Jan Karski's Visit to Belzec: a Reassessment by Friedrich Jansson
Claude Lanzmann: There are no survivors of Belzec.
Jan Karski: There are a lot of them!
There have been many contradictory statements made by not only Karski himself, but also some liberties with his statements in different places have been taken with certain editors trying to piece together what really happened. Did he visist Belzec? Did he visist a camp that was close to Belzec but he was mistaken? Did others claim Karski visited another camp he mistook for Belzec because this would fix problems in the emerging/developing holocaust narrative? Did Karski intentionally make some things up to hide his cover? Did he go along with fake atrocity stories about Belzec just so Poland could please the Jews and make the Jews in England and America could help Poland out since they were sandwiched between Germany and the Soviet Union, both of whom invaded Poland? Are revisionists like Mattogno and exterminationists like Hilberg not spending enough time on the Karski story - something that is not totally their fault since this man and his story has been a mystery from almost day one?
I leave a few block quotes from Friedrich Jansson to tease the reader.
2. The Izbica Thesis
As previously discussed, Karski’s statements that he had seen Belzec as a transit camp, coupled with his newfound celebrity, put traditionalist Holocaust scholars in an uncomfortable position. Accepting that Belzec actually was a transit camp was out of the question. Calling Karski a liar was politically inconvenient, and would set a dangerous precedent. Consequently, they elected not to reject Karski’s story altogether, but to change his destination. The location they seized on was Izbica, a Jewish town located between Belzec and Lublin.
The principal support for their argument was that some versions of Karski’s story from 1943 describe a visit to a camp a certain distance from Belzec, and distinct from the Belzec camp itself. As they interpreted the texts, the visit to Belzec was only a late addition to his story. As Karski’s biographers E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw Jankowski put it:The village Jan reached was not Belzec, nor did Jan think it was while he was there. When he first spoke of this mission after reaching London three months later, he described the site as a ’sorting point’ located about fifty kilometers from the city of Belzec - although in the same statement he referred to the camp’s location as "the outskirts of Belzec." (The actual Belzec death camp was in the town of Belzec, within a few hundred feet of the train station.) In an August 1943 report, Karski at first placed the camp twelve miles, then twelve kilometers outside of Belzec. By the time he began retelling his story publicly in 1944, the town he reached had become Belzec itself. [...]
Jan was in the town of Izbica Lubelska, precisely the midway point between Lublin to the northwest and Belzec to the southeast - forty miles from each locality. Izbica was indeed a "sorting point"; Karski had this fact right and the distance from Belzec nearly right in his earliest report.18
The claim that the destination of Karski’s visit was in fact Izbica is taken for granted in the more recent literature.19
However, as we have seen, Karski’s visit to Belzec – or, on the new understanding, to Izbica – can be dated to September, most likely early September. Is it possible that Karski visited Izbica at that date and saw a transport being loaded with Jews?
If this were to be true, the first requirement would clearly be that there actually was a transport departing Izbica at around this date. Consultation of standard sources readily confirms that there was not. The lists of transports in Yitzhak Arad’s standard book on the Reinhardt camps contains no transports departing Izbica between May 15 and October 22, 1942.20 A more recent list of all transports to and from Izbica contains some transports missing from Arad’s book, but confirms that no transport departed Izbica at any time even approximating the date of Karski’s visit.21 Thus, the Izbica thesis fails on simple matters of chronology. Jan Karski cannot have visited Izbica and witnessed a transport of Jews being loaded to depart, because no transports of Jews departed Izbica at the time he allegedly visited. In contrast, Belzec was at the peak of its activity at the time of Karski’s visit.
While the fact that Karski’s description of his experience does not match the reality of Izbica in time is sufficient to refute the Izbica thesis, it is worth observing that his description does not match the reality of Izbica in place either. Karski’s descriptions of the camp he visited consistently maintained that it was entirely fenced in. For example, in the 1943 pamphlet Terror in Europe, Karski’s account describes the camp as “bounded by an enclosure which runs parallel to the railway track”,22 and his 1944 book Story of a Secret State elaborates that it was “surrounded on all sides by a formidable barbed-wire fence” and well-staffed by guards.23 Izbica, however, was not a closed ghetto. It was surrounded neither by walls nor barbed-wire fences.24 Therefore Karski’s account cannot be of Izbica.
