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In the two and a half years that followed, some 6 million Jews and at least 5 million ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners, Romani, homosexuals, disabled people, and others would join Winer as the casualties of the largest genocide in human history. By that time, Winer had been dead for six months, recaptured by the Gestapo in Warsaw then shipped to Bełżec extermination camp sometime just after his last communique on April 10. Those two governments, on behalf of the Allied Powers, wouldn't release their first official report on Nazi extermination efforts in Europe until the very end of 1942. While Oneg Shabbat placed one copy in the hands of the Polish government-in-exile in London and published another batch for the German people (in hopes that it would inspire in them some sympathy for the Jews), Winer's findings never seemed to have made it onto the desks of decision-makers in either Britain or the U.S.

Under the pseudonym Yakov Grojanowski and with the help of Oneg Shabbat, Winer documented this revelatory testimony in what would become known as the Grojanowski Report, likely the first eyewitness account of the Nazis' extermination programs to make it beyond the walls of the camps and into the halls of power in Europe. He spoke of Jewish deportees, including his own family, arriving at Chełmno en masse, enduring beatings at the hands of Nazi officers, then dying in gas chambers before being dumped in mass graves - step by step, like clockwork.

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During transport from the Nazis' Chełmno extermination camp to the Rzuchów subcamp, the 30-year-old Polish prisoner slipped out of the lorry and into the forest.įrom there, Winer made his way to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, where he rendezvoused with the underground Oneg Shabbat group, which had made it their clandestine mission to chronicle the horrors that the Nazis had recently begun perpetrating upon the fellow Jewish residents of their city.Īt the time, of course, the group had no idea of the full extent of what they were actually chronicling.īefore Winer escaped and contacted Oneg Shabbat, the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Poland, let alone the outside world, had received only scattered bits of information about what was now happening inside the newly completed camps in the forests outside Warsaw - not to mention Krakow, Lublin, and much of eastern Poland.īut in his reports to Oneg Shabbat, Winer began to fill in the gaps. On January 19, 1942, Szlama Ber Winer made his escape.