July 6th, 2011
On December of 1942, Ignacy Schwarzbart sent a telegram to the World Jewish Congress in New York. The following are excerpts from the telegram:
“Have read today all reports from Poland…. They exceed by horror sufferings of our nation everything fantasy can picture. Jews in Poland almost completely annihilated…. Believe the unbelievable….”
Schwarzbart and Szmul Zygielbojm were two Jewish representatives of the Polish National Council of the Government of the Republic of Poland in Exile. Since the fall of France, the exiled government had made London their base, and it was there they received the report that prompted Schwarzbart’s telegram. The two had been hearing reports about atrocities – some from concentration camp survivors – for some time. Zygielbojm had long believed the worst. Schwarzbart had been more skeptical.
The report that convinced Schwarzbart came from one Jan Karski. A member of the Polish underground resistance movement, Karski, a Roman Catholic, had sought to ascertain the truth of the state of Jewish persecution in occupied Poland. After touring the Warsaw ghetto, he disguised himself as a prisoner in order to enter a Nazi concentration camp, an act which nearly cost him his life.
After a harrowing escape from the camp, Karski traveled to London and met with Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm. On July 28, 1943, Karski reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt his findings. The same year, in protest over the Allied governments’ continued inaction to acknowledge the atrocities, Zygielbojm took his own life.
Karski had infiltrated the Bełżec death camp. Reports from Auschwitz soon followed. On April 7th, 1944, two Slovakians named Fred Wetzler and Rudolph Vrba began an escape from the concentration camp. Knowing from other escape attempts that the guards would hunt for them for three days, their brazen plan was to hide in a wood pile just outside the perimeter of the camp until the search was over.
The bold plan worked. Fifteen days and more than 85 miles later, Vrba and Wetzler testified before the Jewish Council in Zilina, Slovakia. In June, their testimony was validated by Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rozin, two Jews who had escaped Auschwitz in May. The Council compiled an extensive report of the Auschwitz atrocities.
On June 15, 1944, the BBC broadcast details of the Auschwitz report. Days later, the New York Times published extracts of the report. The truth was out. The world finally learned of the horrors of Auschwitz.