Looking at Karski’s full story makes the geographic contradiction between Karski’s story and Izbica even clearer. As Karski described his trip, he took the train to a town from which the Jews had been removed. There he met his contact, a Belzec guard, with whom he walked to the camp. The geography of Karski’s story, therefore, consists of an Aryan town and a nearby fenced-in camp that dealt with Jews. This matches the reality of Belzec Town and Belzec Camp. It does not match the reality of Izbica, which was an almost entirely Jewish settlement. As the Izbica native Thomas Blatt described it, Izbica was a “typical shtetl” with a prewar Polish population of only two hundred,25 where Jews and Poles lived together even during the war.26 Robert Kuwalek quotes a Jew who was deported to Izbica and described it as not a ghetto but “a purely Jewish town where no Poles lived”.27 While Kuwalek notes that this statement is inaccurate, as “several dozen” Polish families lived in Izbica at that time, the description nevertheless illustrates just how dramatically different Izbica was from the town which Karski described visiting. Karski visited an Aryan town with a nearby fenced-in camp, while Izbica was an unfenced Jewish town without a nearby fenced-in camp. The two could hardly be more different.
We have seen that the Izbica thesis is impossible on both chronological and geographical grounds. Moreover, the internal logic of Karski’s story contradicts the idea of a visit to Izbica. As he described his visit to Belzec/Izbica, it was arranged by the Jewish underground, who wished to show him the full extent of the persecutions of the Jews so that he could speak in their cause as a direct eyewitness when he arrived in London. Therefore they decided to send him to Belzec, which they had identified as an extermination camp. Jewish organizations had in fact identified Belzec as an extermination camp, but they had made no such identification of Izbica. For Jewish leaders to wish to obtain a witness to Belzec, which they conceived as an extermination camp, is perfectly logical. According to one report, the Jews had sought a witness to Belzec exterminations as early as April 1942, and were willing to pay any witness who would give such testimony.28 Their motivation for desiring a witness to a seeming extermination camp is understandable, but given that Karski had already seen the Warsaw ghetto, there was no reason for them to exert themselves in sending him to see the Izbica ghetto.
Nor does it make sense that Jewish leaders would arrange a trip to Izbica for Karski while telling him that he was going to Belzec. Even the possibility that Karski might have ended up visiting Izbica by mistake in spite of the fact that a visit to Belzec had been arranged is ruled out by the fact that Karski describes making a prearranged rendezvous with a Belzec guard, which would have been impossible in the event of a mistaken location or a last-minute change in plans. It is also unlikely that Karski could have been seriously confused about his location. As one author has stated, “[s]ince Karski was very familiar with Polish geography, it is difficult to see how he could have erred.”29 Karski knew the area well. He had attended the University of Lvov, just 45 miles from Belzec.30 In December 1939, he had seen an earlier camp for Jews located near Belzec. He had described this camp in a 1940 report, and mentioned the town of Belzec by name, correctly locating it “on the boundary of the territories occupied by the Bolsheviks.”31 The supposition that he confused Belzec with Izbica is far-fetched.
Although the preceding arguments easily show that the Izbica thesis is totally untenable, they still leave some questions unanswered. Was the location of Belzec really a late addition to Karski’s story? Why are there versions of Karski’s story that describe visiting a “sorting point” rather than Belzec? Finally, did Karski really go to Belzec or did he not? The remainder of this paper will answer these questions.
And here is just one more.
5. The Falsehoods in Karski’s Accounts
The next main goal of this paper is to understand the reason that Karski started out claiming to have gone to Belzec, then claimed to have visited a camp (not Belzec) some distance from Belzec, and then again claimed to have visited Belzec. Before we launch into this question, it’s worth stopping to analyze some simpler features of Karski’s accounts which have caused unnecessary controversy.
