composed the material on which Szwarcbart and Zygielboim based their published account, most probably someone in the Polish Underground, must have confused Treblink with Belzec, possibly because the existence of belzec was known before that of Treblinka.

An interesting fact is that Karski had included a description of a transit camp situated at Belzec in his first report sent to the Polish Government-in-Exile in Angers in 1940. Karski claimed to have personally seen that camp in December 1939, but whether he really did so or was using an account by some other person is unknown. Karski stated that that camp held Jews who were waiting to cross the demarcation line into the Soviet Occupation Zone of Poland.

The most interesting thing is that Karski's description of "Belzec" in "Secret State" strongly resembles his description of the Belzec transit camp in his 12940 report, except that in that earlier report he of course did not claim that any extermination of Jews was taking place at the transit camp.

It appears that Karski took the Szwarcbart-Zygielboim account of extermination at a camp near Belzec, and added to it details drawn from his 1940 account of a transit camp that had existed at Belzec in December 1939, presumably in order to lend verisimilitude to the account he produced for "Secret State".

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

#5

Post by little grey rabbit » 26 Feb 2011, 07:10

I think there are four issues here:

1. Is the "Szwarcbart-Zygielboim account" actually written by Karski or not? If not what did Karski see if anything?
2. Was the report of September 1942 [definitely not Karski] the original of the Szwarcbart-Zygielboim account or was it a different one - and who was it?
3. If Karski or anyone was interested in what was happening to the Warsaw Jews why was it so difficult them to take the 2-3 hour trip to Malikinia to find out?
4. What was actually the opinion of non-Jewish Poles on seeing Jews disappear from their country? I don't imagine that any serious figure would have been anything but horrified by gas chambers, but I get the distinct impression that if such a program was camoflagued as a resettlement, then Polish opinion would in many sectors have been strongly in favour of it (resettlement). So was there a period when catholic Polish leadership was privately saying: "Oh great, the Germans are deporting the Jews for us"?

In regards issue #3. Into That Darkness makes very clear that the camp near Malkinia was very accessible to the outside. The stationmaster was working for the Home Army. I will quote 3 or 4 sections from this book to given an idea how open the camp was

page 239. Stangl
[...But anyway, by this time everybody knew what was going on.]
Did they? Even during your trial any number of people denied having known anything at all about these things?
[Stangl] "I know," he said bitterly, "None of them knew anything, saw anything, guessed anything. But hundreds of soldiers and civilians used to come up to our gate, stand along the fences, gawk, and try to buy things off us because it was known that there was all this stuff around. For a while we even had planes circling around overhead and flying low so that they could watch what was going on. I rang through to HQ about that finally and they told us to shoot at them. So we did, and that stopped that. But we never could stop the others - not quite, ever. They saw dead Jews on the ground and being carried away from the station. They photographed them. The whole place stank to high heaven from kilomenters away. For two weeks after coming through there - or 'visiting' there - many used to say they couldn't eat. But no, they saw nothing and knew nothing. Of course...."
Perhaps the planes is a touch excessive but the open nature of the camp is repeated by others

page 194 Franz Suchomel
They weren't 'whores' in that sense. We called them Spekulantinnen. They were women who came from all over - Warsaw too, I expect - to do business with the Ukrainians. They may have f****** with them - I suppose they did - but mainly they were around to 'shop'. After Wirth came, he had twelve of them picked up at random, brought into camp and had them whipped. Afterwards he shipped them to the labour camp
page 193 Richard Glazar - on the burning of bodies
Secrecy? Good heavens, there was no secrecy about Treblinka; all the Poles between there and Warsaw must have known about it, and lived off the proceeds. All the peasants came to barter, the Warsaw whores did business witht he Ukrainians - it was a circus for all of them]" [Both Zabecki and Berek Rojzman had already spoken of the peasants who tended their fields which adjoined the camp. "And many others," said Rojzman, "came to the fence to barter, mostly with the Ukrainians, but with us too."
Surely if Jan Karski really wanted to know where the Warsaw Jews were going by the end of August he should have been able to take a train to Malkinia to find out, especially with the Home Army soldier in the railway station, Pan Zabecki, faithfully reporting all details to his commanders?

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

#6

Post by michael mills » 27 Feb 2011, 07:14

Some answers:

1. It is almost certain that Karski did not write the SZ-Zyg report. It is almost certain that he never visited am extermination camp.

