Black Earth(113)

Most of the Jews of Warsaw were deported to the death facility of Treblinka and murdered in the Grosse Aktion of July–September 1942. In October, Karski entered the Warsaw ghetto, led by a Bundist through a tunnel dug by Revisionist Zionists, the group that had been the clients of Karski’s superiors in the foreign ministry. Some of the people he met on the other side, members of Betar, had been part of Karski’s brief three years before, when he had been Drymmer’s secretary and presumably handling the paperwork on the planned emigration of Jews from Poland. Now the men of Betar were planning to fight the Germans (although some of them were still serving, in Warsaw as around the country, in the Jewish police that had just completed the deportations). Leaving the tunnel, Karski entered the building where, a few months later, the Revisionists would raise, following their own tradition, both the Zionist and the Polish flags as they rose against the Germans in the ghetto. Karski was told exactly what had happened to Warsaw Jews. His contacts asked him to help by pleading with the western Allies for action and revenge.

In October 1942, Karski reached London—no simple undertaking for a Polish courier in occupied Europe in the middle of the war. He brought with him his own observations and experiences as well as three written reports on the murder of Jews in Poland. In London, he spoke to Polish authorities and to British intellectuals and public figures: Gerald Berry, Victor Gollancz, Ronald Hyde, Allen Lane, Kingsley Martin. One aspect of his message was a simple repetition of prewar Polish foreign policy: that Polish Jews should be allowed to go to Palestine. In strong contrast to the interwar years, this plea expressed the desperate hope of the Jews themselves, who were facing a German policy of total murder. But London was far from the Warsaw ghetto, a different world. Karski was told in no uncertain terms that Jewish immigration to Palestine would not be allowed. Thus British policy, like Polish policy, remained in a sense unchanged from 1939. Karski also spoke to the American ambassador, who told him that quotas allowing Jewish immigration to the United States were unlikely to be increased. In fact, the number of Jews admitted would actually decrease. Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States—fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942.

In all of his discussions, as in his memoir of 1944, Karski was unusual in drawing a clear line between the German policy of social decapitation and mass terror towards Poles, and the German policy of the total extermination of Jews. His efforts contributed to the Polish information campaign that preceded the Allied warning of December 1942. Karski himself believed that he had failed, but the observations he made and the risks he took contributed to actions that had the effect of allowing Jews to live.

Rescue was usually grey.

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By the time of the warning of December 1942, most Baltic, Soviet, and Polish Jews under German occupation had already been murdered. The shooting of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union that began the previous year had continued throughout the spring and summer of 1942; Operation Reinhard, the gassing of the Jews of the General Government at Be??ec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, was complete that fall. As the Red Army pressed forward after its victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, it was overrunning the death pits (and in some cases finding them). Before long, Soviet soldiers would reach the killing facilities in the east of occupied Poland. Under this pressure, the center of Germany’s murderous campaign would shift west to Auschwitz.

The concentration camp Auschwitz was established in 1940 on the site of the Polish military base at O?wi?cim, the very place where Karski had reported for duty as a Polish officer in September 1939. In summer 1940, Polish males, often politically active, began disappearing from the streets of Warsaw, dispatched to Auschwitz. Another member of the Polish underground volunteered to learn the truth about this mysterious place. As the Germans were raiding Warsaw neighborhoods regarded as elite and intellectual, Witold Pilecki walked into a roundup. Pilecki was a farmer, local activist, and reserve officer with combat experience in the Polish-Bolshevik War. He had been a member of the Polish Military Organization. Though now a married man with children, he volunteered for Auschwitz. He was dispatched on the second Warsaw transport of 1,705 men, among people who would be registered at the camp under the numbers 3821-4959 and 4961-5526. He described his own entry into the camp as the moment when he “finished with everything that had been on earth and began something that was beyond it.” Pilecki remained in Auschwitz for almost three years, seeking to organize an underground within the camp and smuggling out notes. He escaped in 1943, and two years later wrote a long, detailed report of life at Auschwitz. He described the punishment and murder of Poles in 1940 and 1941, the imprisonment and gassing of Soviet prisoners of war in 1941 and 1942, and finally the transformation of the camp into a major killing facility for Jews.