Polish World War II resistance movement fighter
Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski, 24 June 1914 – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.
Emigrating to the United States after the war, Karski completed a doctorate and taught for decades at Georgetown University in international relations and Polish history. He lived in Washington, D.C., until the end of his life. Karski did not speak publicly about his wartime missions until 1981 when he was invited as a speaker to a conference on the liberation of the camps. Karski was featured in Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film "Shoah" (1985), about the Holocaust, based on oral interviews with Jewish and Polish survivors. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Karski was honored by the new Polish government, other European nations, and the US for his wartime role.
Early life.
Jan Karski was born Jan Romuald Kozielewski on 24 June 1914 in Łódź, Poland. Karski was born on St John's Day, and named Jan (the Polish equivalent of John), following the Polish custom of naming children after the saint(s) of their birthday. His baptismal record—in error—listed 24 April as his birthdate, as Karski explained later in interviews on several occasions (see Waldemar Piasecki's biography of Karski, "One Life", as well as published interviews with his family).
Karski had two brothers and one sister. Among his sibling was Marian Kozielewski, a police inspector in Warsaw. The children were raised as Catholics and Karski remained a Catholic throughout his life. His father died when he was young, and the family struggled financially. Karski grew up in a multi-cultural neighborhood, where a majority of the populace was Jewish.
After military training at the school for mounted artillery officers in Włodzimierz Wołyński, he graduated with a First in the Class of 1936 and was ordered to the 5th Regiment of Mounted Artillery, the same unit where Colonel Józef Beck, later Poland's Foreign Affairs Minister, served.
Karski completed his diplomatic apprenticeship between 1935 and 1938 at various posts in Romania (twice), Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, and joined the diplomatic service. After completing and gaining a First in Grand Diplomatic Practice, on 1 January 1939 he started work in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
World War II.
During the Polish September Campaign, Karski's 5th Regiment was part of the Kraków Cavalry Brigade, under General Zygmunt Piasecki, a unit of the "Armia Kraków" defending the area between Zabkowice and Częstochowa. After the Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski on 10 September 1939, some units, including Karski's 1st Battery, 5th Regiment, tried to reach Hungary but were captured by the Red Army between 17 and 20 September. Karski was held prisoner in the Kozielszczyna camp (presently in Ukraine). He successfully concealed his true rank of second lieutenant and, after a uniform exchange, was identified by the NKVD commander as a private. He was transferred to the Germans as a person born in Łódź, which was incorporated into the Third Reich, and thus escaped the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets.
Resistance.
In November 1939 Karski was among POWs on a train bound for a POW camp in the General Government zone, a part of Poland that had not been fully incorporated into The Third Reich. He escaped and made his way to Warsaw. There he joined the SZP ("Służba Zwycięstwu Polski")—the first resistance movement in occupied Europe, organized by General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski, the predecessor to ZWZ, later the Home Army (AK).
About that time Karski (until then, Kozielewski) adopted the "nom de guerre", Jan Karski, which he later made his legal name. Other names used by him during World War II included Piasecki, Kwaśniewski, Znamierowski, Kruszewski, Kucharski, and Witold. In January 1940 Karski began to organize courier missions to transport 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. Tortured, he was transported to a hospital in Nowy Sącz, from which he was smuggled out with the help of Józef Cyrankiewicz. After a short period of rehabilitation, he returned to active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the headquarters of the Polish Home Army.
In 1942, Karski was selected by Cyryl Ratajski, the Polish Government Delegate's Office at Home, to undertake a secret mission to see prime minister Władysław Sikorski in London. Karski was to contact Sikorski and various other Polish politicians and brief them on Nazi atrocities in occupied Poland. In order to gather evidence, Karski met Bund activist Leon Feiner. He was twice smuggled by the Jewish underground into the Warsaw Ghetto in order to directly observe what was happening to Polish Jews.
My job was just to walk. And observe. And remember. The odour. The children. Dirty. Lying. I saw a man standing with blank eyes. I asked the guide: what is he doing? The guide whispered: “He’s just dying”. I remember degradation, starvation and dead bodies lying on the street. We were walking the streets and my guide kept repeating: “Look at it, remember, remember” And I did remember. The dirty streets. The stench. Everywhere. Suffocating. Nervousness.
