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

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

#31

Post by little grey rabbit » 09 Mar 2011, 11:32

wm wrote:
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".
As I said, you appear to have misrepresented the source somewhat. Oral history does have its pitfalls.

This is what google translate gave me
During the war for Izbica Jews was not the ghetto. Normally lived in the whole village. Ghetto Germans did just for the Jews brought here from the Czech Republic, Lodz, Poland, and Germany. It was located in a building fire, for the tracks. The whole ghetto it was just this building, surrounded by barbed wire.
I think using one elderly woman who may not be being quoted accurately or have the same understanding of words like ghetto as we do, to disprove all scholarship and other survivors of Izbica foolish.

However the firestation did play a role in Izbica. From the pdf linked to above
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. It is difficult today to calculate how many people were in the town at that time. The density of the population was so enormous that people had to camp in the streets. During those autumn deportations thousands of people were sent to the death camps in Belzec and Sobibor.
The liquidation of the transitory ghetto in Izbica took place on November 2nd, 1942. About 1000-2000 Polish and European Jews were gathered by force into a small firehouse in Izbica, taken to the Jewish cemetery, and then executed and buried in two or three mass graves. the victims were recruited from those, for whom there were not enough places in the transports to the death camps.
It does not seem credible to claim all the deportees from all over Europe lived only in this fire station. Doubtless the old lady is doing her best to supply what she thinks the answers are supposed to be, but has fallen short a little. In anycase Karski did not describe a fire station surrounded by barbed wire, he described a great open area, half an hour walk from the town surronded by barbed wire.

Nor did he mention a town so crowded with yellow star wearing Germans, Slovaks and Austrians they were camping in the street when he went to visit the resistance contact in the center of the town he called Belzec. IIRC, he believed he was seeing Warsaw Jews in the barbed wired enclosure half an hour's walk away from the town he called Belzec.

Izbica is not reasonable suggestion.


Sorry.

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

#32

Post by wm » 09 Mar 2011, 14:07

little grey rabbit wrote: It does not seem credible to claim all the deportees from all over Europe lived only in this fire station.
They didn't live there, they stayed for a day or too and were removed.
little grey rabbit wrote: Doubtless the old lady is doing her best to supply what she thinks the answers are supposed to be, but has fallen short a little. In anycase Karski did not describe a fire station surrounded by barbed wire, he described a great open area, half an hour walk from the town surronded by barbed wire.
She doesn't say how big the place was.
And that fire station, it really didn't look like NYFD Hook and Ladder 8 Firehouse, I suppose you wouldn't know it is a fire station even if you were inside it.
Below are pictures taken in Izbica in 1941. Now, try to imagine how the "fire station" could have looked like.
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
Image
Image
Image
from: http://www.biblioteka.teatrnn.pl/dlibra/dlibra


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

#33

Post by little grey rabbit » 12 Mar 2011, 07:10

I certainly appreciate the pictures because I am sure that Karski would have realised in was in a ghetto town had he gone to Izbica. I am not sure if we can say what the fire station would have looked like from these pictures. The only question that need concern us is:
1. Is Karski supposed to have seen the firestation surrounded by barbed wire and is that fire station situated 30 minutes from the Izbica center?
2. Was there another barbed wire enclosure 30 minutes walk from Izbica center that also had a train station attached?

If the answer to both of these is "no", as I am pretty sure it is, then I think we can discard the Izbica suggestion as being without supporting evidence.

Part of the question I raised was why Malkinia and/or Treblinka did not feature in Karski's account of the fate of the Warsaw Jews. There is some material from Walter Laqueur's The Terrible Secret that might shed light:

page 114 on Biuletyn Informacyjny (published in Poland)
On 30 July 1942 there was no accurate information as yet with regard to the destination of the Jews. It was announded [by Biuletyn 30 July] that they were brought 'to the East, in the direction of Malkinia and Brest on Bug'. There was no precise news 'but there is room for the most pessimistic assumptions'. Even in the next issue of the Biuletyn the infromation given was not correct: the Jews, it was said, were brought to 'two death camps, Belzec and Sobibor' (6 August 1942). In Biuletyn of 13 August it was said that the number of of those deported was 120-150 000. Biuletyn of 20 August gave a figure of 200,000 and the editorial commented on the 'bestial murder of millions of Jews living among us before the eyes of our people'.
On the same page Laqueur states that many signals send by Bor Komorowski and Korbonski by radio to London and the BBC where they claim they gave specific information have not been able to be located. Presumably not in the BBC archives either.

