Earliest eyewitness account of the Holocaust finally to be published in UK

Nazi troops arresting Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, 1943.
Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Story of Catholic who infiltrated Nazi death camp and brought report to Allies could become new film

The extraordinary memoir of a Polish resistance fighter who gave the first eyewitness report on the Holocaust to the Allies is to be published for the first time in Britain, and is to be made into a film by the producer of The King's Speech.

The Story of a Secret State, by Jan Karski, was published in 1944 in America. Karski, a devout Catholic, risked his life with the Polish underground and was involved in high-level secret missions to the Polish government-in-exile in London. A prisoner of the Russians and Nazis, and brutally tortured by the SS, he escaped from Poland and in 1943 was sent to London with a hidden microfilm revealing conditions under the Nazis and in particular the relentless persecution of Europe's Jews by the Third Reich.

As a member of the resistance and to learn the fate of Polish Jews, Karski was smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw ghetto and infiltrated the Belzec death camp dressed as an Estonian guard. He travelled across occupied Europe to England, and eventually to America. Karski personally reported to the Polish prime minister in London, General Sikorski, Britain's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, the US president, Franklin Roosevelt, and many other prominent figures. His description of the systematic annihilation of Jews was met with incredulity.

The drama of Karski's story has inspired the producer of The King's Speech, Iain Canning, to immortalise his role in another historic epic. Canning is believed to have just acquired the rights to the memoir from Penguin, who will publish the book next month. Film insiders said that Ralph Fiennes, who was Oscar-nominated for Schindler's List, was a likely contender for Karski.

The Story of a Secret State sold 400,000 copies in three months in the United States while the war still raged. In the postwar period, having been traumatised by memories he described as "my permanent possessions", Karski preferred silence, rather than to relive the horrors. But he revised his book before his death in 2000, expanding it with material he could not reveal during the war.

Given its historical importance, it is astonishing that the harrowing record of brutality and courage was not published in the UK. In the Warsaw ghetto, Karski said he saw "a cemetery" with living bodies. "Everywhere there was hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children." He witnessed two "rosy-cheeked" Nazi youths laughing before taking pot-shots at inmates: "The shot rang out… Then the terrible cry of a man in agony. The boy who had fired… shouted with joy." Karski, a man used to Nazi brutality against Poles, remained frozen in shock.

In Belzec, a camp east of Warsaw, he found "squalor" and a "mass of sheer death". Horror-struck, he watched a train being loaded "hermetically", filled with naked bodies "to bursting" — a "quivering cargo of flesh". The floor was covered with quicklime to burn the bodies, "the flesh eaten from their bones," death coming slowly, but taking up to four days.

Before his mission to Britain, Karski agonised over what action the Allies could and would take to stop the murders in the ghetto and camps – if they believed him. "I know that many people will not believe me, will not be able to believe me, will think I exaggerate or invent. But I saw it," he said at the time.

The Jews he spoke to – most of whom knew their fate was probably sealed – begged him to convey the desire for vengeance and "merciless" bombing and executions of Germans.

Having hoped to meet Winston Churchill, Karski had to make do with Eden, who presented a report to the war cabinet, but no direct action was taken as a result of Karski's testimony.

Commenting on whether the Allies could have done more once they knew about the death camps, the historian Andrew Roberts said that the issue was "a huge bone of contention… among historians". There were "major problems" with bombing – the risk to inmates "wouldn't look good for Allied propaganda". He also pointed out the huge distances that aircraft had to fly and their inability to pinpoint targets.

He added that Karski reported on killings, but did not know about the gas chambers.

Karski described Gestapo brutality and the "sheer pain of the first rubber truncheon" in terms we can all understand: "Something like… a dentist's drill [when it] strikes a nerve, but infinitely… spread over the entire nervous system."

Roberts added: "Karski, for all his amazing bravery shown in this wonderful book, was not able to provide… details of the gas chambers... It's heart-rending to think so little was done, but then Eden and others argued at the time that they were in fact helping the Jews by trying to defeat the Germans."

Observer

Marek Edelman, Last Leader of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Has Died

SS officers walking through the destroyed Ghetto after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Marek Edelman, the last living leader of the uprising by Jews incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, has died in Warsaw. He is thought to have been 87.

Edelman was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, an area walled off by Poland’s Nazi occupiers in 1940 to separate the city’s Jews from the rest of the population. As a member of the Bund labor organization that worked underground to spirit Jews into hiding or out of the country, he was one of the masterminds of the plan to resist the Ghetto’s liquidation.

Edelman, who had suffered from ill health for many years, died in Warsaw late yesterday. His death was confirmed by a friend, Paula Sawicka, whose family he had lived with in recent years.

“He fought for his country more than anyone else,” Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, said in an interview. “He wasn’t fighting for himself, but to show that the Jews in the ghetto weren’t passive, that they wouldn’t go like sheep to the slaughter.”

The Ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of the Jewish festival of Passover and the day Nazi commanders planned to have the remaining people in the ghetto killed. With few weapons, Edelman and his colleagues forced the Germans to retreat. When the operation’s leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, died during the uprising, Edelman took his place. The fighters kept the occupiers at bay for almost a month in total.

By the end of the uprising on May 16, almost all of the Ghetto’s 50,000 to 60,000 remaining inhabitants had been killed or deported, mainly to the Treblinka extermination camp. About 350,000 people were locked into the Ghetto when it was built; only a few thousand survived its liquidation. Edelman was one of the few fighters who escaped, through underground sewers.

In contrast with many Jewish Poles who survived the war, Edelman decided to stay and settled in the central Polish city of Lodz, where he became a cardiologist. In an interview, he said his work as a doctor enabled him to save lives, which he was unable to do in the ghetto.

“The Lord already wants to blow out the candle, and I have to hide the flame quickly when his attention is distracted for a little while,” he said.

Edelman was probably born on Jan. 1, 1922, in Homel, a city located in present-day Belarus. His birth date and place of birth are disputed, and Edelman refused to confirm his age in interviews.

The family soon moved to Warsaw, where his father died when Edelman was young. He was left an orphan at about the age of 13.

In 1946, a year after the end of the war, Edelman moved to Lodz, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he married Alina Margolis, also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. He finished his medical studies there and became a cardiologist, working until an anti-Jewish campaign in 1968 instigated by the communist authorities led to his dismissal.

While his wife emigrated that year to France, taking the couple’s two children with her, Edelman refused to leave Poland. He later explained his decision by saying “someone had to stay here with all those who died.”

In the 1970s, Edelman became involved in the anti-communist Solidarity movement and was interned after the imposition of martial law in 1981. He was released after a few days thanks to protests by Western intellectuals, and continued his resistance until the fall of communism in 1989.

Edelman was a leading member of the Freedom Union, the party of Poland’s first post-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He reflected on his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto in a book-length interview by the Polish journalist Hanna Krall in the 1970s that has been translated into several languages. In 1998, Edelman was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration.

Praise from Czech Leader

Vaclav Havel, leader of the Czech opposition movement and the first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, wrote to Edelman after a biography by Witold Beres and Krzysztof Burnetko was published in 2008.

“I deeply respect everything that you have done in your life, your uprightness, your courage,” Havel wrote. “For me, you are an example of a true Pole, the authentic personification of all that is best in Poland.”

In April 2009, Edelman joined leading Polish filmmakers and writers in a protest to the government after a former neo-Nazi took over the running of the country’s public television network.

“People who publicly support racism and anti-Semitism shouldn’t be allowed to play a role in public life,” he wrote in an open letter to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. “Don’t forget that evil can grow bigger.”

Edelman is survived by two children, Aleksander and Anna. His wife died in 2008.

Bloomberg

Commemorating the Warsaw Uprising and Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust

On April 19, 1943—the day of the first night of Passover sixty five years ago—the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto launched an armed revolt. Faced with little material help from the non-Jewish populations surrounding them, as well as open opposition from Polish anti-Semites, these Jews fought with pistols, hand grenades and Molotov cocktails the heavy artillery, noxious gas, fire and air power of the German army and its minions. Despite the fact that this was the first open urban revolt against Nazi rule in Europe, the bravery of these Jewish fighters was met with less than an enthusiastic response by the Allied command. These acts of armed opposition, and others like it, should put an end forever to the myth that the Jews of Europe walked quietly and without protest to their deaths. And their story must be told and retold in every generation.

Beginning with their assumption of power in 1933, the Nazis—in an ever escalating campaign—had stripped Jews of their basic human rights, stole their property, murdered them, used them in slave labor camps, resettled them in ghettos and sent them to concentration camps. In January 1942, at a conference in Wannsee, outside Berlin, the Nazis revealed their plans for a “final solution” to the necessary German officials. And the first mass gassings began at Auschwitz the following June, according to the Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, by Louis L. Snyder. Although concentration camps existed within Germany itself, all of the “killing camps” were situated outside of Germany and in the East. And the shipment of Jews to these camps continued almost until the very end of Word War Two.

Jewish resistance in the ghettos and forests of Eastern Europe, and Poland in particular, occurred within the cross-currents of the war itself. The German army had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and twenty-seven days later Warsaw surrendered. After the British withdrew their troops from Europe at Dunkirk the following May, Hitler’s Army controlled all of Western Europe. A little more than a year later, on June 22, 1941, the German’s invaded the Soviet Union, and not until the Red Army won the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943 and started a general counter-offensive did the war begin to turn against Hitler in the East. In the West, Allied armies landed on the Italian mainland in September 1943, and after D-Day, June 6, 1944, began to fight their way into western Germany.

