Karski's description of his visit to the Warsaw ghetto in October 1942:
In summer 1942 -- 280,000 Jews had been deported from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp.

Is it necessary to describe the Warsaw ghetto? So much has already been written about it, there have been so many accounts by unimpeachable witnesses. A cemetery? No, for these bodies were still moving, were indeed often violently agitated. These were still living people, if you could call them such. For apart from their skin, eyes, voices, there was nothing human left in these palpitating figures. Everywhere there was hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children, the desperate cries and gasps of a people struggling for life against impossible odds.

To pass that wall was to enter into a new world utterly unlike anything that had ever been imagined. The entire population of the ghetto seemed to be living in the street. There was hardly any square yard of empty space. As we picked our way across the mud and rubble, the shadows of what had once been men or women flitted by us in pursuit of someone or something, their eyes blazing with some insane hunger or greed.

Frequently we passed by corpses lying naked in the streets. 'What does it mean?, I asked my guide. 'Why are they lying there naked?'

'When a Jew dies,' he answered, 'his family removes his clothing and throws his body in the street. If not, they have to pay the Germans to have the body buried. They have instituted a burial tax which practically no one here can afford. Besides this saves clothing. Here, every rag counts.'…

'I don't see many old people', I said. 'Do they stay inside all day?'

The answer came in a voice that seemed to issue from the grave.

'No. Don't you understand the German system yet? Those whose muscles are still capable of any effort are used for forced labor. The others are murdered by quota. First come the sick and aged, then the unemployed, then those whose work is not directory connected with the German war needs, finally those who work on roads, in trains, in factories. Ultimately they intend to kill all of us.'….

From: Jan Karski, The Story of a Secret State, Boston 1944