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{{Righteous Among the Nations}} |
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'''Jan Karski''' (24 June 1914{{efn|name=birth}} – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, [[Polish resistance movement in World War II|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 [[Allies of World War II|Western Allies]] about the situation in [[Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)|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. His testimony about a Nazi extermination camp he would have visited clandestinely was however questioned by [[Raul Hilberg]], a prominent [[The Holocaust|Holocaust]] scholar. |
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'''Jan Karski''' (born '''Jan Kozielewski,''' 24 June 1914{{efn|name=birth}} – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, [[Polish resistance movement in World War II|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 [[Allies of World War II|Western Allies]] about the situation in [[Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)|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. |
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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., |
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 (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. |
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Karski later stated: "I wanted to save millions, and I was not able to save one man."<ref>{{cite news |title=20. rocznica śmierci Jana Karskiego. "Ludzie nie mogą zapomnieć, co to jest Holokaust" |url=https://www.polskieradio.pl/39/156/Artykul/1107111,20-rocznica-smierci-Jana-Karskiego-Ludzie-nie-moga-zapomniec-co-to-jest-Holokaust |access-date=22 November 2020 |work=PolskieRadio.pl}}</ref> |
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==Early life== |
==Early life== |
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Jan Karski was born Jan Kozielewski on 24 June 1914 in [[Łódź]],{{efn|name=birth|Karski's date of birth is sometimes given as 24 April 1914, based on his baptismal records in Russian and subsequently shown on his official birth certificate. 24 June was confirmed by Karski's family lawyer, Dr. Wieslawa Kozielewska-Trzaska, by Karski's niece and god-daughter, and by the Jan Karski Society, an organization established shortly after his death to preserve his legacy. It is the date Karski himself used on handwritten documents, including several diplomatic dossiers at the [[League of Nations]]. |
Jan Karski was born Jan Romuald Kozielewski on 24 June 1914 in [[Łódź]],{{efn|name=birth|Karski's date of birth is sometimes given as 24 April 1914, based on his baptismal records in Russian and subsequently shown on his official birth certificate. 24 June was confirmed by Karski's family lawyer, Dr. Wieslawa Kozielewska-Trzaska, by Karski's niece and god-daughter, and by the Jan Karski Society, an organization established shortly after his death to preserve his legacy. It is the date Karski himself used on handwritten documents, including several diplomatic dossiers at the [[League of Nations]].<ref name="Małecki"/> |
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<p>24 April was the birth date shown on both the diploma for Karski's master's degree (awarded in 1935) and his certificate from the Artillery Reserve Officer Cadet School (awarded in 1936).<ref>''Jan Karski. Fotobiografia'', by Maciej Sadowski, Warsaw: Veda, 2014 |
<p>24 April was the birth date shown on both the diploma for Karski's master's degree (awarded in 1935) and his certificate from the Artillery Reserve Officer Cadet School (awarded in 1936).<ref>''Jan Karski. Fotobiografia'', by Maciej Sadowski, Warsaw: Veda, 2014 {{pn|date=September 2022}}</ref> |
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<p>In March 2014, the [[United States Senate]] adopted a resolution honoring Karski on the centennial of his birth, 24 April 2014. The resolution was withdrawn and revised to recognize Karski on 24 June 2014, according to the Polish Press Agency.<ref>{{cite web |title=World News. Archived copy |via=Internet Archive, 2014-04-28 |url=http://www.pap.pl/palio/html.run?_Instance=cms_www.pap.pl&_PageID=1&s=infopakiet&dz=swiat&idNewsComp=152195&filename=&idnews=155506&data=&status=biezace&_CheckSum=-331242185 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20140428221745/http://www.pap.pl/palio/html.run?_Instance=cms_www.pap.pl&_PageID=1&s=infopakiet&dz=swiat&idNewsComp=152195&filename=&idnews=155506&data=&status=biezace&_CheckSum=-331242185 |url-status=dead |archive-date=2014-04-28 |author=Polish Press Agency}}</ref> |
