Black Earth(112)

All the same, Polish authorities did convey accurate information about the mass murder of Jews to their British and American allies and to the wider public in 1942. The Polish prime minister, W?adys?aw Sikorski, was quite unambiguous about the significance of the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto that summer: “This mass murder has no precedent in the history of the world; all known cruelty pales in comparison.” Polish information undergirded Allied press briefings and reports in the British press and on the BBC. Poles and Polish Jews alike believed that the Germans would stop murdering Jews when their actions were made known to the world; in this sense the Polish government did take the action that it believed would halt the killings. Warnings did have some effect on Germany’s allies, but not on Germany itself.

On November 27, 1942, the Polish National Committee, a kind of ersatz parliament supporting the government abroad, demanded that the Allies intervene to stop the killing of Jews. On December 4, the Times of London reported that Germany planned a “complete extermination” of Jews under its control. On December 10, the Polish foreign ministry added its own pleas to the Allies to act. In unmistakable language, the Polish government demanded immediate action to prevent the Germans from completing their project of “mass extermination.” This statement led to a firestorm in the British press and in the House of Commons, whose members stood for a moment of silence in recognition of the deliberate murder of millions of European Jews. In this way, Poles contributed to the declaration issued by the British and their American and Soviet Allies on December 17, 1942, demanding that the Germans and their partners cease killing Jews.

This warning, issued not long before the German defeat at Stalingrad, was no doubt understood by Germany’s allies as providing the way to signal that their own loyalty to Berlin was conditional. It helps to explain why Slovakia, Romania, and France all changed their policy towards Jews quite significantly in 1943, and why Sweden began to demonstrate its willingness to help Jews. In this way, even limited Polish sovereignty—the ability of Polish authorities to convey credible information to their British and other Allied counterparts—was significant to the Jews.

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The availability of plausible firsthand information about the mass murder of Polish Jews depended upon the courage of extraordinary individuals, who tended to be rather close to the state in both its prewar and wartime incarnations. One of these was Jan Kozielewski, known as Jan Karski, the only man in the history of the Holocaust with direct access to both the lowest of the horrors and the highest of the powers. Karski was twenty-five years old when the war began, but was already well informed about the Jewish question in Poland. As a talented young diplomat he worked first in the emigration section of the Polish foreign ministry, the unit charged with finding ways to reduce the number of Jews in Poland. From May through August 1939, he worked as the personal secretary for Drymmer, the man in charge of the support for Betar and Irgun, and this at the most intense time of Polish-Zionist contacts. Karski was Drymmer’s secretary when Britain publicized its policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine and Irgun began its actions against the British, and when Polish weapons were loaded onto ships bound for Palestine.

In August 1939, Karski was mobilized to the Polish military base at O?wi?cim. He fled with his unit eastward, where he was taken prisoner by the Red Army. He escaped execution as a Polish officer by pretending to be an enlisted man and then jumping from a train. He found his way back to Warsaw, where he saw his brother, the commander of the Warsaw police. His brother faced the dilemma of all police officers at a moment of foreign occupation: collaborate and risk serving the interests of a foreign power, or refuse to collaborate and risk chaos and lawlessness. In order to try to resolve this question for his brother, Karski traveled as a courier to seek the Polish government-in-exile, at the time in France.

Upon his return to Poland, Karski began to attend with pained interest to the fate of the Jews. He seems to have felt quite keenly the connection between the National Democrats’ desire for a Poland without Jews, the policy of the prewar Polish government to promote emigration, and the Nazi elimination of Jews from Polish life. Although the means the Germans used were alien to Polish politicians, the result corresponded to a vision that had been widespread in Poland after 1935: a country without 90 percent of its Jews. The imaginary social revolution of the second half of the 1930s, the fantasy of taking all of those Jewish homes and businesses, was actually fulfilled in the early 1940s. German rule broke the previous Polish social order by punishing the elites and killing the Jews, largely destroying the prewar middle and upper classes. Karski wrote to the Polish government that the transfer of property had created a “narrow bridge” between the Polish population and its German masters. The attitude of Poles to Jews he described as “generally severe, and often ruthless.”