JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

After reading my quick post from yesterday (on Oswiecim, Camp of Death, March 1944, a very early work published on the Holocaust) my friend Andy Moursund made several good points on other pieces of very early Holocaust literature (those being books or pamphlets rather than newspaper or journal articles), which I note below with links to their full text. 

Andy went directly to Jan Karski’s extremely early (1942 and 1944) works–they were potentially momentous, though they missed their true moment, the reasons of which will no doubt be long discussed and debated. Karski (1914-2000) performed an heroic duty reporting on the mass extermination of Jews, ethnic Poles, and other nationalities in Poland in 1942-3, and wrote on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. He was a professor at Georgetown University for a while, and lived on or near MacArthur Blvd–I saw him a couple of times in Georgetown (where my store was for years) back in the mid/late 1980’s but never spoke to him…he had very penetrating eyes in a sharp and angular face, exceptionally striking in a Samuel Beckett sort of way–his Story of a Secret State was well known to our circle, and Karski was very easily recognized, but not necessarily easily approachable. In any event, I regret not speaking with him. 

The earliest work by Jan Karski is The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. First official government-documented alert about the Holocaust and genocide of Poles addressed to the wartime allies of the then-United Nations.Government of the Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs MSZ, published in 1942. I should point out that “extermination” used in the description of mass execution of human beings seems to predate the recorded OED first-usage by three years.  (“Extermination, attributive, as  extermination camp n., a concentration camp for the mass murder of human beings, applied esp. to the camps set up by Nazi Germany in the war of 1939–45.1945  [First usage] Atlantic July 55,  “Among the workers a threat of being sent to an extermination camp has its uses.”–OED)