Jan Karski

Jan Karski, born Jan Kozielewski in Łódź in 1914, was a twenty five year old Polish Foreign Service cadet at the time of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. He was captured by the Soviets, escaped from a Soviet prisoner of war transport in November 1939, returned to German-occupied Warsaw, and joined the Polish underground. From 1940 onwards he was one of the Polish Home Army’s principal couriers, carrying messages and intelligence reports between the underground command in Warsaw and the Polish government-in-exile, first in Paris and then in London. He made several round trips on foot and by train across occupied Europe between 1940 and 1942. He was caught by the Slovak police in summer 1940 and tortured by the Gestapo at Nowy Sącz in southern Poland; he survived after an escape arranged by the Home Army. The mission for which he is now remembered was his fourth, in autumn 1942.

The Polish underground in autumn 1942 wanted to send a courier to London with a comprehensive report on the German extermination of European Jewry, which had reached its peak in summer and autumn 1942 with the Aktion Reinhard killings at Treblinka, Sobibor and Belżec, the deportation of around three hundred thousand Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka in July, September 1942, and the corresponding operations across the rest of occupied Poland. The Polish Home Army leadership, including the underground command of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party, asked Karski before his departure to inspect both the inside of the Warsaw ghetto and a German camp, in order to be able to provide London with first-hand testimony. Karski entered the Warsaw ghetto twice in late August or early September 1942, escorted by Bund leaders Leon Feiner and Menachem Kirshenbaum through a tunnel under one of the ghetto walls, and observed the conditions there at first hand. He then visited what he had been told was the death camp at Belżec, in southeastern Poland; he was disguised in a borrowed Ukrainian guard’s uniform and entered the camp grounds with the help of a corrupted local guard. The exact site has been disputed in the postwar literature; he probably visited a transit camp at Izbica Lubelska or a sorting facility related to Belżec rather than the killing facility itself, but the conditions he saw, of starving Jewish prisoners being beaten and loaded onto cattle cars for onward transport to the gas chambers, were sufficient to confirm what the Polish Home Army had been reporting.

Karski left occupied Poland in October 1942 with a cache of microfilm documentation, including the Bund’s report on the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, the Polish Home Army’s reports on the Aktion Reinhard camps, and the appeals of the Polish-Jewish underground for Allied action. He travelled across Germany on forged papers as a Polish forced labourer, into France, across the Pyrenees on foot, into Spain, and from Gibraltar by air to London. He arrived in London in late November 1942 and presented his report to the Polish government-in-exile, to the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in person, and to a large number of British politicians, journalists and intellectuals over the following months. He travelled to the United States in summer 1943 and presented the report to President Roosevelt at the White House on 28 July 1943, to Justice Felix Frankfurter at the Supreme Court (whose response, that he could not believe Karski’s account, has become famous), to Cardinal Spellman in New York, and to a wide range of senior American officials and journalists.

The Allied response was effectively no response. Eden allowed the Polish government-in-exile to issue the Polish Note of 10 December 1942, which the United Nations powers endorsed on 17 December 1942 in a joint declaration condemning the German extermination of European Jewry. The declaration committed the Allies to nothing in particular. Roosevelt’s response to Karski’s personal report was to ask about the condition of Polish horses in the German occupation. Frankfurter, in the meeting that has become a touchstone of postwar Holocaust historiography, told Karski that he was unable to believe him, with the addition that he was not saying that Karski was lying but that he was simply unable to believe what Karski was telling him. The military and diplomatic record from the period shows that the Allied governments at the highest level had received and processed Karski’s report and had decided, on the standard wartime calculation, that nothing could be done to stop the killing without diverting resources from the war effort and that the war effort itself was the only way to bring the killing to an end.

Karski continued to lecture and write in the United States during the rest of the war and after the war. His memoir, Story of a Secret State, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1944, was a wartime bestseller. He took up an academic post at Georgetown University in Washington in 1952 and taught East European history and Soviet politics there until 1992. He died in Washington in July 2000 at the age of eighty six. He had received the Order of the White Eagle of Poland in 1995 and was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1982. He was made an honorary citizen of Israel in 1994. The Republic of Poland and the State of Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have all dedicated public monuments to him in the past twenty years. The standard summary of his case in the postwar literature is that he had told the Allied governments what was happening and that the Allied governments had not, on the whole, listened.

See also

Sources

  • Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, Houghton Mifflin, 1944; reissued, Penguin, 2011
  • E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, John Wiley, 1994
  • Andrew Roberts, Karski’s Mission: To Stop the Holocaust, Wallach Family Papers, ongoing
  • Yad Vashem, file on Jan Karski, Righteous Among the Nations, 1982
  • The National Archives, Kew, FO 371 series on the Polish Note of December 1942
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Karski meeting transcript, 28 July 1943