False dates
Raul Hilberg, Michael Tregenza, and Carlo Mattogno have argued against Karski’s visit to Belzec based on the assumption that it took place in October.45 As we have seen, Karski visited Belzec in September. However, the confusion is understandable, as Karski himself repeatedly gave the former date. Why did he do so?
One possible answer is that it was a simple mistake. This explanation, however, fails to explain the times that Karski claimed to have visited the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943 and left Poland the following month,46 or claimed to have visited Belzec at the end of 1942 and traveled to London in early 1943.47 In his meeting with President Roosevelt, Karski even claimed to have left Poland in March 1943.48 Indeed, there was a broader effort among the Poles to falsify the date of Karski’s departure from Poland, and Karski was not the only one to report this falsely.49
Why did Karski give the original false date, of having departed Poland in late October? His biographers suggest that it was to make his information seem more fresh.50 This was doubtless one reason, but when speaking to a Jewish audience, however, another factor entered the picture, namely the Poles’ desire to gain Jewish support for the Polish position on their eastern border by creating the impression that the Polish government was highly active and concerned on behalf of the Jews. By moving back the date of his departure from Poland, Karski gave the impression that he had hurried to carry the Jews’ news, sometimes even claiming that he had made the trip from Warsaw to London in record time. This story was in keeping with the impression the Poles wanted to make on a Jewish audience, while the reality - that he spent considerable time waiting around in Paris for the right moment to go to London - would not have.
Death trains
Karski’s most attention-getting claim was that the Jews loaded onto the train at Belzec were killed on the trains with some kind of disinfectant, perhaps quicklime, which had been spread on the floor of the wagons.51 As we will see below (Section 7), Karski freely admitted in postwar interviews that during the war he believed that Belzec was a transit camp from which Jews were taken for forced labor. He also accepted that the disinfectant was for the purpose of disinfection rather than extermination, thereby admitting that he had not truly believed in the extermination of the Jews by train, which was simply a piece of speculative atrocity propaganda.
6. Karski’s Wartime Accounts of His Trip
Now we turn to our main question: where did Karski say he went? Why are there versions of his story that claim a visit to a “sorting point” fifty kilometers from Belzec?
Examining this question requires that we look at how the trip is described in all major wartime versions of Karski’s story. They are:
•December 5, 1942 Schwarzbart telegram reporting on December 4 meeting with Karski. States that he went to Belzec.52
•March 1, 1943 story in The Ghetto Speaks, published by the American Representation of the General Jewish Workers Union of Poland (the Bund),53 a slightly different version of which appeared in the March 1943 edition of Voice of the Unconquered,54the newsletter of the Jewish Labor Committee. Describes visiting a “sorting point” fifty kilometers from Belzec, at which some Jews are killed in “death trains” and others sent on to Belzec, where they are killed with poison gas or electricity.
•May 1943 story, written by Arthur Koestler55 on the basis of discussions with Karski and later broadcast on the BBC.56 Stated that Karski visited the camp of Belzec, which was located 15 kilometers south of the town of Belzec.
•Minutes of August 9, 1943 meeting in New York between Karski and Jewish organizations. Says that the camp Karski visited was 12 miles from Belzec, then says it was 12 kilometers from Belzec.57
•Story of a Secret State, published November 1944.58 Reports traveling to Belzec, meeting his contact at a shop, and walking via an indirect route for 20 minutes or 1.5 miles to reach the Belzec camp.59
This series of accounts confirms what was noted above, that Karski’s story developed from a trip to Belzec, to a trip to a camp some distance from Belzec, then back again to a trip to Belzec. There are four texts which place Karski at a distance from Belzec: the pair of articles from March 1943, the Koestler broadcast, and the minutes taken by the Representation of Polish Jewry. On closer inspection, however, the March 1943 articles can be split off from the other two, as unlike the latter two, they explicitly distinguish Karski’s destination from Belzec.