on page 113
According to General Bor Komorowski, the Home Army was transmitting daily reportes to London on the situation, but the BBC maintained complete silence.
[...]
Stefan Korbonski was chief of Kierownictwo Walki Cywilne - the Civilian Struggle Directorate - and later became the last Delegat in Poland. He tells essentially the same story. Official Polish bodies in London and the BBC took no notice of the reports about the deportations from Warsaw to the death camps which he had sent independently:
"This game lasted for a couple of days and evidently due to the daily alarm of the London station, the government finally replied. The telegram did not explain much. It said literally: "Not all your telegrams are fit for publication.'

[....]
The signals sent from Warsaw during the first four weeks after the deportations started have not been publish [or it appears located - my note]. A radiogram transmitted by the Wanda radio station on 25 August announced that on some days 5-6 000 Jews were taken out of Warsaw, on others 15,000 - altogether some 150,000 had been deported. But this was an AK radiogram from Rowecki to Sosnkowski, the Polish C-in-C in London.
Finally Laqueur makes it clear he spoke with Karski extensively for his book and on page 231 states
He had not actually seen the gas chambers during his visit, apparently because these were walled in and could be approached only with a special permit.

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

#34

Post by Sunbury » 12 Mar 2011, 14:12

LGR, it seems your denying revisionist history concerning Karski. As he, himself accepted post war that he had been to Izbica, you still keep denying that fact. You have offered no proof other than your own opinion and you have a preconcieved position that everything Karski did was fantasy.

You do offer excellent travel monologues on trains and walking holidays in Poland, but little else.
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?

#35

Post by little grey rabbit » 13 Mar 2011, 03:23

Sunbury wrote:LGR, it seems your denying revisionist history concerning Karski. As he, himself accepted post war that he had been to Izbica, you still keep denying that fact. You have offered no proof other than your own opinion and you have a preconcieved position that everything Karski did was fantasy.

You do offer excellent travel monologues on trains and walking holidays in Poland, but little else.
Actually I have offered a selection of primary documents and secondary works to back my claim that Karski does not give a description compatiable with Izbica - a claim which has only been made by two amateur historians writing a biography.

This is the description given in March 1943 in Voice of the Unconquered published under “Eye-Witness Report of a Secret Courier Fresh from Poland.”
It has been held that this was written by Jan Karski but there is no evidence to support this other than it has some similarities but more differences to the account published in the Secret State in 1944.
Not once during the journey are the doors of the cars opened
with the result that many die before they reach the ‘sorting point’ (Obóz
Rozdzielczy) which is located about fifty kilometers from the city of Belzec. [...]In the uniform of a Polish policeman I visited the sorting point near Belzec. It is a huge barrack only about half of which is covered with a roof.
When I was there about 5,000 men and women were in the camp.
The first question that arises is why would Karski, who was very firm on the fact that Poles were not collaborating with Germans, say he wore the uniform of a Polish policeman. In the version that appeared under his name this was changed to Estonian.
The second question is how does "a huge barrack only about half of which is covered with a roof" bear any resemblence to the excellent pictures that wm has proivded us of the Judenwohnbezirk of Izbica?

This is not "denying history" rather this is affirming history has a process of sifting through accounts and documents and provide reasonable source based explanations.

Here is Karski (signed with his own name) in October 1944 in Collier's magazine
The camp was about a mile and a half from the store. We started walking rapidly, taking a side lane to avoid meeting people. It took about twenty minutes to get to the camp, but we became aware of its presence in less than half that time. About a mile away from the camp we began to hear shouts, shots, and screams.
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 bayonets ready for use. Around the outside of the fence, militiamen 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 moetion. Through them, forcing paths if necessary with their rifle butts, walked the German police and the militiamen. They walked in silence, their faces bored and indifferent. They looked like shepherds bringing in a flock to the market. They had the tired, vaguely disgusted appearance of men doing a routine, tedious job.

Into the fence a few passages had been cut, and gates made of poles tied together with barbed wire swung back to make an entrance. Each gate was guarded by two men who slouched about carelessly. We stopped for a moment to collect ourselves. I noticed off to my left 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.
Again, how does this relate to the ghetto town of Izbica? It doesn't. If we take this seriously we say Karski got off at Izbica train station, walked into an Aryanised town (not a description of Izbica), walked a mile and a half to a large barbed wire enclosure (not the fire station at Izbica) which had another train station attached to it (not Izbica train station). I can't tell you what Karski did or didn't do, I can say had Karski visited Izbica, from everything we can reconstruct of Izbica, he would not have written what he did.

