[Written in 2011]
On July 15 2000, an obituary appeared in the New York Times:
“Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West about Holocaust. Jan Karski, a liaison officer of the Polish underground who infiltrated both the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp and then carried the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to a mostly disbelieving West, died on Thursday in Washington. Mr. Karski, a retired professor of history at Georgetown University, was 86 years old.”
The Making of a Hero
Jan Kozielewski, was born on the 24th April 1914, the youngest of eight children: seven boys and a girl. His family lived in a tenement house at 71 Kilinskiego Street, in a mixed Christian-Jewish neighbourhood of Łodź, Poland. His father Stefan had a small tannery and leather goods manufacturing business, and his mother Walentyna, a religious Catholic, was a homemaker. Jan hardly knew his father, who died while he was still a young child. His older brother, Marian, acted as a father figure and had a great influence on the young Jan. Marian rose to become the Chief of Police in Warsaw, and he used his connections to guide his youngest brother in the right direction. After having passed his secondary school (Gymnazium) final examination, the “Matura” in 1931, Jan went to the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now Lvov and in the Ukraine), where he graduated from the Legal and Diplomatic department, receiving his MA in 1935. After continuing his education as a sort of apprentice diplomat in different European Polish embassies and consulates, he was hoping to become a professional diplomat. Jan had an aptitude to pick up languages and he managed to become fluent in most European languages. Just as the War broke out, he was offered a position with the Diplomatic Service, but unfortunately, he could not take it up because at the same time he was called up to the Polish Army.
Lieutenant Kozielewski joined the elite Fifth Horse Artillery, attached to a cavalry brigade. The outbreak of World War II, 1st September 1939, found Kozielewski in Oświęcim (a town that later gained infamy as Auschwitz), where his unit was based. This Army base was inherited from the Austro-Hungarian Army after the First World War. The Base came under heavy German bombardment. The explosions made the horses nervous and they bolted. The soldiers were running around in panic. As German onslaught seemed unstoppable, Lieutenant Kozielewski and his men withdrew eastward. On 17th September, they reached the easternmost Polish town of Tarnopol (today in the Ukraine and renamed Ternopil) on the Polish Soviet border, where they were taken prisoner by the Red Army. The Russians transported them deep inside the Soviet Union to Kolshchina in central Ukraine, southeast of Kiev. Here he exchanged clothes and boots with a private, to conceal his identity. As one who was born in Łodź, a town at this point a part of the Reich (renamed by the Germans Litzmannstadt), he was now a German, so he volunteered to be exchanged. The Soviets handed him over to the Germans during an exchange of prisoners.
Unfortunately, he just exchanged captors. Instead of being imprisoned by the Russians, he became a prisoner of the Third Reich. In both Russia and Germany, POWs had to work for their meagre food. In November 1939, he managed to escape from the cattle train taking prisoners to work from one of the camps. His mates had lifted him to the narrow ventilation inlet of the cattle truck and being thin, he managed to wriggle through and jump out. Kozielewski made his way to Warsaw and joined the Union of Armed Struggle (UAS), one of many underground organisations that sprung up after the German occupation. In 1941, the Union of Armed Struggle was renamed the “Home Army” and was recognised as part of the Polish Armed Forces. The UAS decided that because of his knowledge of languages and because he was in excellent physical shape, a good equestrian and a marvellous skier, he should be made a courier. About that time, he adopted the nom de guerre of Jan Karski, which later became his legal name. He had other noms de guerre too, including Witold, Piasecki, Kwaśniewski, Znamierowski, Kruszewski and Kucharski.
In January 1940, Karski started organising his first courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish government in exile based in Paris. He was to go to France and make contact with the Polish Government in exile there, a government recognised by France. He passed through to Slovakia where he joined the army of refugees crossing in to Hungary (at this time, the Germans did not yet occupy Hungary and although very anti-Semitic, Jews were relatively safe).
Karski made several secret trips between France, Britain and Poland. Always risking his life, many times crossing enemy lines between occupied Poland and the West. During one such mission in July 1940, in the Tatra Mountains, in the town of Demjata in Slovakia, one of his contacts betrayed him to the Gestapo. Severely tortured, the Gestapo placed him in a hospital under armed guards in Nowy Sącz in Poland, a mid-sized town south-east of Kraków, from where the partisans rescued him. After a period of rehabilitation, he returned to active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Headquarters of the Home Army.