The March 1943 articles
The two March 1943 articles printed in Jewish publications in New York contain both the earliest published version of Karski’s story, and the only version of his story which distinguished the camp he visited from the Belzec camp. They are clearly derived from a common text, but edited differently. These articles were not authored by Karski, although they do derive from his report. Even Karski’s biographers recognize that parts of the story “appear to have been embellished for propaganda purposes or distorted for security reasons”.60
The most characteristic feature of these stories is their attempt to distinguish the destination of Karski’s trip from Belzec, and to reconcile the two within a common framework. They state that many of the deported Jews “die before they reach the ‘sorting point’, which is located about 50 kilometers from the city of Belzec”,61 and claim in Karski’s voice to have visited this location:In the uniform of a Polish policeman I visited the sorting camp near Belzec. It is a huge barrack only about half of which is covered with a roof. When I was there about 5,000 men and women were in the camp. However, every few hours new transports of Jews, men and women, young and old, would arrive for the last journey towards death.62
Karski himself never gave this version of the story. Nor did he ever claim to have visited the camp in Polish uniform. As he was acutely aware of the Poles’ need to curry favor with Jewish groups by creating the impression that Polish-Jewish relations were more favorable than they actually were, it is extremely unlikely that Karski would ever have told a story involving a Polish death-camp guard.
The story adds an explicit reconciliation between Karski’s story and the then standard account of Belzec:Because there are not enough cars to kill the Jews in this relatively inexpensive manner many of them are taken to nearby Belzec where they are murdered by poison gases or by the application of electric currents. The corpses are burned near Belzec. Thus within an area of fifty kilometers huge stakes are burning Jewish corpses day and night.63
Again, Karski never told this story himself. As Wood and Jankowski correctly deduced, the story, though derived from Karski’s account, has been altered, although they were mistaken about how it was altered. The purpose of the alterations was to reconcile Karski’s experience with the story, then current, of the Belzec electricity/gas extermination camp, as can be seen in the fact that the passages which make this reconciliation do not appear in any other source, and do not match any claim made by Karski himself. The editors, however, slipped up in leaving in a description of the camp as located “on the outskirts of Belzec”. This description is incompatible with the description of the “sorting camp” located 50 kilometers from Belzec. A location 50 kilometers from London might perhaps be described as “on the outskirts of London”, or a location 50 kilometers from New York as “on the outskirts of New York,” but Belzec was only a small town. A location 50 kilometers from Belzec would no more be described as “on the outskirts of Belzec” than Austria would be described as “on the outskirts of Belgium.” The same goes for the text’s reference to the camp as being located “near Belzec”, when Belzec was much too small a place to be the point of reference for a location 50 kilometers away. These passages clearly reflect an earlier version of the text, before it was altered to send Karski to a different location.
While the editing could have been done in New York, it seems more likely that the story had already been altered in London. Thanks to the British censors who intercepted and preserved Schwarzbart’s telegram, we know that Karski came to London claiming to have entered the Belzec camp. Examining the context of his arrival will allow us to see how events likely proceeded. At the time of Karski’s arrival in London in late November of 1942, the campaign which culminated in the Allied declaration of December 17, 1942 was already underway. Ignacy Schwarzbart, the author of the December 1942 telegram which is the first written record of Karski’s visit to Belzec, played a key role in this campaign. Schwarzbart, whom Karski later remembered as "a professional politician and a bit of a manipulator,"64 was at the time already involved in spreading the story of extermination at Belzec. According to The Black Book of Polish Jewry, on November 15 he had declared thatAn electrocution station is installed at Belzec camp. Transports of settlers arrive at a siding, on the spot where the execution is to take place. The camp is policed by Ukrainians. The victims are ordered to strip naked ostensibly to have a bath and are then led to a barracks with a metal plate for floor. The door is then locked, electric current passes through the victims and their death is almost instantaneous. The bodies are loaded on the wagons and taken to a mass grave some distance from the camp.65
A document containing the same language came to the British Foreign Office on November 26,66 and the New York Times reported similar67 remarks concerning electrocution at Belzec made by Schwarzbart on November 25.68 Other reports circulating at the time, some of which had appeared in the Polish government organ Polish Fortnightly Review just days before Schwarzbart met with Karski,69 also mentioned Belzec as a place of gassing or electrocution. It cannot have taken Schwarzbart very long to realize that Karski’s story of Jews departing Belzec by train, even if only to be killed on the train, contradicted his story of the Jews arriving at Belzec all being electrocuted or gassed in the camp.