That is not "denial" that is correctly reading texts and cross-referencing with known facts.

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

#36

Post by little grey rabbit » 14 Mar 2011, 08:00

Just as an aside, David Engel, the historian who claims that there is no report on the situation of the Jews extant in the archives, quotes from his November 1942 report. From "Facing The Holocaust", page 37-38
A report from the underground carried to London by Jan Karski in November 1942 indicated that although German bestiality toward the Jews had aroused "sympathy [for the victims] and condemnation of the Hitlerite methods' among the Poles and had caused "antisemitic attitudes to become less pronounced," the deman for "rapid regulation of the Jewish question following the war along the lines of voluntary or forced emigration of the Jewish masses" remained "widespread." Similarily, in his own evaluation of attitudes among the Polish population Karski noted that the underground press of the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodow) continued to call for an "uncompromising struggle with Jewry", while extreme right-wing underground publications ahd adopted "a hostile attitude" toward the Jews, an attitude "not expressing any feeling at all with regard to the German terror against the Jewish population." These latter publications, he observed further, also tended to charge the government with "being dependent upon the Jews." On the other hand, he gave no indication that the underground press of any of the center or left-wing parties were especially concerend with the Jewish situation one way or another.
All of these comments spoke directly to concerns that had been felt in government circles virtually since the exile regime had been created. From the first year of the war the government had been receiving periodic warnings from sources in the Polish underground not to appear overly solicitous of Jewish concerns, lest it lose credibility with the masses of Poles, who, the reports suggested, tended to view Jewish interests as, for the most part, inconsistent with their own. Specificially, underground reports had consistently advised that in the liberated Poland of the future, "the Jewish problem can be solved only through a massive ....emigration of Jews" leading to the removal of "Jewish supremacy in economic life" and had indicated that "without....a minimal program" to accomplish this goal, "no government will be able to rule in Poland peacefully and for a long time." Moreover, by the time the Jewish demands had been placed on the government's agenda, some of the regime's opponents in exile appear to have been attempting to advance their cause through alleagtions of undue Jewish influence in Polish policymaking circles.
It does not prove Karski did not visit either Izbica or Karski that he did not mention it in his written reports to the Government in Exile, but it is surely surprsing when he clearly treats the Jewish question.

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

#37

Post by wm » 15 Mar 2011, 20:05

little grey rabbit wrote: I certainly appreciate the pictures because I am sure that Karski would have realised in was in a ghetto town had he gone to Izbica.
Izbica was no that different from other towns and villages in that region.
little grey rabbit wrote: 1. Is Karski supposed to have seen the firestation surrounded by barbed wire and is that fire station situated 30 minutes from the Izbica center?
Probably. Grzegorz Pawłowski, a holocaust survivor, says the place had capacity for at least a thousand people:
After the war, I found out that all the Jews who stayed in Izbica (and there could be about one thousand of them) were forced to go to the fire brigade station, which was also used as a cinema. They were held there for about ten days, then they were taken to a Jewish cemetery. Two ditches were dug. Germans used to shoot few Jews at once, their faces towards tombs. They would fall into that ditch dead. The ditches were so full of corpses, that Shulz, who was a mayor of the city, was forced to dig a third one. Some of the bodies, which couldn't be covered with ground, were thrown into the third ditch.
http://sprawiedliwi.tnn.pl/person_det.p ... &locale=en

But it is doubtful that a stranger could recognize the house as a fire station. It was a very poor town, according to Thomas Blatt the voluntary fire brigade had only a hand pump, so small that during a fire it looked as if they were pissing. I think it was a fire station in name only.
little grey rabbit wrote: 2. Was there another barbed wire enclosure 30 minutes walk from Izbica center that also had a train station attached?
Where the train station comes from? My sources say it there was a wooden ramp and nothing more.
little grey rabbit wrote: The first question that arises is why would Karski, who was very firm on the fact that Poles were not collaborating with Germans, say he wore the uniform of a Polish policeman.
No, he wasn't, just search "Secret State" for "traitor". You really botched that one, how he could deny existence of Polish Police of the General Government (Blue Police), Karski's own brother was a commander of Warsaw Blue Police!
little grey rabbit wrote: Here is Karski (signed with his own name) in October 1944 in Collier's magazine
The details are unimportant and usually wrong. He intentionally mangled and obscured anything what could be used to implicate anyone in Poland. He could not afford any risk. When he was arrested by the Gestapo and letter rescued 32 people were executed in reprisals and 7 tortured to death. He knew what would happen if he made a mistake.
And His memory wasn't that good although he thought otherwise. He suffer severe nervous breakdown after Izbica camp visit. Mistakes and inconsistences are something to be expected not grounds for witch hunt.

