Jan Karski

Jan Karski
Jan Karski Jan Karski, before a wall-map of the Warsaw Ghetto at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, recalls his secret 1942 missions into the Nazi "prison-city-within-a-city" Photo by E. Thomas Wood, 1994
Born	24 April 1914 Łódź, Poland
Died	13 July 2000 (aged 86) Washington, D.C., United States
Nationality	Polish
Other names	Jan Kozielewski (birth name); Piasecki, Kwaśniewski, Znamierowski, Kruszewski, Kucharski, and Witold (akas)
Occupation(s)	Polish resistance fighter; diplomat; activist
Known for	World War II resistance and the Holocaust rescue

Jan Karski (24 April 1914 – 13 July 2000) was a Polish World War II resistance movement fighter and later professor at Georgetown University. In 1942 and 1943 Karski reported to the Polish government in exile and the Western Allies on the situation in German-occupied Poland, especially the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the secretive Nazi extermination camps.

Biography

Jan Karski was born as Jan Kozielewski on 24 April 1914, in Łódź. He was raised a Catholic and remained one throughout his life. He grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood, where the majority of the population was then Jewish.

After graduating from a local school, Kozielewski joined the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) and graduated from the Legal and Diplomatic departments in 1935. During his compulsory military training he served in the NCO school for mounted artillery officers in Włodzimierz Wołyński. He completed his education between 1936 and 1938 in different diplomatic posts in Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and went on to join the Diplomatic Service. After a short period of resident scholarship, in January 1939 he started work in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the outbreak of World War II, Kozielewski was mobilized and served in a small artillery detachment in eastern Poland. Taken prisoner by the Red Army, he successfully concealed his true rank by pretending to be an ordinary soldier and was handed over to the Germans during an exchange of Polish prisoners of war, in effect escaping the Katyn massacre.

World War II resistance

"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", note of Republic of Poland addressed to United Nations, 1942

In November 1939, on a train to a POW camp in General Government (a part of Poland which had not been fully incorporated by Nazi Germany into The Third Reich), Karski managed to escape, and found his way to Warsaw. There he joined the ZWZ – the first resistance movement in occupied Europe and a predecessor of the Home Army (AK). About that time he adopted a nom de guerre of Jan Karski, which later became his legal name. Other noms de guerre used by him during World War II included Piasecki, Kwaśniewski, Znamierowski, Kruszewski, Kucharski, and Witold. In January 1940 Karski began to organize courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish Government in Exile, then based in Paris. As a courier, Karski made several secret trips between France, Britain and Poland. During one such mission in July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo in the Tatra mountains in Slovakia. Severely tortured, he was finally transported to a hospital in Nowy Sącz, from where he was smuggled out. After a short period of rehabilitation, he returned to active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Headquarters of the Home Army.

In 1942 Karski was selected by Cyryl Ratajski, the Polish Government's Delegate at Home, to perform a secret mission to prime minister Władysław Sikorski in London. Karski was to contact Sikorski as well as various other Polish politicians and inform them about Nazi atrocities in occupied Poland. In order to gather evidence, Karski met Bund activist Leon Feiner and was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto for the purpose of showing him first hand what was happening to the Polish Jews. Also, disguised as a Ukrainian camp guard, he visited what he thought was Bełżec death camp. In actuality, it seems that Karski only got far enough to witness the Durchgangslager ("sorting and transit camp") for Bełżec, "Izbica Lubelska." Many historians have accepted this theory, as did Karski himself.

Since 1942 Karski reported to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the situation in Poland, especially the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust of the Jews. He had also carried from Poland a microfilm with further information from the Underground Movement on the extermination of European Jews in German occupied Poland. The Polish Foreign Minister, Count Edward Raczynski, provided the Allies on this basis with one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the Holocaust. A note by Foreign Minister Edward Raczynski entitled The mass extermination of Jews in German occupied Poland, addressed to the Governments of the United Nations on 10 December 1942, would be published later along with other documents in a widely distributed leaflet.

Karski met with Polish politicians in exile including the prime minister, as well as members of political parties such as the PPS, SN, SP, SL, Jewish Bund and Poalei Zion. He also spoke to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec. In 1943 in London he met the then much known journalist Arthur Koestler later author of Darkness at Noon. He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In July 1943, Karski again personally reported to Roosevelt about the situation in Poland.

Karski met with many other government and civic leaders in the United States, including Felix Frankfurter, Cordell Hull, William Joseph Donovan, and Stephen Wise. Frankfurter, skeptical of Karski's report, said later "I did not say that he was lying, I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference." Karski presented his report to media, bishops of various denominations (including Cardinal Samuel Stritch), members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but without success. His warning against the Yalta solution and the plight of stateless peoples became an inspiration for the formation of the Office of High Commissioner for Refugees after the war. In 1944 Karski published Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State, in which he related his experiences in wartime Poland. The book was initially to be made into a film, but this never occurred. The book proved to be a major success, with more than 400,000 copies sold in the United States until the end of World War II.

Life in the United States

After the war Karski entered the United States and began his studies at Georgetown University, where he earned a Ph.D in 1952. In 1954, Karski became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at Georgetown University for 40 years in the areas of East European affairs, comparative government and international affairs, rising to become one of the most celebrated and notable members of its faculty. In 1985, he published the academic study The Great Powers and Poland.

His attempts at stopping the Holocaust were publicized after 1978, after the French film-maker Claude Lanzmann recorded his testimony for Lanzmann's film Shoah. The film was released in 1985 and, in spite of earlier promises, didn't include mention of Karski's role in informing the world about the Holocaust. In their book on Karski, Wood and Jankowski state that Karski then wrote an article (which was published in English, French and Polish) called Shoah, a Biased Vision of the Holocaust, in which he pleaded for the production of another documentary showing the missing part of his testimony and the help given to Jews by Polish Righteous among the Nations. In 1994, E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski published Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust.