2. The Sz-Zyg was most probably put together from a number of separate sources, some early garbled accounts of Belzec, plus more recent reports of the deportation from Warsaw. Sz and Zyg put the reports together, and mustakenly concluded that the camp to which Warsaw Jews was being taken was near belzec.

3. Agents of the Polish Underground did follow transports of Jews to Malkinia. They noted that Jews were taken from there to other destinations, including Treblinka II.

4. Many Poles did openly express their satisfaction that the jews were being deported. For example, a Polish priest wrote to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, saying that although the Germans had done much harm to Poland, they were doing one good thing, namely getting rid of the Jews, something the Poles had been too weak to do themselves. I will post more details of that letter later.

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

#7

Post by wm » 01 Mar 2011, 23:54

little grey rabbit wrote:J His 1944 account seems to have its origin in a report written in late 1942 by the two Jewish members of the Polish National Council in London, Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart.
"late 1942" can mean anything, may I asked when the report was written and what is the source of the information?

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

#8

Post by wm » 07 Mar 2011, 01:33

michael mills wrote: One reason we can be certain that Karski simply plagiarised the Szwarcbart-Zygielboim account is that he repeats their most egregious error, namely that Jews deported from Warsaw in the summer of 1942 were taken to a camp in the vicinity of Belzec and exterminated there.
There is a much simple explanation, they repeat his error.
little grey rabbit wrote: He believes that Karski did not meet the Jewish leaders until months after his arrival in Britain, since the emphasis of his mission was on the Polish underground, not on carrying messages for the Jews.
That's partially correct, he was asked to not contact anyone for political reasons.
little grey rabbit wrote: Would the Myron Talor note of September 1942 not suggest that that the Zygielbojm/Schwarzbart account is indeed from a different source than the Karski account?
They had access to his reports well before the meeting, the meeting was a formality.

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

#9

Post by michael mills » 07 Mar 2011, 05:28

There is a much simple explanation, they repeat his error.
Logically less likely than my explanation.

Agents of the Polish Underground who tracked the transports of Jews from Warsaw in July-August 1942 found that they were travelling along the railway line to Malkinia Junction, from where they proceeded down the Siedlce branch line to Treblinka, which is situated just across the Bug River from Malkinia.

Accordingly, the leaders of the Polish Underground in Warsaw, the men who gave Karski the materials to carry back to London, were well aware that the Jews deported from Warsaw were being taken to Treblinka, not to Belzec. If Karski had indeed been tasked with going to the camp where the Warsaw Jews were being exterminated, he would likewise have known that it was Treblinka.

Accordingly, the conclusion must be that Karski never went to that camp.

It is far more likely that the misidentification was made by Szwarcbart and Zygielboim, who were not on the spot, and were totally reliant on reports dribbling in from Poland. The most obvious reason for the misidentification is that they were using two separate sources of information, one an early and rather fanciful report or reports about extermination of Jews at Belzec, the other a more recent and reliable description of the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto in July-August 1942. It appears that the report about the deportations from Warsaw did not specify where the Warsaw Jews were being taken, so Szwarcbart and Zygielboim simply assumed their destination was Belzec, about which they had already received reports.

The one true element in Karski's story is his account of meeting the two Jewish leaders in Warsaw, but not in the Ghetto. It is also probably true that they gave him a message for Szwarcbart and Zygielboim, which he delivered to them several months after his arrival in London, it not being a priority for him.

However, it is unlikely that he made a clandestine visit to the Warsaw Ghetto, since the description of it he gives in "Secret State" is far more representative of conditions before the beginning of the deportations, when beggars were dying of starvation in the streets (ie the winter of 1941-42), rather than of late August 1942, when Karski claims to have made his visit, a time when all the beggars and poorer elements in the Ghetto had been carted off to their deaths in Treblinka and living conditions had improved for the Jews fit for labour who remained.

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

#10

Post by David Thompson » 07 Mar 2011, 05:52

Michael -- You wrote, after quoting wm:
Logically less likely than my explanation.
Why don't you give our readers your sources, so they can check the facts for themselves?

