חיים פזנר - האיש שידע

הידיעות המוסמכות הראשונות אודות מרכזי הרצח במזרח אירופה שהגיעו ממקורות גרמניים. ; A biography of Pazner (1899-1981), who was born to the Posner family in Kowal, Poland. Describes his experiences of antisemitism in schools and universities in Poland and Germany. As a student and active Zionist in Danzig, he became head of the Jewish Agency office there in 1934. After attending the Zionist Congress in Lucerne in 1935, he was interrogated several times by the Gestapo. He was beaten in October 1937 by Gestapo agents, and then left for Switzerland with his wife and young son. In 1940 he became one of the heads of the Jewish Agency office in Geneva, where he and his wife arranged for Jewish refugees to emigrate to Eretz Israel, and provided aid which saved many Jews in the occupied countries. In July 1942 he received information from Dr. Arthur Sommer, an anti-Nazi German economist, through Prof. Edgar Salin, under whom he had done his doctorate in Basel, on the implementation of the Final Solution; he passed on the information to the Allies, but it was considered unbelievable. Information he received on Auschwitz in June 1944 finally resulted in an Allied response, which indirectly stopped the deportations from Hungary. His mother and six siblings perished in the Holocaust. In 1953 Pazner and his family immigrated to Israel, where he became a diplomat and later head of finances at Yad Vashem. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)