The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. Note addressed to the Governments of the United Nations on December 10th, 1942, and other documents.

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First and only edition and impression of one of the very first documents to disclose the Holocaust, presented to the Allies in an appeal for action and published by the Polish government-in-exile. The exposition is based on the extraordinary work of the Polish secret agent Jan Karski (1914-2000). Between 1940 and 1942 Karski gathered evidence in Poland, visiting the Warsaw ghetto and, disguised as a Ukrainian guard, the Durchgangslager ("transit camp") for the Be ec death camp. Karski's findings were smuggled to the Polish government-in-exile in London and presented to the Allies on 10 December 1942 in an address by the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Edward Raczy ski. The address unequivocally stated that Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor were extermination camps, and it estimated that out of a pre-war population of 3,130,000 Polish Jews, one in three had already perished. The address concluded with an appeal not just to condemn and punish the perpetrators, but to find means to stop the extermination. The speech was widely reported in the press, covered by both The Times and New York Times the following day (the latter printed the speech in full on 18 December). It reached Churchill, and on 14 December Anthony Eden presented the findings to Cabinet. Eleven Allied states issued a joint declaration on 17 December condemning the Nazi government's "bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination" (see Zimmerman, pp. 181-2). In early 1943, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs arranged for publication of the speech in full in the present pamphlet. The speech and pamphlet are widely credited as the first official announcement of the Holocaust. The fragile and ephemeral nature of the pamphlet ensures it is not often encountered in commerce. For the next three years, Karski travelled the world to publicise the plight of Polish Jewry. He gave hundreds of lecturers and obtained personal interviews with a wide range of influential figures, including Anthony Eden, Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Felix Frankfurter, but failed to initiate any major intervention. In 1982 Yad Vashem recognized Karski as Righteous Among the Nations. "Although he had not saved individual Jews, The Commission for the Designation of the Righteous decided that he had risked his life in order to alert the world to the murder. He had incurred enormous risk in penetrating into the Warsaw ghetto and a camp, and then committed himself wholly to the case of rescuing the Jews. Karski's case is quite exceptional in many ways. While other rescuers had taken the difficult decision to leave the side of the bystanders, not to remain silent and to stand up and act, Karski, after he reached the West, brought this dilemma to the doorstep of the free world's leaders" (Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, accessible online). In 1994 he was made an honorary Israeli citizen. A study of his work by Wood and Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, was published in 1994. Joshua D. Zimmerman, The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945, 2015. Octavo (16 pp.). Original wrappers, wire-stitched. Slight rusting to staples, else wrappers very bright and clean: an excellent copy. Seller Inventory # 169201

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