Jan Karski [nee Jan Kozielewski in Lódz, Poland] is known to history as the man who tried to stop the Holocaust. His gripping eye-witness account of the Final Solution to eliminate the Jews of Europe which he carried as the emissary of the Polish Underground State to Allied leaders across Nazi-occupied Europe, and their reaction, are well known, and the subject of much debate in numerous histories of WWII. If British and American leaders, including president Franklin Delano Roosevelt with whom Karski met at the White House in 1943, and Winston Churchill, chose to do nothing to help the Jews because of pure pragmatism and the desire to win the war as expeditiously as possible, Jewish leaders of the time also experienced shock and disbelief.
The plight of the Jews loomed large in Karski’s report because of the unprecedented scale of inhumanity that Karski had personally witnessed smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and posing as a Ukrainian guard in the transit camp Izbica to the Belzec death camp. Still the report must have been overwhelming and difficult to accept for its horrific human implications, with the war experience traumatizing much of war-torn Europe for many years after the war was over, especially in the bloodlands of Central and Eastern Europe where we now know the greatest atrocities happened. According to Timothy Snyder, of the seventeen million that were murdered during WWII, fourteen million were murdered in the lands between Germany and Russia, or Poland and its former territories [Bloodlands 2010].
What made Karski so remarkable were his perseverance and his modesty. He did not crack; he did not whine or touted his own horn as others had done; he just moved on. Karski was a realist but he also was resolute about what he had to do, even if others didn’t. In his pragmatism perhaps he most resembled Józef Pilsudski, a man he admired for all their differences. He was a decisive man, a citizen soldier, who soldiered because he was called to duty to serve a cause far greater than himself; and Karski was a deeply moral man for whom the difference between right and wrong was clear, if not always simple.
Karski wasn’t trying to save the Jews because they were his people, Poles or Jews, but because they were fellow human beings. He knew very well even before he undertook his mission that persuading the Allies to hold all the Germans responsible for the atrocities was an unreasonable demand, but undertook the impossible mission nonetheless. For having grasped the enormity of the horror and having seen and lived through that bloody history, Karski was able to maintain his mental balance and basic human compassion; and most admirably, he chose to act on behalf of those whom history had abandoned and who could have just as easily been forgotten.
Karski went on to unmask the Nazi atrocities and write the best seller Story of the Secret State in 1944, which included his personal accounts of what he saw. Karski did not look for glory or even imagined himself as having done something extraordinary; after all he did not save a single soul personally. He did what he had done because it was the right thing to do. This act of empathy makes him the precursor of the growing global consensus on human rights in our time shaped by the Holocaust, the fall of Nazi Germany and the Soviet terror machine, as well as the atrocities we have witnessed since in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere.
It is not that Karski’s mission had no impact, or did not move anyone. American policy towards Jewish refugees did change after his meeting with FDR even if it probably was too little too late. Cordell Hull, who arranged the meeting with the president after reading Karski’s report, incorporated Karski’s ideas about the plight of stateless refugees in his draft of the UN Charter which he began drafting in March 1943. The plight of the Jews, Karski argued, was aggravated by their stateless condition.
A people without a nation are defenseless with no one to speak for them. For Karski the fate of Poland would be sealed, he reasoned, if its status as a nation were to be left to Stalin’s design. In effect Karski, warned against
Yalta but his warning could just as well apply to non-Arab Darfur. Karski even as a young man was a visionary, well groomed to be a diplomat.
Anyone familiar with his biography, and there are several, including Waldemar Piasecki’s film My Mission, is struck how precarious and difficult it was to get the story of the Holocaust out to the world. Still the hardships that Karski endured as an emissary and his mission, while important, were only a small part of his life for which he is most remembered. Karski could have easily died in Kozielsk [one of the Katyn camps] at the hand of Stalin’s notorious NKVD and executed along with the other Polish officers inthe spring of 1940, had he not switched his cavalry officer’s boots with another soldier or jumped the cattle cars.
Karski was a real hero leaping naked out of Gestapo prison window into the night in Nowy Sacz to make his escape, and he eluded the Nazis as he made his perilous journey to London in 1942 across Hitler’s Reich and Vichy France to Spain. Much of Karski’s life was tragedy, with the suicides of his older brother colonel Marian Kozielewski, also a Polish war hero, and his Jewish wife, the dancer and photographer Paula Nirenska, who lost all her loved ones in the Holocaust.
Yet Karski went on to lead a productive life, wrote books, became a successful academic and a much revered teacher of many, including Bill Clinton. Just how much president Clinton appreciated his former mentor is best illustrated by his request for a moment of silence at the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David between Chairman of Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak when informed that Karski had died. The Great Powers and Poland, which Karski wrote in 1985 after his Fulbright to Poland, has been hailed as the authoritative work on the subject by the British historian Norman Davis. When he retired in 1995 from Georgetown University‘s School of Foreign Service, his replacement was former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
At Georgetown, he was known to his students as “McKarski” [after McCarthy], for being an ardent critic of Soviet Communism and naïve illusions of the New Left. Like many Polish-Americans disappointed by Yalta, Karski became a Republican, but even more importantly, had a post-ideological vision of history that looked forward to the “Spring of Nations” and the collapse of totalitarian systems in our time. In the end his students came over to his side, as Lech Walesa scaled the walls of the Gdansk shipyard to head the ten million strong Solidarity Union.
Karski welcomed Solidarity, which finally restored freedom to his homeland, met with Lech Walesa and was a fan of Jacek Kuron. He was hailed as a war hero and decorated twice for valor with Virtuti Militari, Poland‘s highest military medal, and The Order of the White Eagle, the highest civilian honor.
In the later part of his life Karski applied his wry wit to humor nations and people, to disrobe them of their illusions and to press them to own up to themselves, and their obligations to others and to the truths of history. He warned against excessive nationalism, which he knew well could easily degenerate into hateful ethnic phobias and racism.
One of the larger than life figures of the 20th century, Karski was not a publicity seeker, and perhaps for this reason, his remarkable wartime past had to be “restored to history” by the likes of Elie Wiesel, who attributed the idea for the Office of UN High Commissioner for Refugees to Jan Karski, and Claude Lanzmann, whose nine and a half hour documentary film Shoah [1985] featured Karski. Karski received numerous honors, was nominated for the Nobel Prize and formally recognized by the UN General Assembly shortly before his death, but the honor he most fancied was being declared a Jew by the Jewish state.
To him, a Catholic, it was the highest honor and a personal triumph. In his Righteous Among Nations acceptance speech he said: “And now I, Jan Karski, by birth Jan Kozielewski – a Pole, an American, a Catholic – have also become an Israeli.” Like his compatriot Thaddeus Kosciuszko before him, he became de-territorialized, a citizen of three nations.
When he died at 86 on July 13, 2000, St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington was filled with Christians and Jews and others. It was remarkable moment to hear the Kaddish recited for Jan Karski. He had lived to witness a world become more tolerant to all. It was a personal vindication of his deep faith in humanity.
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Michael Szporer is a Professor of Communications Arts and Humanities at University of Maryland University College, Member of the Board of Director of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and member of Jan Karski Society.
http://www.victimsofcommunism.org/