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

#38

Post by wm » 15 Mar 2011, 21:11

michael mills wrote:[
However, it is unlikely that he made a clandestine visit to the Warsaw Ghetto
During Karski's first visit to the Warsaw Ghetto, one of his guides was Dudek Landau:
Karski and his guide, Jewish resistance leader Leon Feiner, entered an apartment building at number 6 Muranowska Street, on the "Aryan side" of the ghetto wall. Awaiting them in the cellar was a 22-year-old member of the Jewish Military Union, Dudek Landau. He knew little about this Pole's mission to the Ghetto; his commander had told him only that a very important man was coming to visit and that it would be his responsibility to guard the secret tunnel by which the guest would enter.
A squad of Jewish children had excavated the tunnel, digging from the cellar of a building on one side of Muranowska (which was divided lengthwise by the wall) to the basement on the other side of the street. Landau led Karski and Feiner through the earthen passageway, which extended nearly forty yards at a height of no more than four feet.
http://remember.org/karski/kexcrpt2.html
on the picture below Karski and Landau in Melbourne, November 1993
Image

During Karski's second visit to the Warsaw Ghetto, one of his guides was Irena Sendler:
When as a young girl during the war I acted as a live road sign for Jan Karski during his perilous journey into the Warsaw Ghetto http://www.dzieciholocaustu.org.pl/szab ... 001_02.php
Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker who served in the Polish Underground and the Żegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II. Assisted by some two dozen other Żegota members, Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false documents, and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the Ghetto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler

Leon Feiner ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Feiner ) told me that he guided "Witold" (Jan Karski) to the Warsaw Ghetto in summer 1942 (...) and arranged his trip to one of the so called distribution camps.
from Władysław Bartoszewski, "Środowisko naturalne. Korzenie", page 195 http://lccn.loc.gov/2010415592
Władysław Bartoszewski is a Polish politician, social activist, journalist, writer, historian, former Auschwitz concentration camp inmate, soldier of Armia Krajowa, Polish underground activist, participant of the Warsaw Uprising, twice the Minister of Foreign Affairs, chevalier of the Order of the White Eagle, and an honorary citizen of Israel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartoszewski

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

#39

Post by michael mills » 16 Mar 2011, 01:36

On 26 February, Little Grey Rabbit asked:
So was there a period when catholic Polish leadership was privately saying: "Oh great, the Germans are deporting the Jews for us"?
There is some relevant information bearing on that question in the book by Alexander Prusin, "The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992" (Oxford University Press, 2010).

On page 173, Prusin writes:
The culture of religious and political anti-Semitism was also deeply rooted and affected personal attitudes. In summer 1941 as the first wave of the Holocaust was reaching its peak, in tune with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Polish clergyman wrote a letter to the London government-in-exile blaming the Jews for moral corruption and demoralization of Polish society. He praised the genocide as 'a special act of the Almighty because the Polish people, meek and unsystematic, would never have decided to undertake decisive steps necessary in this case'.

the Germans, outside of many ills they inflicted upon our country, in this singular venue have shown us a good beginning for how to liberate [Polish] society from the Jewish plague, the road upon which we - although naturally in a less brutal way - must consequently proceed.

That such views were not necessarily the ravings of a religious fanatic was attested to by a report sent to London in September 1941 by the AK commander Stefan Rowecki, who explicitly stated that any positive efforts of the Polish government in regard to the Jewish question 'cause the worst impressions, [for] the country is overwhelmingly anti-Semitic...........the differences are only in the methods; there are only a few who advocate emulating the Germans.
Prusin goes on to say that there were groups and individuals in Poland who risked their lives to save Jews, but concludes:
However, these instances were few and far between, and in general the Jewish escapees from the ghettos and camps found themselves in a deadly trap between the Germans and largely hostile or indifferent native residents.
The information from Prusin supports the supposition that there were many Poles, perhaps also in the leadership, and certainly in religious circles, who thought that "it is a good thing that the germans are getting ride of the Jews for us", even if they may have disliked the brutal methods being used by the German occupiers.