Following the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, Karski's wartime role was officially acknowledged there. He received the Order of the White Eagle (the highest Polish civil decoration) and the Order Virtuti Militari (the highest military decoration awarded for bravery in combat). He was married in 1965 to the 54 year old dancer and choreographer, Pola Nirenska, a Polish Jew, whose family (with the exception of her parents, who emigrated to Israel shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland) died in the Holocaust. She committed suicide in 1992. Karski died in Washington, D.C. in 2000. They had no children.

During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995 Karski said about the failure of most of the Jews' rescue from mass murder:

It was easy for the Nazis to kill Jews, because they did it. The allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it. The Jews were abandoned by all governments, church hierarchies and societies, but thousands of Jews survived because thousands of individuals in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland helped to save Jews. Now, every government and church says, "We tried to help the Jews", because they are ashamed, they want to keep their reputations. They didn't help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough.

Honors/Legacy

On 2 June 1982, Yad Vashem recognised Jan Karski as Righteous Among the Nations. A tree bearing a memorial plaque in his name was planted that same year at Yad Vashem's Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem.

In 1991, Karski was awarded the Wallenberg Medal of the University of Michigan. Statues honoring Karski have been placed in New York City at the corner of 37th Street and Madison Avenue (renamed as Jan Karski Corner) and on the grounds of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Georgetown University, Oregon State University, Baltimore Hebrew College, Warsaw University, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, and the University of Łódź all awarded Karski honorary doctorates.

In 1994, Karski was made an honorary citizen of Israel in honor of his efforts on behalf of Polish Jews during the Holocaust (Shoah).

In April 2011, the Jan Karski U.S. Centennial Campaign was created to increase interest in the life and legacy of the late Polish diplomat, as we approach the Centennial year of his birth in 2014. The U.S. Campaign, headed by Polish-American author Wanda Urbanska, is working in partnership with the International Legacy program at the Polish History Museum in Warsaw, Poland under the direction of Ewa Wierzynska. Polish Consul General Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka hosted a gala kickoff dinner in New York City on May 30, consisting of representatives from Georgetown University, Polish Catholic and Jewish groups to organize a steering committee, which currently includes 17 prominent individuals.

One goal of the Campaign group was to obtain the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Karski in advance of his Centennial, as well as to promote educational activities, including workshops, artistic performances and the revival of his 1944 book, "Story of a Secret State." In December 2011, the support of 68 U.S. Representatives and 12 U.S. Senators was obtained and a package for the Medal was submitted to the White House. On April 23, 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that Karski would receive the country's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In February 2012, independent researcher Helen Radkey discovered that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or "Mormons") had conducted baptism for the dead ceremonies in the name of Karski, who was a devout Roman Catholic. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who knew and admired Karski, denounced the church's acts. "He was a hero for thousands of people, and it’s simply unfair to do that to his name and to him," Wiesel said. "He deserves better than that. He deserves to be left in peace."

Remembering Karski's mission

The former Foreign Minister of Poland Władysław Bartoszewski in his speech at the ceremony of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 27 January 2005, said: "The Polish resistance movement kept informing and alerting the free world to the situation. In the last quarter of 1942, thanks to the Polish emissary Jan Karski and his mission, and also by other means, the Governments of the United Kingdom and of the United States were well informed about what was going on in Auschwitz-Birkenau."

See also

• Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
• Polish Secret State
• Witold Pilecki
• Shoah
• Szmul Zygielbojm
• Edward Bernays
• List of Righteous Among the Nations by country
• Irena Sendler
• Bermuda Conference
• Victor Martin (Belgian resistant and sociologist)
• List of Poles

Bibliography

Publications by Karski

• Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State, Boston 1944 (Polish edition: Tajne państwo: opowieść o polskim Podziemiu, Warszawa 1999).
• Wielkie mocarstwa wobec Polski: 1919-1945 od Wersalu do Jałty. wyd. I krajowe Warszawa 1992, Wyd. PIW ISBN 83-06-02162-2
• Tajna dyplomacja Churchilla i Roosevelta w sprawie Polski: 1940-1945.
• Polska powinna stać się pomostem między narodami Europy Zachodniej i jej wschodnimi sąsiadami, Łódź 1997.
• Jan Karski (2001). Story of a Secret State. Simon Publications. p. 391. ISBN 1-931541-39-6.

About Karski

• E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski (1994). Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons Inc. page 316; ISBN 0-471-01856-2
• J. Korczak, Misja ostatniej nadziei, Warszawa 1992.
• E. T. Wood, Karski: opowieść o emisariuszu, Kraków 1996.
• J. Korczak, Karski, Warszawa 2001.
• S. M. Jankowski, Karski: raporty tajnego emisariusza, Poznań 2009.

External links

• Karski named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem
• The Last Letter From Szmul Zygielbojm, The Bund Representative With The Polish National Council In Exile, 11 May 1943
• The Jan Karski papers at the Hoover Institution Archives
• Interviews with Jan Karski
• Excerpts from biography of Jan Karski and audio of his recollections
• Biography of Jan Karski at The Wallenberg Endowment, University of Michigan
• Jan Karski, a silent messenger by Jack Fuchs, 1 June 2001
• Obituary of Jan Karski from The Times, 17 July 2000
• Interview with Jan Karski, 9 February 1995, at his home
• The International Wallenberg Foundation: Jan Karski