Today is the 110th anniversary of Jan Karski’s birth. He entered through the camp gates and saw hell on earth. He appealed to the great consciences of this world to intervene and stop the murder taking place in occupied Poland.
Jan Karski (Jan Kozielewski) was born on April 24, 1914, in Łódź. He graduated from the Faculty of Law, Diplomacy Studies, and the Officer Cadet School in interwar Poland. After the outbreak of the war, he was taken prisoner, but he managed to escape and take up underground activities. Due to his excellent memory and knowledge of foreign languages, he was entrusted with the duties of a political emissary of the Polish Underground State authorities.
One of his main tasks was to inform the Allies about the tragic situation of the Jewish population under German occupation. Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto twice in 1942 by the Jewish underground to witness the horrendous conditions and report to the outside world.
In the ghetto and the Izbica transit camp, Karski witnessed starvation, murder and the transfer of Jews to death camps, and he wrote detailed reports about everything he saw. He met with leaders all over the world, including Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, as well as civic leaders, journalists and members of the film industry, to tell them about the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate all European Jews.
However, the emissary’s dramatic appeals to save the Jewish nation did not yield any results—most of the interlocutors did not believe his reports or ignored them. The truth came to light only during the film “Shoah” production 1978. Jan Kozielewski—this was his name before he adopted the pseudonym Karski—repeatedly performed secret diplomatic missions during World War II, transporting reports from the occupied Polish lands to the West.
After the war, Jan Karski decided to remain in exile in the United States.
Karski received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University. Two years later, he became a U.S. citizen. After receiving his doctorate, Karski taught at Georgetown for 40 years, focusing on East European affairs, comparative government, and international affairs. He also went on numerous international lecture tours, sponsored by the State Department, and testified before Congress on numerous occasions about Eastern Europe. He received honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, Oregon State University, Baltimore Hebrew College, Hebrew College of America, Warsaw University, Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, and Lodz University. In 2002, a monument of Karski was unveiled at Georgetown University.
Karski wrote the book, Story of a Secret State, in 1944. Later, he wrote, Shoah, a Biased Vision of the Holocaust (1987) and The Great Powers and Poland, 1919-1945: From Versailles to Yalta.
Jan Karski recorded his testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation in 1995. His interviewer was prominent Holocaust survivor Renee Firestone.
In the last twenty years of his life, Jan Karski returned to his “unfinished mission,” repeatedly speaking at meetings in America, Israel, and Poland about the mass extermination of the Jewish population during the war and his attempts to interest the world in this drama.
Karski was made an honorary citizen of Israel in 1994. He said, “This is the proudest and the most meaningful day in my life. Through the honorary citizenship of the State of Israel, I have reached the spiritual source of my Christian faith. In a way, I also became a part of the Jewish community… And now I, Jan Karski, by birth Jan Kozielewski – a Pole, an American, a Catholic – have also become an Israeli. Yad Vashem recognized Karski as one of the Righteous Among the Nations even though he did not save any Jews. He was honored “because he had risked his life to alert the world to the murder” and “incurred enormous risk in penetrating the Warsaw ghetto and a camp.” His contribution was recognized as exceptional. “While other rescuers had taken the difficult decision to leave the side of the bystanders, not to remain silent and to stand up and act, Karski, after he reached the West, brought this dilemma to the doorstep of the free world’s leaders.” A tree was planted bearing his name in Yad Vashem’s Valley of the Righteous Among the Nations.
In 2012, the Polish Senate posthumously honored Karski as a World War II hero for working to reveal details of the Nazi genocide in Poland. U.S. President Barack Obama posthumously honored Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially laudable contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
Jan Karski died July 13, 2000, in Washington, D.C.
Sources: The Life of Jan Karski, Jewish Virtual Library