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

#40

Post by David Thompson » 16 Mar 2011, 05:03

Michael -- The topic is the reliability of the reports attributed to Jan Karski. Please stay on it. Don't get distracted and start roaming into the underbrush, and don't try to drag our readers there either.

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

#41

Post by michael mills » 17 Mar 2011, 06:07

Here are excerpts from the material published in 1943 in New York in the book "Black Book of Polish Jewry", which is apparently the source of the descriptions given by Karski in his book "Story of a Secret State", published the following year, of his alleged visits to the Warsaw Ghetto and to the extermination camp at Belzec.

Page 119:
Living conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto on the eve of the mass-extermination, which started in July 1942, were dramatically described by an eye-witness, a secret courier of the Polish Underground organization, who reached London at the beginning of December 1942 after succeeding in getting out of Poland. His report was published in Voice of the Underground, a monthly newsletter of the Jewish Labor Committee, New York, in March 1943. Immediately upon arrival of the courier in London, the Polish Government summoned the two Jewish members of the Polish National Council, the late Szmul Zygielbojm and Dr I Szwarcbart, and turned over to them the documents which the courier had brought.
The description of the "secret courier" as having reached London at the beginning of December 1942 is certainly consistent with the documentary record of Karski's activities at that time. Accordingly, it is entirely possible that Karski brought with him a report on conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, a report that had been given to him by the two Jewish leaders he met in Warsaw in August 1942, before he left on his journey to London.

As the historian David Engel has demonstrated conclusively, whatever report Karski did bring with him on Jewish matters had only a very low priority, and he did not actually meet Szwarcbart until several months after his arrival in London. Hence the claim that the Polish Government-in-Exile in London handed the report over immediately to Szwarcbart and Zygielbojm is possibly an exaggeration, since the material in it was not regarded as having a high priority.

It is also most likely that whatever report Karski did bring with him, it was not written by him or based on his personal experiences. Note that in the above excerpt, the report is stated as describing living conditons in the Warsaw Ghetto "on the eve of the mass extermination", ie before 22 July, when the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began. Indeed, the material in the report does apply to the period before the deportations, when hunger was wide-spread and germans could visit the ghetto freely.

However, Karski claimed in "Secret State" to have personally visited the Warsaw Ghetto after his meeting with the two Jewish leaders, ie in August, after the beginning of the deportations, when conditions in the ghetto had changed substantially. Accordingly, he could not have written the report himself, since he had not visited the ghetto before the start of the deportations, and could not have personally witnessed the conditions applicable at that time. Karski must simply have been given a report that had already been prepared by Jewish sources; his claim to have visited the ghetto himself is most likely fictional.

The passage in "Black Book of Polish Jewry" continues:
The courier stated that long before the orgy of mass-murder which commenced at the end of July 1942, conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were desperate. We read in his report: "The hunger was so great that the people became crazed. The aged and children by the hundreds would drop dead in the streets. Dead corpses lying about in the streets no longer made any impression upon the inhabitants of the Ghetto. Every morning in front of practically every gate there would lie naked corpses. They were stripped of their clothes and cast into the street to avoid funeral expenses. All the dead gathered during the day would be buried in common graves".
This confirms that the report carried by the unnamed courier described conditions before the start of the deportations in late July, and hence could be based on a visit to the ghetto in August, after the start of the deportations, as claimed by Karski in "Secret State".

Note also that "Black Book" does not explicitly claim that the courier who brought the report to London actually visited the ghetto and personally witnessed the conditions described in it.

"Black Book" returns to the "previously mentioned secret courier of the Polish underground organizations", on page 123, where it begins a long and highly detailed excerpt from the report of that courier on the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto, an excerpt that extends from page 123 to page 131.

