ABSTRACT
In 1981 the conference The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps took place in Washington, DC. There, in the section 'Discovering the "Final Solution"', Jan Karski spoke for the first time publicly about the Holocaust since he had given lectures across the USA to accompany the publication of his book Story of a Secret State in 1944. In 'To Die in Agony', chapter 30 of his 1944 book, Story of a Secret State, Karski speaks of Belzec, even if people know nowadays it was Izbica. While Karski was directly linking Nazi atrocities with the extermination that was taking place, he was unable to convince his British and American interlocutors that what was happening was far worse than a giant pogrom. At the 1981 conference, Karski gave an amazing conclusion to his speech, explaining what happened to him when he discovered not only that everybody pretended not to have known, but, even worse, nobody wanted to know in 1944–5.