Both the Jewish councils established by the Nazis (the Judenrat), and the Jewish Fighters Organizations, weighed their military plans based on their expectations of Allied action. All hoped in vain that the Allies would bomb the railheads that led into the concentration camps. And in the Vilna ghetto, for example, the decision about whether or not to launch an armed revolt was pinned on the outcome of the American and British invasion of Italy. Individual acts of resistance by Jews had started even before the Nazis came to power. But only after all other avenues of survival had been closed down did organized armed resistance—and almost certain death—begin to emerge in the ghettos of Eastern Europe.

Other factors within Jewish communal life mitigated against fighting back. Lucy Davidowicz, in her trenchant book The War Against the Jews, described a tradition of passivity and non-violence among observant Jews. Fighting for a “death with honor,” on the other hand, became the cry of young more secular minded members of organizations such as Hashomer Hatzair and the Bund, socialist Zionists and non-Zionist socialists respectively. The groups of communist Jews within the ghettos favored joining partisan groups fighting in the woods, according to Davidowicz. And the alignments of the many political parties, both inside and outside the ghettos, helped shape the armed Jewish resistance.

The first ghetto fighting organization was created in Vilna during January 1942. And armed groups were soon established in seven major ghettos and forty-five smaller ones, according to the definitive Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Lacquer. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jews joined the Soviet partisans, and about eighty percent of those died. It should be noted, that the resistance movement also existed in the camps themselves. They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, by Yuri Suhl, recounts several of these stories in the most compelling fashion. This book describes, for example, a successful plot to blow up one of the four crematoria in Birkenau in 1944. Another chapter is a first-person account of a revolt in Sobibor, and the escape of inmates into the woods. The reader will learn of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jewish woman who made her way into the inner sanctums of Nazi officers, where she shot them point-blank with a pistol. Emmanuel Ringlebaum (who was murdered late in the war), considered the historian of the Warsaw ghetto, portrays with great love the person and the work of Mordechai Anielewicz, the 23-year old commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Warsaw. Also in Suhl’s book, a chapter details the military and political aspects of the revolt, drawn from author Ber Mark’s book, Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Warsaw Ghetto was a small, ever shrinking, squat of land in which the 375,000 Jews of that city were confined behind brick walls, built after the Nazi conquest of Poland. After hundreds of thousands of these Jews were shipped to the camps, the population of the ghetto declined. By the September 1942, only 60,000 souls were left. During this early period, many of the young men and women who would become fighters engaged in cultural and educational work among the ghettos residents—including those persons originally from small towns and shtetls outside Warsaw. These would be-fighters, members of several Jewish organizations, agreed upon a set of goals and created a unified political leadership that jockeyed for position with the Nazi-instituted Judenrat. They also opened communication and smuggling lines with Polish groups on the “Aryan” side of the wall. After the collapse of the Judenrat, the Jewish Fighters Organization became the de-facto political leadership inside the ghetto.

By January 1943, the Jewish Fighters Organization (JFO) had about 600 fighters. For months they had been building bunkers for those Jews remaining in the ghetto. They established organized units and military commands, created a bomb factory and concentrated their forces in three zones within the ghetto in expectation of fighting back. The Jewish Military Association, a second military command run by so-called Revisionist Zionists, was more heavily armed but had only 400 members. And they concentrated their forces in a separate section of the ghetto.

The JFO began by attacking active collaborators, and one of their first acts was the assassination of the chief of the Nazi-controlled Jewish police force. On January 18, 1943, German armed forces surrounded the Ghetto and began an attempt to round up the remaining Jews. In spontaneous reaction, four units of the JFO fought back. While sustaining heavy losses themselves, the JFO killed about 50 German soldiers and stole their weapons; and after three days of fighting, the Germans suspended their sweep of the ghetto. After that action, the JFO received a small influx of weapons from Polish armed groups operating on the “Aryan” side of the ghetto.

The major action on April 19 was better planned. The JFO knew in advance of the Nazi plans to march thousands of soldiers and police into the ghetto and re-start the deportations. When the fighting began the JFO seized the military initiative and drove the Germans and the Ukrainian and Latvian units that accompanied them. Overtime, however, the Germans began a campaign of heavy artillery and firebombing aimed at driving the Jews out of their hiding places. At the end of April, the JFO decided to smuggle as many fighters as possible through the sewers and canals under the city and into the forests, where they could join the partisans. On May 8, the German forces discovered the JFO headquarters on Mila 18. The German piped gas into the bunker, and the JFO’s commander, Mordechai Anielewich, and eighty fighters and 300 Jewish non-combatants died. On May 16, twenty eight days after the fighting began, the German command declared victory.

In the end, however, it is the Jewish fighters who will be remembered as men and women of honor. Just last week, on Saturday April 19, 2008, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw revolt, Marek Edelman, stood at the “Heroes of the Ghetto” monument in Warsaw. As described by the New York Times, he handed his grandchildren tulips and daffodils and watched as they placed them at the foot of this memorial to the ages.

Leonard Zeskind