The excerpt is interesting in that it constantly refers to Treblinka as the place to which the Jews deported from Warsaw were taken and killed. For example, page 123:
....the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto meant only a terrible death in Treblinka.
Page 128:
The direction of the transport was invariably the same - the slaughter house of Treblinka.
Page 129:
Gradually, the remaining Jews began to realize that the Germans sent all the 'deportees' to Treblinka where they died under atrocious conditions, especially since news from Treblinka began to come in, whispered secretly at first, and more openly later.
Page 130:
In addition to this, houses were blockaded and their inhabitants sent to Treblinka.
Page 131:
As a rule, the workers went directly to the trains leading to death in Treblinka.
It is obvious that whoever wrote the report published in "Black Book of Polish Jewry", a report that according to that book was brought to London by a Polish courier who arrieved there early in December 1942, knew very well that the Jews deported from Warsaw were being taken to Treblinka. It is therefore out of the question that the person who wrote the report could have believed that those Jews were being taken to Belzec.

The logical conclusion is that whoever wrote the report on the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto published on pages 123-131 of "Black Book" cannot have been the same person who wrote a report claiming that the Jews deported from Warsaw were being taken to Belzec via a sorting camp, and claiming that he personally visited that camp.

Could the long report on the deportation of the Warsaw Jews have been brought to London by Karski?

That report itself contains a clue as to the date of its composition. On page 130 of "Black Book" we read:
A special institution, the SS Wertefassung (Board of Property Seizure), which has been working without interruption until this very day (middle of November 1942) took over the abandoned Jewish property.
The report was therefore written and despatched to London after the middle of November. Accordingly it is highly unikely that it was Karski who brought it to London.

More to follow.

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

#42

Post by wm » 19 Mar 2011, 09:04

michael mills wrote: The description of the "secret courier" as having reached London at the beginning of December 1942 is certainly consistent with the documentary record of Karski's activities at that time. Accordingly, it is entirely possible that Karski brought with him a report on conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, a report that had been given to him by the two Jewish leaders he met in Warsaw in August 1942, before he left on his journey to London.
It was not a report, it was a letter from Leon Berezowski Feiner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Feiner to Szmul Zygielbojm dated on August, 27 1942.
michael mills wrote: As the historian David Engel has demonstrated conclusively, whatever report Karski did bring with him on Jewish matters had only a very low priority, and he did not actually meet Szwarcbart until several months after his arrival in London.
Karski didn't bring with him any documents. Every bit of information was on microfilms placed into a hollowed key. In Paris he gave the key to Aleksander Kawałkowski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksander_Kawalkowski) , a member of Polish underground in France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_und ... _in_France). The key was immediately sent to London and Karski had to take a tortuous route through the Pyrenees.

In short:
November 10 - the key arrives in London
mid-November - Szmul Zygielbojm receives his letter and brings it forward during a session of the Polish National Council a few days latter. ( according to Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki Kto ratuje jedno życie. Polacy i Żydzi 1939-1945, London 1968, page 195 )
November 24 - a press release is issued by the Polish Government, the informations from the microfilms form its basis
November 25 - The New York Times reports the press release:
Old persons, children, infants and cripples among the Jewish population of Poland are being shot, killed by various other methods or forced to undergo hardships that inevitably cause death as a means of carrying out an order by Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Gestapo chief, that half the remaining Polish Jews must be exterminated by the end of this year, according to a report issued today by the Polish Government in London. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract. ... +1942&st=p
November 25 - Karski arrives
December 2 - Karski meets Ignacy Schwarzbart
December 4 - Szwarcbart sends confirmation of Karski's testimony to the Jewish World Congress in New York (a copy of the telegram has survived in the British Public Records Office)
December 10 - A note entitled The mass extermination of Jews in German occupied Poland is issued, addressed to the Governments of the United Nations (http://www.projectinposterum.org/images ... termin.gif)
The Polish Government consider it their duty to bring to the knowledge of the Governments of all civilized countries the following fully authenticated information received from Poland during recent weeks, which indicates all too plainly the new methods of extermination adopted by the German authorities. http://www.projectinposterum.org/docs/m ... ation2.htm
17 December - Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Edward Raczyński strongly condemns the holocaust on the BBC: the German Nation cowardly accepts a total destruction of entire race.

