The latter half of 1942 marked a turning point in the development of the free world's awareness of the nature of German designs upon the Jews of occupied Europe. During this time reliable information first reached the West about the existence and operation of a comprehensive Nazi programme to kill all Jews within the German Reich's reach. Much of this information came from Polish sources and was addressed in the first instance to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. Other reports were sent by Jewish sources inside Poland, via channels operated by the Polish underground, to Jewish leaders in Great Britain and the United States.

The leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine did not have such direct contact with occupied Poland as their counterparts in the West were able at times to maintain. Through most of 1942 their knowledge of what was happening to their fellow Jews in Europe was obtained second hand through sources in London, New York, Geneva, and posts in various neutral countries, as well as via the wire services of the major international news organisations. Their first substantial direct encounter with news of what has since come to be known as the Holocaust came only on 18-19 November 1942, when a group of Palestinian citizens who had been detained in Nazi-occupied Europe at the outbreak of war arrived in Palestine in exchange for a contingent of German nationals similarly held in the Allied countries. Many of these had spent the first three years of the war in Poland and were able to provide eyewitness corroboration for reports of the wholesale slaughter of Jews that had previously been widely discounted as unconfirmed rumours. Their message finally brought home to Palestinian Jewish leaders the awful reality from which they had previously recoiled; from then on a major portion of their attention was to be directed to finding ways to rescue whatever Jews could still be saved.

It happened that at this very moment a high-ranking official of the Polish Government-in-Exile was visiting Palestine. Stanislaw Kot, former interior minister and ambassador to the Soviet Union and close confidant of Premier Władysław Sikorski, had come to the country, ostensibly for a rest, prior to assuming his new post as government delegate in the Middle East.