Disguised as a Ukrainian camp guard (although in some of his writings Karski stated he was disguised as an Estonian guard, for security and political reasons) he also visited a "Durchgangslager" ('transit camp') for Bełżec death camp located in the town of Izbica Lubelska, midway between Lublin and Bełżec. While Karski accurately reported the location in his initial reports, written in 1943, in his book published in the USA during the war, Karski identified the camp as the Bełżec death camp, which has led to some confusion among historians. According to Thomas Wood and Stanislaw Jankowski, Karski was initially told he was going to be taken to see Bełżec and in his book, Karski was referring to the overall system of murder centered on Bełżec rather than the camp itself.
Reporting Nazi atrocities to the Western Allies.
Starting in 1940, Karski reported to the Polish, British, and US governments on the situation in Poland, especially on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi extermination of Polish Jews. He smuggled out of Poland microfilm with further information from the underground movement on the extermination of European Jews in German-occupied Poland. His reports were transcribed and translated by Walentyna Stocker, the personal secretary and interpreter for Sikorski. Based on Karski's microfilm, Polish Foreign Minister Count Edward Raczyński provided the Allies with one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the Nazi Holocaust. Raczyński's Note, addressed to the governments of the United Nations on 10 December 1942, was later published along with other documents in a widely distributed leaflet entitled "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland".
Karski met with Polish politicians in exile including the prime minister, as well as members of political parties such as the Socialist Party, National Party, Labor Party, People's Party, Jewish Bund and Poalei Zion. He also spoke to the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed account of what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec.
Karski also traveled to the United States, where on 28 July 1943 he met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office, the first eyewitness to tell Roosevelt of the situation in Poland and the Jewish Holocaust. Roosevelt asked no questions about the Jews. Karski met with many other government and civic leaders in the United States, including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Cordell Hull, William Joseph Donovan, and Rabbi Stephen Wise. Karski presented his report to media, bishops of various denominations (including Cardinal Samuel Stritch), members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but without result, as most people could not comprehend the scale of extermination that he recounted. But Karski's accounts of the problems of stateless people and their vulnerability to murder helped inspire the formation of the War Refugee Board, changing US governmental policy from neutrality to support for war refugees and civilians in Europe, and after the war, inspiring the creation of the Office of High Commissioner for Refugees.
In 1944, Karski published "Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State" (a selection was featured in "Collier's" magazine six weeks before the book's publication).
According to historian Adam Puławski, Karski's main mission as a courier was to alert the government-in-exile of the conflicts within Polish underground movements. He discussed the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation as part of that account, almost incidentally. Without diminishing Karski's contributions, Puławski notes that facts about the Holocaust were available to the Allies for at least a year and a half before Karski met with Roosevelt, thus saying that his mission was primarily to report on the Holocaust is in error.
Life in the United States.
At the war's end, Karski remained in the United States in Washington, D.C. He began graduate studies at Georgetown University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1952. In 1954, Karski became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Karski taught Eastern European affairs, comparative government, and international affairs at Georgetown University for 40 years. In 1985, he published the academic study "The Great Powers and Poland", based on research during a Fulbright fellowship in 1974 to his native Poland.
Karski's 1942 report on the Holocaust and the London Polish government's appeal to the United Nations were briefly recounted by Walter Laqueur in his history "The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's Final Solution" (1980).
Karski did not speak publicly about his wartime mission until 1981 when he was invited by activist Elie Wiesel to serve as keynote speaker at the International Liberators Conference in Washington, D.C.
French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann interviewed Karski at length in 1978, as part of his preparation for his documentary "Shoah", but the film was not released until 1985. Lanzmann had asked participants not to make other public statements during that time, but Karski got a release for the conference. The nine-and-a-half hour film included a total of 40 minutes of testimony by Karski, an excerpt from the first of two days of Lanzmann interviewing Karski. It ends with Karski saying that he made his report to leaders. Lanzman later said that, on the second day of interviews, Karski recounted in detail his meetings with Roosevelt and other high US officials. Lanzman said that the tone and style of Karski's second interview were so different, and the interview so long, that it did not fit with his vision of the film and was thus not used. Unhappy with how he was presented in the film, Karski published an article, later a book, "Shoah, a Biased Vision of the Holocaust" (1987), in the French journal "Kultura". He argued for another documentary to include his missing testimony and also to show more of the help given to Jews by many Poles (some are now recognized by Israel as the Polish Righteous among the Nations).
Following the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, Karski's wartime role was officially acknowledged by the new government. He was awarded 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 1994, E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski published a biography, "Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust". They noted that Karski had urged the production of another documentary to correct what he thought was the bias in Lanzmann's "Shoah."
During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995, Karski discussed the Allies' failure to rescue most of the Jews 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