Dispatches from Warsaw

In September 1939, the German blitzkrieg rolled into Poland which almost immediately became a hellscape of genocide and destructions—ground zero for the Third Reich’s political and ethnic reshaping of Europe. As German death squads wiped out Polish elites and constructed a constellation of extermination camps—Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz—to murder Europe’s Jews, brave people made it their mission to expose Nazi atrocities to the world, to show that what was happening inside Poland was not war but murder. Dispatches from Warsaw tells the story of the Polish resistance fighters who refused to stay silent while the Germans massacred Poles, herded Jews into ghettos, and turned Poland into a factory of mass murder.

While locked in a life-and-death fight for their homeland, the Polish Resistance took up the cause of documenting the Holocaust. Dodging the Gestapo, Jan Karski was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Germans were imprisoning Jews, and later penetrated a satellite of the Belzec death camp, eventually meeting with Roosevelt at the White House. Jan Nowak also witnessed the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, then made a dangerous journey across German-occupied Europe with secret documents exposing the horrors inside the ghetto. Witold Pilecki volunteered to be captured and sent to Auschwitz, where he organized resistance inside the camp and smuggled out reports of crimes against humanity. Jur Lerski parachuted into Poland to gather behind-enemy-lines intelligence, which he later reported to Winston Churchill.

While Germany demolished their country and its people, these resistance fighters risked their lives to make sure the world knew the truth from inside Poland. Told with the tense drama of a spy thriller and the deep pathos of the best Holocaust histories, Dispatches from Warsaw is a story of unforgettable courage, resistance, and witness.

PART I: 1939

1. Warning to the World
2. It’s War
3. Falling Back
4. Warsaw ‘39
5. The Soviet Saviors
6. Seeds of Dissent
7. Resistance

PART II: 1940-1941

1. Phony War
2. Into the Lion’s Den
3. Captivity
4. Dark Times
5. Waiting

PART III: 1942-1943

1. Spring
2. Witness of Death
3. A Message to the World
4. At the Crossroads
5. A New Courier

PART IV: 1944-1945

1. On Deaf Ears
2. Flawed Assumptions
3. The Race Against Time
4. Warsaw Rises
5. Dispatches from Warsaw
6. Poland ‘45