ABSTRACT
As early as 1941, very few “messengers of disaster” saw and understood the catastrophe of the destruction of the Jews of Europe inside the huge world war. For them, it was not a mere detail. Jan Karski risked his life to speak about what he had seen in the Warsaw ghetto and in Izbica, near Belzec. Lemkin invented the word “genocide”, based on his prior reflections on the extermination of the Armenians during World War I. But they were not able to convince one of the inconceivable. This chapter says why, between the very recent memories of World War I and the reality of the unspeakable.
