This, reported the emissary from underground Poland, Jan Karski, was the ‘solemn message’ entrusted him by a central figure of the Jewish Bund in Warsaw in October 1942 for delivery to ‘the great leaders of the Allies’. On the same occasion, according to Karski, the Bund spokesman, together with a Zionist representative, presented specific demands for a response on the part of the Western Allies to the relentless, methodical murder of their people which has since, for better or worse, come to be called the Holocaust. Some of these demands - their appeal to the Western powers to ‘begin public executions of Germans, any they can get hold of, for example, or their call to ‘threaten the entire German nation with a similar fate [to that then being meted out to the Jews] both during and after the war’ - were, it seems, primarily the product of desperation, and those who advanced them did not seriously anticipate a favourable Allied response. But others - exchanging Jews for German prisoners or ransoming them for money, or dropping leaflets from the air upon German cities informing the German people of the fate of Europe's Jews - were actually quite modest suggestions which Karski's informants appear to have anticipated would be given due consideration by the leaders of the free world. Clearly they expected the two great Western Allies to hear their cry and come to their aid. ‘The democracies’, they insisted, ‘cannot calmly put up with the assertion that the Jewish people in Europe cannot be saved.’

Yet, as nearly two decades of careful and extensive research has revealed, the democracies could, and in fact did, do precisely that.