So it was not a "very low priority" and not "several months".
michael mills wrote: Hence the claim that the Polish Government-in-Exile in London handed the report over immediately to Szwarcbart and Zygielbojm is possibly an exaggeration, since the material in it was not regarded as having a high priority.
Szmul Zygielbojm and Ignacy Schwarzbart were members of Polish Government on Exile. I think it would be hard for the Polish Government to hand a report over to itself.
michael mills wrote: It is also most likely that whatever report Karski did bring with him, it was not written by him or based on his personal experiences. Note that in the above excerpt, the report is stated as describing living conditons in the Warsaw Ghetto "on the eve of the mass extermination", ie before 22 July, when the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began. Indeed, the material in the report does apply to the period before the deportations, when hunger was wide-spread and germans could visit the ghetto freely.
Of course it was not written by him. Karski was just a currier and nothing more. It was written by Henryk Woliński (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Wolinski), Ludwik Widerszal (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwik_Widerszal), Stanisław Herbst ( http://www.naukowy.pl/encyklopedia/Stanislaw_Herbst ) from the Jewish Department in AK's Bureau of Information and Propaganda.
Wolinski was the co-author of the report of the underground authorities to the Polish government-in-exile in London. He provided information about the mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka that lasted from July 21 till mid September 1942, when over 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were transported under the guise of "resettlement for work in the East". He received daily reports from railway men about the number of trains and of people in them, and he likely received the reports from Witold Pilecki, AK operative who became the only person to volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to organize camp's resistance and provide information on the atrocities. Through Woliński's network the Polish government in London was able to inform the Allied governments and the western mass media about the enormity of German crimes in Poland and particularly against its Jewish population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Wolinski

The true "Karski's report" was written by Karski in London and ready at the beginning of 1943.

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

#43

Post by wm » 19 Mar 2011, 09:21

and this leaflet was distributed through the resistance movement in Poland at the beginning of August 1942:

In the Warsaw Ghetto, behind walls that separate it from the outside world, several hundred thousand condemned await death. There is no hope of rescue, no help is coming. (...) The same thing that is going on at the Warsaw Ghetto has been happening in a hundred other cities and towns across Poland. The total number of murdered Jews has already exceeded one million and is growing every day. They are all dying – the rich and the poor, the old, women, men, teenagers and infants. Catholics die with the name of Jesus and Mary on their lips alongside Orthodox Jews. They are all guilty of the crime of having been born into the Jewish Nation, which Hitler has condemned to death. The world is watching these atrocities – more horrible than anything else history has seen – in silence. Millions of defenseless people are being slaughtered amid an ominous and all-encompassing silence. (...) Aside from the dying Jews, there are only Pilates, who wash their hands of everything. This silence cannot be tolerated any longer. No matter what its cause, it
is despicable. One cannot allow oneself to be passive in the face of atrocity. Silence in the face of murder makes one the murderer’s accomplice. Those that do not condemn the killing are assenting to it
.


it was written b Zofia Kossak-Szczucka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zofia_Kossak-Szczucka, Karski participated in discussions that take place prior to the publication.

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

#44

Post by wm » 19 Mar 2011, 10:11

Well, maybe we should see ourself how good at lying Karski is.
This is Karski's first public appearance after the war. Even in private he rarely mentioned the war. His wife, her entire family of seventy four murdered during holocaust, requested he never speak about it at home.
He had a high level of empathy. Emotional reactions like these at 0:25 and 10:15 happen quite often to him when he spoke about holocaust. After the first day of filming he suffered a complete mental breakdown similar to that after Izbica camp visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpg-wFJFxRQ
Karski, 17 years later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iTbL2idhQ
highlights:
0:30:00 the Warsaw ghetto
0:34:00 David Landau
0:36:15 Leon Feiner (the Bund leader)
0:42:30 Jews had no chance
0:44:00 they didn't believe me
0:48:30 Karski's Roosevelt impersonation, a must-see
1:00:50 you are an old man, you are going to die soon
1:05:30 a message for humanity

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

#45

Post by little grey rabbit » 19 Mar 2011, 12:28

The first clip is from Lanzman's Shoah and he doesn't mention his trip to either Izbica or Belzec - or at least not in that 11 minute clip. So if anything it casts even more of a cloud over his testimony.

The 2nd clip is an hour long - can you give a time point if he mentions a Belzec or Izbica trip anywhere? The part of saw just leaps straight from the visit to the Warsaw ghetto to leaving for London - so it doesn't help his Belzec/Izbica claims. The useful bit I gleaned was his brother was head of security for Warsaw before the war.

Have you read David Engel's article on Karski? He seems a very careful historian and we should take his conclusions that Jewish concerns did not play almost any role at all in Karski's reports should be taken seriously.

Or there is another explanation. I believe all the Government in Exile papers were archived with the Hoover library (IIRC), but where-ever it was archived I am sure the first compiler/archivist was none other than Jan Karski.

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