Karski, consequently, was a dangerous witness, whose story did not fit into the account being spread by the Poles and Jews at the time, and which was therefore not particularly wanted. Indeed, Karski’s experience played no role whatsoever in the Polish activities that surrounded the Allied declaration of December 17, 1942, in spite of the fact that he was the only eyewitness to the Reinhardt camps on hand in any Allied country. In fact, the Polish government-in-exile carefully restricted Karski’s contacts in London for months after his arrival,70 and never arranged to have him inform the British about his experience in Belzec. Meanwhile the Allied declaration went forward with the pointed omission of any mention of the Reinhardt camps, which were relegated to the realms of print and broadcast propaganda, where they were covered without any input from Jan Karski, the only eyewitness on hand.
In short, Karski came to London with an account of his visit to Belzec that contradicted the preexisting propaganda about that camp. He told the Jewish members of the Polish National Council the story of his visit, but they were already engaged in advancing a different story about Belzec, one in which it was an extermination camp that killed with electricity or gas. In spite of the fact that their story was not supported by any eyewitness from within the camp, they continued with their campaign while keeping silent about Karski’s information. They could not but realize the danger inherent in Karski’s account of Belzec, which so dramatically contradicted the stories they were spreading. Naturally, they sought a way to defuse this danger, and came up with the solution of resolving the contradiction between the two stories by placing them at different locations. The articles in The Ghetto Speaks and Voice of the Unconquered are the result. While the alterations to Karski’s story were most likely made within Polish Jewish circles in London,71 the articles were published not in London but in New York so as to avoid the possibility that Karski would read and contradict them. The expedient worked: as far as I have been able to discover, he remained completely unaware of them.
In light of this background, the odd fact that Schwarzbart’s diary does not mention Karski until March 16, 1943, which caused David Engel to conclude that the two had not previously met, becomes perfectly understandable. Karski’s story was a threat to the propaganda campaign which then occupied Schwarzbart’s attention. Schwarzbart only felt comfortable mentioning Karski in his diary after the American Jewish publications The Ghetto Speaks and Voice of the Unconquered had published the latter’s story in a form that explicitly reconciled it with the official version of Belzec by locating his visit in a “sorting camp near Belzec” rather than in Belzec itself and contrasting the “death train” method that Karski saw with the extermination “by poison gases or by the application of electric currents” that took place in Belzec. By that time, the Allied declaration and the wave of propaganda that surrounded it was a fait accompli, and the danger posed by Karski’s information had been defused.
The distance problem
While Karski was unaware of the two articles of March 1943, he was quite familiar with the next source, a story written by the Hungarian Jew Arthur Koestler at the suggestion of SOE chief Lord Selbourne, and on the basis of discussions with Karski himself. The piece clearly stated that Karski visited “the camp of Belzec.”72 However, it also stated that “[t]he camp of Belzec is situated about 15 kilometers south of the town of that name,”73 a seriously excessive figure. Karski could not have so described a camp at that location thus, because following the railroad south for 15 kilometers from Belzec would have brought him to Rawa Ruska, a much larger city. Had Karski visited a camp at that location, he would not have described the camp as 15 kilometers south of Belzec, but as on the outskirts of Rawa Ruska.
The same kind of excessive reported distance occurs in the fourth and final “problematic” source, the minutes taken by the Representation of Polish Jewry of an August 9, 1943 meeting between Karski and Jewish organizations, which again did not differentiate the camp Karski visited from Belzec, but placed it first 12 miles and then 12 kilometers from the town.
