A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
rooms. I was sure they would understand me…I will publish the decrees spreading death over Europe…They will have no other choice but to believe. The recognition of truth will cease to be a personal favor to me, but a log ical necessity.31
As he lobbied for action in Washington and around the country in 1942 and 1943, he flashed back to a speech delivered by British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941, broadcast on the BBC, which had urged Allied resolve. “The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis…As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated,” Churchill had thundered. “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” 32
Suddenly Lemkin’s crusade took on a specific objective: the search for a new word. He replayed in his mind the Churchill speech and the response of the lawyers in Madrid to his proposal. Perhaps he had not adequately distinguished the crime he was campaigning against from typical, wartime violence. Maybe if he could capture the crime in a word that connoted something truly unique and evil, people and politicians alike might get more exercised about stopping it. Lemkin began to think about ways he might combine his knowledge of international law, his aim of preventing atrocity, and his long-standing interest in language. Convinced that it was only the packaging of his legal and moral cause that needed refining, he began to hunt for a term commensurate with the truth of his experience and the experience of millions. He would be the one to give the ultimate crime a name.
Chapter 3 The Crime With a Name
“Believe the Unbelievable”
Although he did not realize it at the time, Lemkin belonged to a kind of virtual community of frustrated, grief-stricken witnesses. A continent away, Szmul Zygielbojm, a fellow Polish Jew, was making arguments similar to those Lemkin registered in the U.S. War Department. In late May 1942, when reports of Nazi terror were still branded “rumors,” Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish National Council in London, released and publicized a report prepared by the underground Jewish Socialist Bund in Poland. For the previous two years, Zygielbojm had been traveling around Europe and the United States describing ghastly conditions in occupied Poland, but the Bund report offered the most complete, precise, and chilling picture of Hitler’s extermination plot. The Nazis had dispatched Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, to conquered territory in eastern Europe. In Lithuania and Poland in the summer of 1941, the Bund reported,
men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place, a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered or shot by machine guns or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, the sick in hospital were shot, women were killed in the streets. In many towns the Jews were carried off to “an unknown destination” and killed in adja cent woods.1
The Bund report introduced readers to the gas vans that roamed around the Polish town of Chelmno, gassing an average of 1,000 people every day (ninety per van) from the winter of 1941 to March 1942. The report revealed that Germany had set out to “exterminate all the Jews of Europe.” More than 700,000 Jews had already been killed; millions more were endangered. Its authors called upon the Polish government-in-exile to press the Allies to retaliate against German citizens in their countries.2 Others urged the Allies publicly to link their bombing of Germany to Nazi atrocities and to drop leaflets over German territory informing German citizens of the atrocities. Zygielbojm appeared on the BBC on June 26, 1942, to deliver the same message. Speaking in Yiddish, he read aloud a letter from a Jewish woman in one ghetto to her sister in another: “My hands are shaking. I cannot write. Our minutes are numbered. The Lord knows whether we shall see one another again. I write and weep. My children are whimpering. They want to live. We bless you. If you get no more letters from me you will know that we are no longer alive.” The Bund report and the woman’s letter, Zygielbojm said, were “a cry to the whole world.” 3
Earlier that year Jan Karski, a twenty-eight-year-old Polish diplomat and a Roman Catholic, had disguised himself as a Jew, donning an armband with the Star of David, and smuggled himself through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto. Posing as a Ukrainian militiaman, he also infiltrated Belzec, a Nazi death camp near the border between Poland and Ukraine. In late 1942 Karski escaped carrying hundreds of documents on miniature microfilm contained in the shaft of a key. He arranged to meet in London with Zygielbojm and his colleague, Ignacy Schwarzbart. On the eve of the meeting, Schwarzbart examined Karski’s documents, and, aghast, cabled the World Jewish Congress in New York, describing the suffering of the Jews in Poland:
JEWS IN POLAND ALMOST COMPLETELY ANNIHILATED STOP READ REPORTS DEPORTATION TEN THOUSAND JEWS FOR DEATH STOP IN BELZEC FORCED TO DIG THEIR OWN GRAVE MASS SUICIDE HUNDREDS CHILDREN THROWN ALIVE INTO GUTTERS DEATH CAMPS IN BELZEC TREBLINKA DISTRICT MALKINIA THOUSANDS DEAD NOT BURIED IN SOBIBOR DISTRICT WLODAWSKI MASS GRAVES MURDER PREGNANT WOMEN STOP JEWS NAKED DRAGGED INTO DEATH CHAMBERS GESTAPO MEN ASKED PAYMENT FOR QUICKER KILLING HUNTING FUGITIVES STOP THOUSANDS DAILY VICTIMS THROUGHOUT POLAND STOP BELIEVE THE UNBELIEVABLE STOP4
Karski met with Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm the next day in their office near Piccadilly Circus. He told them of naked corpses in the Warsaw ghetto, yellow stars, starving children, Jew hunts, and the smell of burning flesh. Karski relayed a personal message to Zygielbojm from Leon Feiner, the leader of the Bund trapped in Warsaw. Feiner had instructed Zygielbojm to stop with the empty protests and urge retaliatory bombing, leafleting, and the execution of Germans in Allied hands.5 Karski said that when he had cautioned that the proposals were “bitter and unrealistic,” Feiner had countered with: “We don’t know what is realistic, or not realistic. We are dying here! Say it!” 6 Karski, who had a photographic memory, recited Feiner’s parting appeal to Jewish leaders to do something dramatic to force people to believe the reports:
We are all dying here; let [the Jews in Allied countries] die too. Let them crowd the offices of Churchill, of all the important English and American leaders and agencies. Let them proclaim a fast before the doors of the mightiest, not retreating until they will believe us, until they will undertake some action to rescue those of our people who are still alive. Let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. This may shake the conscience of the world.
Upon hearing Feiner’s message, Zygielbojm leaped from his seat and began pacing back and forth across the room. “It is impossible,” he said, “utterly impossible. You know what would happen. They would simply bring in two policemen and have me dragged away to an institution…Do you think they will let me die a slow lingering death? Never…They would never let me die.” 7 As he continued questioning Karski, an agitated Zygielbojm pleaded with his messenger to believe he had done all he could. Two weeks later in a BBC broadcast Zygielbojm declared, “It will actually be a shame to go on living, to belong to the human race, if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in history.” 8
Karski traveled to the United States and met with Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who graciously heard him out and then responded, “I don’t believe you.” When a stunned Karski protested, Frankfurter interrupted him and explained, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.” 9 Frankfurter literally could not conceive of the atrocities Karski was describing. He was not alone. Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy in Washington from 1942, saw only a massive pogrom. So, too, did Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and other leading Zionists.10