They offered to take me to the Warsaw ghetto so that I could literally see the spectacle of a people expiring, breathing its last before my eyes. [...] As an eyewitness I would be much more convincing than a mere mouthpiece.

[...] We had reached the ghetto by a secret passage that must have been obvious to anyone who scrutinized the district at all carefully. Everywhere there was hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children, the desperate cries and gasps of a people struggling for life against impossible odds. [...] Frequently we passed by corpses lying naked in the streets. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked my guide. ‘Why are they lying there naked?’ ‘When a Jew dies,’ he answered, ‘his family removes his clothing and throws his body in the street. If not, they have to pay the Germans to have the body buried. They have instituted a burial tax which practically no one here can afford. Besides, this saves clothing. Here, every rag counts.’