Many of you will die, but at least your nation goes on living. After the war Poland will be resurrected. Your cities will be rebuilt and your wounds will slowly heal. From this ocean of tears, pain, rage and humiliation your country will emerge again – but the Polish Jews will no longer exist … Hitler will lose his war against the human, the just and the good, but he will win his war against the Polish Jews.
He breaks down at this point, Feiner tries to calm him. Karski then talks about his mission to London and his hopes of meeting Allied leaders, possibly even Churchill and Roosevelt themselves, explaining: ‘you must give me your official message to the outside world. You are the leaders of the Jewish underground. What do you want me to say?’ Feiner then states that neither the Polish underground nor the Jewish resistance are able to stop the extermination of the Jews, so the main responsibility now rests with the Allied powers – ‘only from outside the country can effective help for the Jews be brought’. And he added, ‘Let not a single leader of the United Nations be able to say that they did not know that we were being murdered in Poland.’ History will hold them responsible if they fail to act.’ They inform Karski that already almost 2 million Jews in Poland have been killed. They give him extremely precise details of the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto – how these had begun in July with 5,000 people a day being transported in sealed trains to extermination camps, but soon this figure had risen to 6,000, 7,000, and then 10,000 per day. The chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, had already committed suicide, knowing there was nothing more he or anybody could do. Three hundred thousand had now been deported, and just over 100,000 were left in the ghetto. Although these figures are impossible to comprehend, Karski has a strong feeling these men are not exaggerating.
In the flickering, half-lit room the three men then urgently discuss what can be demanded from the Allies and the Jewish organisations in the West. Feiner and Kirschenbaum urge several actions: that the Allies should now include the prevention of the physical extermination of the Jews as one of their official war aims; that the German civilian population should be informed (through air drops of leaflets, radio and other means) of Hitler’s genocide, so that they could not later claim ignorance of what was being done; that the Allies should make a public appeal to the German people to pressurise the Nazi regime to stop the exterminations. They should declare that, if the genocide continues, the German people will be held collectively responsible for it; that, if none of the above manages to halt the extermination programme, then the Allies should carry out reprisals – through the bombing of sites of cultural importance in Germany, and through the execution of German POWs in Allied captivity, who still profess loyalty to Hitler after hearing of his genocidal crimes.
Karski listens intently, but at this last point tells them it’s impossible, he knows the British, they wouldn’t consider killing prisoners because it would be against international law, and making such a demand would only weaken the Jewish case. But Kirschenbaum hisses back: ‘Of course, do you think we don’t know it?! … We do not dream of it being fulfilled, but nevertheless we demand it. We demand it so that people will know how we feel about what is being done to us, how helpless we are, how desperate our plight is.’ ‘We are dying here! Say it!’ the Zionist leader then adds. Karski nods, and agrees to carry these messages verbatim. He later recalls the despair of the two men at this point:
They paused for a moment as if to let the knowledge of their true condition sink into me. I felt tired and feverish. More and more these two frantic figures pacing the floor in the shadowy room, their steps echoing in the hollow silence, seemed like apparitions, their glances filled with a burden of despair, pain and hopelessness they could never completely express.
Their voices were pitched very low, they hissed, they whispered, and yet I continually had the illusion that they were roaring. It seemed to me that I was listening to an earthquake, that I was hearing cracking, tearing sounds of the earth opening to swallow a portion of humanity … I kept quiet for fear of saying something that might be considered inappropriate, given the enormity of the problem they were sharing with me.
They also urge Karski to ask President Raczkiewicz to intercede with Pope Pius XII – to persuade him to use all powers of the Catholic Church to try to stop the exterminations. And Polish Prime Minister Sikorski should also order Poles to give all assistance possible to Jews, and make clear that any blackmailers of Jews will be executed by the Polish underground. Material assistance is also discussed – provision of money and arms to the Jewish underground, and currency and passports for escaping Jews, and the right of asylum for the small minority of those who may get to Allied countries.
But they also have an uncompromising message to Jewish leaders in the West. Feiner approaches Karski, and grips his arm so hard that it hurts. Karski looks into his eyes, moved by the unbearable pain in them, and listens:
Tell the Jewish leaders that this is no case for politics or tactics. Tell them that the earth must be shaken to its foundations, the world must be aroused. Perhaps then it will wake up, understand, perceive. Tell them that they must find the strength and courage to make sacrifices no other statesmen have ever had to make … This is what they do not understand. German aims and methods are without precedent in history.
He releases Karski’s arm at this point, and then speaks slowly and with great deliberation as though each word were costing him an effort:
You ask me what plan of action I suggest to the Jewish leaders. Tell them to go to all the important English and American offices and agencies. Tell them not to leave until they have obtained guarantees that a way has been decided upon to save the Jews. Let them accept no food or drink, let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. Let them die. This may shake the conscience of the world.
Karski is reeling now, shivering, totally drained by the experience of having listened to these men for the last hours, knowing the responsibility of what he has to communicate – if he is able to get to London alive, that is. But Feiner hasn’t finished yet: ‘I know the English. When you describe to them what is happening to the Jews, they probably won’t believe you.’ After all, he himself had been sending telegrams and detailed written reports to London over the previous months, and these seemed to have achieved nothing. No, Karski needs to see for himself what is happening, so that he would not be relying on their word-of-mouth accounts. He needs to witness the extermination with his own eyes. This would mean his testimony cannot simply be dismissed. Feiner then explains that they can smuggle him into the Warsaw Ghetto, and possibly into one of the extermination camps, but he needs to understand something first – this will mean risking his life. Karski realises how dangerous this will be, yet also understands the critically important nature of this act of witnessing, and accepts without hesitation. They agree to make the arrangements as soon as possible and notify him. He leaves the ruined house that night, seeing the two men ‘standing in the nebulous, wavering light, two dejected shadows that wished me goodnight with a feeble warmth that denoted a trust in my person rather than any confidence in our enterprise’.
*
A few days later, in the last week of August 1942, during a lull in German activity within the ghetto, Feiner meets Karski again, and they enter an apartment building at Muranowska 6, a house in central Warsaw bordering the ghetto wall. Here the building’s caretaker meets them and takes them down to the cellar, where a young fighter in the Jewish Military Union, David Landau, is waiting for Feiner and the ‘very important Polish man’. Landau leads the two men down to an earth passage, only four feet high, which has been excavated under the ghetto wall, emerging forty yards later in the basement of a house within the ghetto. Once they arrive in the basement, Feiner and Karski are given ragged clothes with Stars of David on, and a different escort then takes them out of the house into the ghetto itself.