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

#11

Post by little grey rabbit » 07 Mar 2011, 05:54

The options I see are Karski visited
a. Izbica
b. Belzec
c. Treblinka/Malkinia
d. nowhere

Option a can be ruled out straight away - Karski describes getting off the train station and going into an Aryan town and then walking 30 minutes to a transit camp. That doesn't fit a ghetto town at all.

Regards b or c. He states his purpose was to find out what was happening to Warsaw Jews. A few days after visiting the ghetto he got up early in the morning and went to Warsaw train station and then took a train that arrived before midday.

It is possible to get to Belzec from Warsaw in a morning using modern trains - although normally you would have to change at Lublin. Malkinia these days only takes 90 minutes, so even if longer back then is easily achievable. I wonder how long a train to Belzec from Warsaw would have taken in 1942.

However, then he describes only walking 30 minutes from the town to the camp. That would rule out Treblinka where the distance walking is about 2 hours.

So perhaps {d} nowhere is the right answer?

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

#12

Post by David Thompson » 07 Mar 2011, 07:07

Let's start with the posters giving quotes and page references to the passages in Story of A Secret State which are being discussed, as well as any relevant quotes from the "Szwarcbart-Zygielboim account". Without them, this conversation is going to be increasingly difficult for our readers to follow.

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

#13

Post by Sunbury » 07 Mar 2011, 08:06

little grey rabbit wrote:The options I see are Karski visited
a. Izbica
b. Belzec
c. Treblinka/Malkinia
d. nowhere

Option a can be ruled out straight away - Karski describes getting off the train station and going into an Aryan town and then walking 30 minutes to a transit camp. That doesn't fit a ghetto town at all.

Regards b or c. He states his purpose was to find out what was happening to Warsaw Jews. A few days after visiting the ghetto he got up early in the morning and went to Warsaw train station and then took a train that arrived before midday.

It is possible to get to Belzec from Warsaw in a morning using modern trains - although normally you would have to change at Lublin. Malkinia these days only takes 90 minutes, so even if longer back then is easily achievable. I wonder how long a train to Belzec from Warsaw would have taken in 1942.

However, then he describes only walking 30 minutes from the town to the camp. That would rule out Treblinka where the distance walking is about 2 hours.

So perhaps {d} nowhere is the right answer?
Wandering over to Codoh, IHR and VHO, all were very excited at some point over the Karski question.
Great minds think alike and fools seldom differ rings true.

Its funny LGR how you dismiss option "A: and rush straight to your preferred option D. Option A - Izbica is what Karski's biographers Wood and Jankowski post war wrote that he went to instead of Belzec. Karski agreed with them. What he wrote in WW2 with the information he had on Belzec was wrong and he accepted he was wrong post war and moved on. Being in the wrong location once does not diminsh the rest of his contributions, though it seems some wish that greatly.

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.
Who discovered we could get milk from a cow? and come to think of it what did they think they were doing at the time? Billy Connolly

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

#14

Post by little grey rabbit » 07 Mar 2011, 10:02

My understanding that Izbica was a ghetto town and not an Aryan town with a transit camp located 30 minutes walk away - as Karski clearly described. That fact that Izbica had been Aryanised and all Jews deported by August 1942 is a "fact" only known to Jankowski and Wood. And for reasons unknown they have chosen to conceal the source of this revelation.

The following is a useful link to Izbica - alas not following the pioneering path of Wood and Jankowski.

http://fodz.pl/download/fodz_izbica_broszura_EN.pdf

Given it was essentially a closed ghetto town it would be quite likely Karski would not even have been allowed to disembark there - or that normal passenger trains would stop at that station.

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.

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

#15

Post by wm » 07 Mar 2011, 11:23

little grey rabbit wrote: Regards b or c. He states his purpose was to find out what was happening to Warsaw Jews.
He was a political emissary, his mission was to carry reports, messages, informations from the Underground Movement and leaders of political parties including leaders of Polish Jews. He was not Sherlock Holmes, a roving reporter or a spy. He should have not visited the Warsaw Ghetto or Izbica, the risk was unacceptable. He did it nonetheless because he was beseeched by Leon Feiner and Adolf Berman, to see what was happening to the Polish Jews with his own eyes. BTW Berman died in 1978, do you have any information that he denied Karski story?

So a book written during the war, deliberately obscured to protect Karski, his family, people still fighting in Poland, written from memory, without access to sources is a main source for all of this?

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