On Yom Kippur (Jewish Day of Atonement), 12th October 1940, the announcement was made that “Jewish residential quarters” were to be set up in Warsaw. This Ghetto would comprise of 2.4% of the city’s land, but would contain 30% of the city’s population. The Germans moved the Christians out, and the Jews from other parts of the City and nearby villages were forced into the Ghetto - all together about 600,000 people. They were forced to live and starve in very crowded conditions, without heating or clothing. By mid July 1942, when the first mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto commenced, more than 100,000 Jews had already died. That summer as many as 10,000 Jews were taken each day to the Umschlagplatz, a square in the Ghetto, where they were forced to board cattle trucks for the short journey to Treblinka, where 850,000 Jews were murdered mostly by carbon monoxide gas poisoning. The more sophisticated Zyklon B came later and elsewhere. Because of the shortage of accommodation in Warsaw, as a result of extensive bombing, as the Ghetto emptied, Poles were moved in to some of the vacant properties, making sections of the Ghetto progressively smaller.
In the summer of 1942, Cyryl Ratajski, the Polish Government’s Delegate at Home, prepared Karski for a further mission to the Allied Governments and to the Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski in London. Karski carried messages and information between the Polish underground and the Polish Government in exile. He was also approached by the former leaders of the Warsaw Jewish community, requesting to inform the Allies of all that was done to the Jews in Poland, with desperate pleas for help. To see the treatment meted out to the Jews for himself, in September or at the beginning of November 1942, he and Leon Feiner, a Jewish Socialist leader acting as his guide, smuggled themselves into the Warsaw Ghetto where they saw emaciated and starving people, listless infants and older children with expressionless eyes. Karski saw from an apartment window, two pudgy teenage boys in the uniforms of the Hitler Jugend, hunting Jews for sport, cheering and laughing when one of their rifle shots struck its target and brought screams of agony. They saw corpses lying on the pavements covered with newspapers only. It was explained to Jan Karski that when someone passed away, the German Authorities charged the relatives burial fees, money they did not have. Stripping the dead naked provided the living with some clothing and the Germans could not identify the corpse.
Disguised as a Ukrainian militiaman, Jan also sneaked into the Izbica transit camp near Lublin in eastern Poland. In 1940/41 Izbica was the collection point of many Jews from Łodź, Główna , Kalisz, Koło and Lublin. Here he saw an open space “completely covered by a dense, pulsating, throbbing, noisy human mass of starved, stinking, gesticulating, insane” Jews. There were guards among this human mass, beating, torturing and kicking. A line of cattle trucks was waiting in the background. The Ukrainians were busy lining the cars with a thick layer of quicklime (calcium oxide). When a German officer gave a signal, the Ukrainians started to herd the Jews toward the cars. All hell broke loose. The Ukrainians used extreme cruelty, hitting the people with clubs and rifle butts, forcing them into the waiting boxcars. When a car was full, the dead ones were hurled inside over their heads and then the guards forced the doors shut, crushing and braking limbs caught in the doors. Once inside, as liquid dropped on it, the quicklime burnt their feet and the fumes burnt their skin and lungs. Karski thought all this train had to do was just remain stationary for a day or two or move to a different spot and just wait. The quicklime, hunger, thirst and crowded conditions would do its job and in no time, they all would be dead. However, the train moved on and anyone surviving this journey would meet their end in a gas chamber.
In late autumn of 1942, Karski went to London, arriving towards the end of November with two different messages. One message was from the Polish underground movement, the other from two Jewish leaders: Leon Feiner, a Bundist (a Jewish socialist movement) and Adolf Berman. They urged him to inform as many Allied leaders as he could about the mass extermination of Polish Jewry and to take to the Allies the following proposal:
Preventing the extermination of the Jews should be declared an official goal of the Allies.
Allied propaganda should be used to inform the German people of the war crimes taking place and to publicise the names of the officials taking part.
The Allies should appeal to the German people to bring pressure on Hitler’s regime to stop the slaughter.
The Allies should declare that if the genocide continued and the German masses did nothing to stop it, the German people would be held collectively responsible.