These sources do not, however, originate directly from Karski, and when he gave his own account of his trip, he said that he walked for 20 minutes from his rendezvous point in the town of Belzec to get to the camp,74 which is entirely realistic, particularly given that he avoided the main paths. This still leaves the question of why there are second-hand accounts giving an excessive distance. There are several possible explanations. One is that Karski simply did not have a head for distances. He would be far from the only person with this disability. This possibility is supported by the fact that he gave a hugely exaggerated estimate of the camp’s size.75 On the other hand, he gave a much more realistic (though still overstated) estimate of the distance as 1.5 miles in his account of his Belzec trip,76 which suggests that the authors of these two texts may have exaggerated for reasons of their own. While Koestler was in direct contact with Karski and consequently could not follow the New York publications in saying that the latter had visited some location other than the Belzec camp, he was still aware of all the different claims being made about extermination methods, and made sure to smooth over the contradictions, saying that the Jews were killed in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka “by various methods, including gas, burning by steam, mass electrocution, and finally, by the method of the so-called ‘death train’’’,77 and putting an endorsement of the other accounts into Karski’s mouth:I myself, have not witnessed the other methods of mass killing, such as electrocution, steaming, and so on, but I have heard first hand eye-witness accounts, which describe them as equally horrible.78
Karski did not actually claim to have heard such first-hand accounts, but the remark served to ensure that all the different extermination methods could live happily together. Given Koestler’s concern with ensuring this, it is possible that he altered Karski’s description of the distances to set up the possibility that the conflicting reports about Belzec referred to different locations. The same applies to the Representation of Polish Jewry, which was actively involved in spreading stories of extermination and would have known perfectly well that Karski’s account conflicted with the usual version of Belzec. Of course, this is mere speculation, but it serves to highlight why these second-hand sources do not give any real support to the thesis that Karski visited a location other than Belzec. The decisive factor is that Karski’s first-hand accounts give the location of the camp more accurately.
Another feature to notice is that the texts which place the camp Karski visited somewhere beyond easy walking distance (12 or 15 kilometers, or 12 miles) from the town of Belzec never specify how he got there, or how he returned afterwards. In sharp contrast to this, the wartime texts Karski himself authored, as well as his postwar interviews, are very clear that he met his contact at a shop in the town of Belzec and walked a short distance to the Belzec camp.
Though it is a second-hand source, the Schwarzbart telegram also refutes the reports of excessive distances by placing Karski in Belzec itself. No one who knew the area as Karski did would describe a location 15 kilometers south of Belzec (or 12 miles or kilometers away) as being in the tiny town of Belzec. As this is the earliest source on Karski’s trip, it refutes any notion that he first claimed to have gone to a camp quite some distance from Belzec but subsequently changed his story upon learning the true location of the Belzec camp.
In summary, we have shown that there is no warrant in the wartime sources to support the idea that Karski visited a camp other than Belzec. We have explained the two sources that make this claim as clumsy alterations of Karski’s story meant to harmonize it with the required story of Belzec extermination camp. The two sources that simply place Karski’s destination an excessive distance from the town of Belzec can be explained either in terms of an attempt at reconciling stories or by his poor sense of distances, and are trumped by the more accurate information about Belzec’s location in his first-hand accounts.
I hope people took notice of this:
It cannot have taken Schwarzbart very long to realize that Karski’s story of Jews departing Belzec by train, even if only to be killed on the train, contradicted his story of the Jews arriving at Belzec all being electrocuted or gassed in the camp.
Karski, consequently, was a dangerous witness, whose story did not fit into the account being spread by the Poles and Jews at the time, and which was therefore not particularly wanted. Indeed, Karski’s experience played no role whatsoever in the Polish activities that surrounded the Allied declaration of December 17, 1942, in spite of the fact that he was the only eyewitness to the Reinhardt camps on hand in any Allied country.
As one will see in section 7, which I will not quote, Karski, like others, believed many Belzec Jews went to Sobibor to die. Karski also claimed that Belzec was a death camp at one time but when he managed to get there, he saw it function as a transit camp in a way. Karski too was busy trying to reconcile what he saw, with what was being developed as holocaust history. The way that Lanzmann abused him and cut his entire interview with Karski from his film is also interesting food for thought.
As he repeatedly stated, he was very puzzled at the fact that his experience at Belzec did not fit with the officially sanctioned version. Faced with this confusion, he groped after whatever explanation he could find.
