To the Editors:

A small point of clarification regarding Brian Urquhart’s fine review of my book ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide [NYR, April 25]. I did not mean to give the impression that Isaiah Berlin in fact met personally with Polish diplomat and Holocaust witness Jan Karski, whose firsthand atrocity reports were doubted by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and countless others. Berlin did tell his biographer Michael Ignatieff that while he was aware of terrible crimes against the Jews, he did not suspect the full extent of the extermination until the very end of the war.

Samantha Power
Cambridge, Massachusetts

This Issue

May 9, 2002