Finally, if nothing else worked, the Allies should carry out reprisals by bombing German cultural sites and executing Germans in Allied hands who still professed loyalty to Hitler.
Western Incredulity and Indifference
Jan Karski started his journey out of Poland in October 1942, not to return for forty-two years. After a long and tortuous journey, he arrived in neutral Spain and then sailed to British Gibraltar. On 25th November 1942, he landed at a Royal Air Force base north of London. Just as any other refugee, the British incarcerated Jan Karski at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in southwest London, where MI5 agents wanted to de-brief him. As a diplomat of a friendly government, he refused to co-operate and demanded to see the Polish Prime Minister, General Sikorski, saying he had urgent and important messages for him and him alone. After much diplomatic wrangling, Karski was released and he made his report to the Polish P.M.
Skarski’s was not the first report about the Holocaust reaching the west. Right at the beginning of the war, there were rumours about the crimes committed against the Jewish people by Germany. It was impossible to keep this enormous homicidal machinery a secret for long. There were accurate reports prepared by the Bund and delivered in London via a Swedish diplomat. Gerhard Riegner, an official of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, cabled to Jewish and other leaders in America and Britain, a summary of his discussions with a reliable German informant. According to this informant the Führer’s intention was the extermination all the Jews under his rule. Nobody showed any interest!
On 2nd December 1942, Karski had his first formal meeting. He met Szmul Zygielbojm, representing the Bund, and Ignacy Schwarzbart, a pre-war member of the Polish Parliament with ties to the World Jewish Congress (WJC) (Jewish members of the Polish National Council). On reading Jan’s report ahead of the presentation, Schwarzblat, in great shock, sent a telegram to the WJC reporting, in detail, the atrocities that were taking place against the Jews in Poland. Jan also had a separate message from Feiner of the Bund in Poland, to Zygelbojm. Feiner wanted the Jews in the free world to demonstrate and go on hunger strike to the end if necessary, until the Western Powers fulfilled the five points.
“We are dying here. Let them die too!” was Feiner’s message. Zygelbojm thought Feiner’s demand impossible to achieve. “They would simply bring in two policemen and have me dragged away.” Zygelbojm read a speech on the BBC a week later, saying,
“It will actually be a shame to go on living… if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in history.”
Szmul Zygelbojm committed suicide on 12th May 1943.
Karski’s next assignment was a meeting with the foreign secretary of His Majesty’s government, Anthony Eden. When Karski mentioned the plight of Jews during his presentation, Eden interrupted him saying, “The Polish report on the atrocities has already reached us” and “the matter will take its proper course”. Karski felt he had to see Churchill face-to-face, so that the prime minister should hear about the German atrocities directly, but Eden barred this meeting. On the second meeting with the Polish envoy, Eden introduced Lord Selborne (the man in charge of the Special Operation Executive, the organisation monitoring underground activities in occupied Europe), who wanted to know more about the Soviet-Polish relationship. The Jewish problem did not interest him. Nevertheless, Karski managed to put in a request for hard currency and gold to enable some Jews to bribe themselves out of their hopeless situation. His Lordship replied: “No prime minister, no political leader will comply with this kind of demand. If we sent gold and hard currency… It would become public. No leader can take the responsibility for subsidising the Nazi regime."
The British flatly refused all the proposals brought by Karski, saying that this would play in to Goebbels’ hands. This declaration would prove to the Nazi propaganda that this War was “provoked by the Jews, managed by the Jews on behalf of the Jews”. The British officials were also worried that their own population would say, “Look what is going on, and maybe Goebbels is right”. There were other excuses too. It would not have been right to mention the Jews specifically because the French, the Dutch, the Poles and especially the Russians, also suffered terribly. As for point number 5, the argument was that if the Allies bombarded German cultural sites, the Germans could do the same to us. Finally, these bombings would have gone against the rules of war. Relieving Jewish suffering was not high on the Allied agenda. Because mass murder on this scale was unprecedented in history, the British leadership, people like Anthony Eden or Lord Selborne of the Conservatives, or Alfred Greenwood of the Labour Party, just could not believe Karski’s story. They thought he had exaggerated the truth or just was spreading blatant war propaganda. Karski later wrote,
“In February 1943, I reported to Anthony Eden... He said that Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees.”
