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In May
1942, a Bund underground activist in Warsaw, Leon Feiner, sent a
preliminary report to London containing information on the murder of
Jews in various parts of Poland. The report traced the path of the
murder actions: town after town, district after district, month by
month. It described the extermination center at Chelmno, including
the gas vans, and estimated the number of Jews whom the Germans had
murdered in Poland by May at 700,000 (the figure was much higher).
Feiner stated that, in the absence of substantive actions to halt
the murders, no Jews would survive in Europe by the end of the war.
The report also urged the Allies to adopt a policy of retaliation
against German citizens residing in Allied countries.
Feiner’s
report was forwarded to the media and to the political echelon,
including the Polish government-in-exile in London, and became the
decisive factor in the eruption of reports on the mass murder and
their assimilation in public opinion.
On June 2,
the BBC broadcast the main contents of the report, including the
estimate of the 700,000 murdered Jews. However, it did not stress
the conclusion of the report: that the program to murder all the
Jews was already being carried out. A week later, the Polish
government-in-exile presented the findings of the report to the
Allied governments in an official missive. On June 25, Samuel
Zygelbojm, one of two Jewish representatives in the Polish
government, released the entire document to the press. The Allied
governments did not respond to these efforts, but newspapers began
to carry the information with greater frequency. The Boston Globe
and The New York Times presented prominent reports, including the
assessment that the Jewish population was being systematically
annihilated.
Shortly
after this, two authoritative voices in Britain reinforced the
Bund’s announcement. At a press conference, the Minister of
Information, Brendan Bracken, stated that 700,000 people, all of
them Jewish, had been murdered in Poland. He also proclaimed that,
once the war ended, the "United Nations" would ensure the
rapid and severe punishment of the persons responsible for the
grievous war crimes that had been perpetrated in Poland against Jews
and Poles alike. He fiercely criticized those who regarded the
murder reports as propagandistic hyperbole. The truth is solid, he
said vehemently, and the murder will eventually come to light. |
