Prominent Poles
Jan Karski (his wartime pseudo; he was born Jan Kozielewski) WW II hero; educator, writer.
Born: June 24, 1914, in Lodz (Russian partition of Poland, now Poland)
Died: July 13, 2000, in Washington, DC
After becoming Israel's honorary citizen: "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."
Early days. He was the youngest of eight children. His father was the owner of a small leather-goods factory in Lodz. He grew up in a multi-cultural neighborhood, where the majority of the population was Jewish. Educated by the Jesuits, devout by nature, brought up in the cult of Pilsudski, he was a pretty conventional young Pole of his day. After graduating from a local school, Kozielewski studied at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwow, Poland (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 Wlodzimierz Wolynski. Kozielewski completed his education between 1936 and 1938 in different diplomatic posts in Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
World War II. In January 1939 Kozielewski started working in the Polish ministry of foreign affairs. After the outbreak of WWII, he 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, in effect escaping the Katyn massacre. 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 Polish 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, Kwasniewski, 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 Sacz, 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 Wladyslaw 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 Belzec death camp.(It is now believed that he actually saw a nearby sorting camp of Izbica). Then Karski returned to Warsaw to prepare himself for his dangerous journey to London. He was given a key whose soldered shaft contained microfilm of hundreds of documents. He went to a dentist and had several teeth pulled so that the resultant swelling could provide him with a reason for not speaking if he was stopped by Germans; he was certain his Polish-accented German would give him away. He also kept his hands out of sight, hiding the wrists that were scarred when he had tried to kill himself. Using local trains, he went to Berlin, then through Vichy, France to Spain, where after a prearranged rendezvous, he was taken to Gibraltar and then to London. He 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 Poalei Zion. In particular, Mr. Karski met with Szmuel Zygelbojm, who represented the Jewish Socialist Bund in the National Council of the Polish government-in-exile, to present the Polish Jews' urgings of active resistance. Mr. Zygelbojm listened in pain but then said, "It's impossible, utterly impossible." If he went on a hunger strike, he said, the authorities would send the police and drag him away to an institution. But he added: "I'll do everything I can do to help them. I'll do everything they ask." A few months later, on May 12, 1943, just after the Germans put down the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mr. Zygelbojm sent a letter to the president and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, and then took his own life. He also spoke to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Belzec. In 1943 in London he met the then much known journalist Arthur Koestler. He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His report was a major factor in informing the West. 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 Joseph 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 the War Refugee Board several months later in January 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.
Life in the United States. After the war Karski didn't want to return to communist-ruled Poland and made his home in the United States. He 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 1985 that Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah re-discovered Karski's wartime service. According to the book of Wood and Jankowski, Karski has written an article on the film Shoah -being published in English, French and Polish- where he asked Lanzmann to produce another documentary showing what Karski had to tell about his task towards "the West", though praising the quality of Lanzmann's Shoah despite of that omission. In 1994, E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw 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. Karski was the author of "Story of a Secret State," "The Great Powers and Poland," and was the contributor to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana, and Colliers Encyclopedia. He was married in 1965 to the 54 year old dancer and choreographer, Pola Nirenska, a Polish Jew most of whose family had perished in the Holocaust. She committed suicide in 1992. They had no children.
Honors. Karski 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). In honor 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. Statues honoring Karski have been placed in New York City at the corner of 37th Street and Madison Avenue (renamed "Jan Karski Corner") and on the grounds of Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Georgetown University, Oregon State University, Baltimore Hebrew College, Hebrew College of America, Warsaw University, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, and Lodz all awarded him honorary doctorates.
Remembering Karski. The former Foreign Minister of Poland Wladyslaw 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."
Prof. John Radzilowski wrote in A Hero for a Troubled Century Past ,Polish American Journal, August 2000 : " Karski was human, with all the failings of our species. Yet in a morally confused age, in a time of human degradation, he did something extraordinary. The free world, to its shame, did not listen to his message. Yet, his example is that we need not acquiesce to evil, whether great or small. For this reason alone, Jan Karski was a hero for the century that just ended." Jewish Virtual Library: "Jan Karski, a young, Roman Catholic Pole, tried to stop the Holocaust. His mission failed. "
References E. Thomas Wood & Stanislaw M. Jankowski (1994). Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons Inc..
Abbreviated from an article in Wikipedia which was supplemented and modified:
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