Karski struck up a friendship with the Polish-Jewish artist Feliks Topolski, famous for his portrayals of the British war effort. Topolski introduced him to the cream of British intellectuals, like Penguin publisher Allen Lane, the publisher Victor Gollancz, and to Arthur Koestler. Koestler scripted a BBC broadcast about the atrocities described by Karski. His novel “Arrival and Departure”, on the subject of genocide, is based on Karski’s story.
Before his return to Poland, the Polish government-in-exile sitting in London, sent Karski to the US to publicise the problem of Soviet desire to incorporate eastern Poland in to the Soviet Union. In July 1943, Karski arrived in the United States. Polish embassy contacts set up a secret meeting with President Roosevelt. Karski left this meeting believing that the Allies had already decided to let Stalin take his pick in Eastern Europe. After mentioning the Jewish plight, the President was not moved, according to Jan Karski (actually he was very much moved). Karski also made presentations to the media, bishops of various denominations, members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but he simply could not get through: he was not believed, or it was presumed that he had exaggerated and his information was war propaganda for the Polish government. Therefore, Karski was unable to convince the Allies to take military actions against death camp targets. Anthony Eden in Britain, President Roosevelt in the US, and even prominent American Jewish leaders, all listened politely, but would not take in this terrible story. Their first priority remained the defeat the Third Reich, rather than the rescue of European Jewry, arguing that an Allied victory over the Nazis would liberate the Jews too. During his Wallenberg lecture years later, Karski said that if there were one thing he had learnt from his dealing with Western leaders, it was that:
“The common humanity of people, not the power of governments, is the only real protector of human rights. I learnt also that people in power are more than able to disregard their individual consciences if they come to the conclusion that it stands in the way of what they see as their official duty.”
Karski’s book, “Story of a Secret State”, was published in 1944. It detailed the Polish resistance, recounted his exploits, and also described the realities of
the Holocaust. It became a best-seller in the United States. They wanted to turn the book into a movie, 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 Peacetime
Karski was disgusted when, after the war, Allied leaders began expressing shock and surprise at the discovery of the Nazi death camps. He would not talk about it at all for years until Elie Wiesel, in 1981, prevailed on him to speak out.
Jan Karski settled in the US. He continued his studies at Georgetown University, Washington, where on receiving his PhD in 1952, he was offered a professorship in East European affairs, comparative government and international affairs. For 40 years, he taught there, becoming one of the most celebrated members of its faculty. He also lectured in the Pentagon. In 1954, he took up US citizenship.
When he felt the time had come, he married the daughter of a South American diplomat, but it was dissolved within two years. In 1950, he was invited to attend a function for a Washington synagogue where he met a dancer, Pola Nirenska. She came from a religious Jewish family. Born as Pola Nirensztajn in 1910, her parents disowned her for choosing to become a dancer. After a courtship, Pola and Jan married and Jan proved to be a doting husband. They had no children.
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 “Shoa”, re-discovered Karski’s wartime record.
In 1982, in the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem, a tree bearing his name was planted. In recognition of his efforts on behalf of Polish Jews, Karski was made an honorary citizen of Israel in 1994.
After the fall of Communism, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of University of Łódz, and the White Eagle Order, the highest Polish distinction.
He had many more awards, too many to mention. Jan Karski died on 13th July 2000, aged 86, at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Statues have been erected honouring him 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.
Poland learnt nothing from the War. A few Jews who survived returned to their towns and villages but there were sporadic anti-Jewish episodes all over Poland, blaming the Jews for supposedly co-operating with the Soviets. On 1st July 1946, in the town of Kielce, one of the citizens accused the Jews of killing young boys for their blood and hiding their bodies in the cellar of the Kibbutz (a building containing a Jewish co-operative). Although there was no basement in the building, there was a police investigation, followed by an outbreak of violence against the Jews of Kielce, perpetrated by the communist police, soldiers, and an angry mob. This resulted in 42 murders and 40 injuries, out of about 200 Holocaust survivors. The manifestations of anti-Semitism and the terrible violence, led to the flight of many Holocaust survivors from Poland. Poland has the dubious distinction of having a blood libel in post-war 20th century. Poland became a fiercely anti-Semitic country without actually having Jews living there.
Recommended further readings:
Story of a Secret State
By Jan Karski
Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust
By E. Thomas Wood & Stanislaw M. Jankowski
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