The Nazis did not publish the minutes of the January 1942 conference at Wannsee (see reading, The Wannsee Conference). Nor did they announce the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” How, then, did Jews learn about the massacres in distant places and the gassings in the death camps? After all, almost all Jews in occupied Poland were in ghettos in 1942 with little or no access to newspapers or radio broadcasts. See the map below showing the location of these ghettos throughout Europe. They did, however, hear stories and rumors, often based on reports from the few Jews who managed to escape from deportation trains, shooting sites, and killing centers. They sometimes sent couriers to other ghettos to find out if the rumors were true and to report on events in their own community.
Those couriers were more than messengers who carried a few letters from one city to another. They also smuggled documents, underground newspapers, and even weapons into the sealed ghettos of Poland. Many of them were women, mainly because most Jewish men were circumcised, unlike non-Jews, and so were easily identified as Jews. The women and teenaged girls who acted as couriers were known as kashariyot, from the Hebrew word kesher, meaning “connection.”
