I was reading Into That Darkness by Gita Sereny which on page 141 has this
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.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..."
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
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?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.
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?