Jan Karski

Dr Jan Karski (24 June 1914 - 13 July 2000), was a Polish World War II resistance fighter and scholar. He visited the Warsaw Ghetto after the summer 1942 deportations. Disguised as a guard, he then managed to enter what he thought was the Bełżec death camp for one day where he witnessed mass murder. In 1942 and 1943 Karski reported to the Polish government in exile and the British and U.S. governments on the situation in Poland, especially the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust of the Jews.

Early life

Jan Kozielewski was born on 24 June, 1914, in Łódź. He grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood, where the majority of the population was Jewish. After graduating from a local school, Kozielewski joined the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (modern 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.

Kozielewski 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 scholarship, in January 1939 he started his work in the Polish ministry of foreign affairs. After 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 grade and, pretending to be an ordinary soldier, was handed over to the Germans during an exchange of Polish prisoners of war.

World War II

After crossing into General Government (the German-held part of Poland) in November 1939 he managed to escape a train to a POW camp 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 Witold, Piasecki, Kwaśniewski, Znamierowski, Kruszewski and Kucharski.

In January 1940 Karski started 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 the summer of 1942 Karski was chosen 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 was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto for the purpose of showing him firsthand what was happening to the Polish Jews. Also, disguised as a Ukrainian camp guard, he visited what he thought was Bełżec death camp. (It is now believed that he actually saw a nearby "sorting camp".)

In 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 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 Poalej-Syjon. He also spoke to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec. He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His report was a major factor in informing the West, but no action followed.

In July 1943, Karski again personally reported to Roosevelt about the situation in Poland. He also met with many other government and civic leaders in the United States, including Felix Frankfurter, Cordell Hull, William Donovan, Samuel Cardinal Stritch, and Stephen Wise. Karski also presented his report to media, bishops of various denominations, members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but without success. Many of those he spoke to did not believe him, or supposed that his testimony was much exaggerated or was propaganda from the Polish government in exile. It is possible, however, that Karski's descriptions influenced FDR to create a War Refugee Board several months later in January of 1944.

In 1944 Karski published 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 WWII.

Post-War Career

After the war Karski was unable to return to communist-ruled Poland and made his home in the United States and began his studies at Georgetown University, where he received a PhD in 1952. He taught at Georgetown 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 1954, he became a citizen of the United States. In 1985, he published the academic study The Great Powers and Poland.

His attempts at stopping the Holocaust were forgotten. It was not until 1978 that Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah re-discovered Karski's wartime service. In 1994, E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski published Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. After 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 died in Washington, D.C..

Honors

In honour of his efforts on behalf of Polish Jews, Karski was made an honorary citizen of Israel in 1994. In Jerusalem a tree bearing his name was planted in 1982 in the Alley of the Righteous Among the Nations. In 1998 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Georgetown University, Oregon State University, Baltimore Hebrew College, Hebrew College of America, Warsaw University, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, and University of Łódź all awarded him honorary doctorates. He has been, and continues to be, recognized at Georgetown as one of the most highly notable figures in the institution's 20th century history.

Notes

Sometimes the date is incorrectly given as 24 April, after his false wartime documents.
Karski himself identified the camp as Bełżec death camp in his book published in the USA during the war, even though he knew at the time that it was not Bełżec. However, the descriptions he gave are incompatible with what is known about Bełżec and his biographers Wood and Jankowski later proposed that Karski had actually rather been in the Izbica Lubelska "sorting camp". Many historians have accepted this theory, as did Karski himself.

Reference

External links

Excerpts from biography of Karski and audio of his recollections

Jan Karski | Jan Karski | יאן קרסקי | Jan Karski | Jan Karski

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