Believing the First Reports of Mass Killings in the East?
sits in London as one of the two Jewish representatives on the , the advisory assembly surrounding the . Since the autumn of 1941, messages have been arriving through the couriers of the home resistance: shootings of tens of thousands of Jews in the forests of the East, as at near Riga in December 1941, and the first killings by gas van at , in occupied Poland, from that same winter. The reported figures exceed anything previously imagined.
The information is fragmentary, passed from mouth to mouth, from hideout to hideout, sometimes impossible to verify in detail. Schwarzbart knows that releasing it without formal proof invites the charge of exaggeration, even of propaganda: part of the press and the Allied chancelleries already treat such accounts as wartime rumours. Within the Council itself, some Polish officials fear that Jewish suffering might overshadow that of the whole nation. Yet waiting for corroboration means letting weeks pass during which the killings continue.
Schwarzbart must decide the fate of these reports: make the information public immediately, at the risk of being disbelieved and branded an alarmist; first seek to corroborate the testimonies through other sources before any release; or pass the evidence along the discreet diplomatic channel of the government-in-exile, hoping for Allied action without confronting public disbelief head-on.
London, February 1942, Jewish representative on the Polish National Council: what should be done with the first credible reports of mass killings carried out in the East?
was among the first Jewish leaders in London to grasp the scale of the killings; he raised the alarm tirelessly, held press conferences and, as early as 1942, spoke of a million dead. In the West the information was long minimised and met with disbelief, by the Allied chancelleries and by some members of the alike. Yet the systematic destruction went on: and the shootings in the East were only the prelude to the murder of close to 6 million of Europe's Jews. , the other Jewish representative who came to sit on the Council, would take his own life in London in May 1943, in protest at Allied indifference and the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
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