<p>In March 2014, the [[United States Senate]] adopted a resolution honoring Karski on the centennial of his birth, 24 April 2014. The resolution was withdrawn and revised to recognize Karski on 24 June 2014, according to the Polish Press Agency.<ref>{{cite web |title=World News. Archived copy |via=Internet Archive, 2014-04-28 |url=http://www.pap.pl/palio/html.run?_Instance=cms_www.pap.pl&_PageID=1&s=infopakiet&dz=swiat&idNewsComp=152195&filename=&idnews=155506&data=&status=biezace&_CheckSum=-331242185 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20140428221745/http://www.pap.pl/palio/html.run?_Instance=cms_www.pap.pl&_PageID=1&s=infopakiet&dz=swiat&idNewsComp=152195&filename=&idnews=155506&data=&status=biezace&_CheckSum=-331242185 |url-status=dead |archive-date=2014-04-28 |author=Polish Press Agency}}</ref></p> |
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<p>Karski's diplomatic passport showed his date of birth as 22 March 1912.</p>}} Poland.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20131127/KRAJSWIAT/131129618 |trans-title=Jan Karski urodził się 24 czerwca 1914 roku. Nic tego nie zmieni |title=Jan Karski was born 24 June 1914. Nothing is going to change that |date=27 November 2013 |publisher= |
<p>Karski's diplomatic passport showed his date of birth as 22 March 1912.{{fact|date=September 2022}}</p>}} Poland.<ref name="Małecki">{{cite web |url=http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20131127/KRAJSWIAT/131129618 |trans-title=Jan Karski urodził się 24 czerwca 1914 roku. Nic tego nie zmieni |title=Jan Karski was born 24 June 1914. Nothing is going to change that |date=27 November 2013 |publisher=Dziennik Wschodni|author=Patryk Małecki |location=[[Washington, D.C.]] |via=Internet Archive|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202230009/http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20131127/KRAJSWIAT/131129618 |archive-date=2 December 2013}}</ref><ref name=":1" /> Karski was born on [[Nativity of St John the Baptist|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).<ref name="Małecki"/> |
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[[File:JanKarski.handwritten.birthday.jpg|thumbnail|Jan Kozielewski's handwritten pre-WWII document showing birthdate from Lviv archives]] |
[[File:JanKarski.handwritten.birthday.jpg|thumbnail|Jan Kozielewski's handwritten pre-WWII document showing birthdate from Lviv archives]] |
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Karski had |
Karski had two brothers and one sister.{{fact|date=September 2022}} Among his sibling was {{ill|Marian Kozielewski|pl|Marian Kozielewski}}, a police inspector in Warsaw. The children were raised as Catholics and Karski remained a Catholic throughout his life.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Biskupska |first=Jadwiga |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fGtYEAAAQBAJ&dq=%22Jan+Romuald+Kozielewski%22&pg=PA160 |title=Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation |date=2022-02-17 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-316-51558-7 |pages=160 |language=en}}</ref> 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.{{fact|date=September 2022}} |
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After military training at the school for mounted artillery officers in [[Volodymyr-Volynskyi|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. |
After military training at the school for mounted artillery officers in [[Volodymyr-Volynskyi|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.{{fact|date=September 2022}} |
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Karski completed his diplomatic apprenticeship between 1935 and 1938 at various posts in Romania (twice), Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, and |
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 (Poland)|Ministry of Foreign Affairs]].{{fact|date=September 2022}} |
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==World War II== |
==World War II== |
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During the [[Polish September Campaign]], Karski's 5th Regiment was part of the [[Kraków Cavalry Brigade]], under General Zygmunt Piasecki, a unit of the ''[[Kraków Army|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 [[Kozelsk#History|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 (rank)|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.{{fact|date=September 2022}} |
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On August 23, 1939, Poland mobilized against Germany. It had confidence in its military worth (in the last six years almost half of the national budget had gone to the army) and in the guarantee that France and Great Britain had given it in the event of war with Germany.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust'', 2014 revised edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 3-4.</ref> |
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During the [[Polish September Campaign]], Kozielewski's 5th Regiment was part of the [[Kraków Cavalry Brigade]], under General Zygmunt Piasecki, a unit of the ''[[Kraków Army|Armia Kraków]]'' defending the area between Zabkowice and Częstochowa. After the [[Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski]] on 10 September 1939, some units, including Kozielewski's 1st Battery, 5th Regiment, tried to reach Hungary, but were captured by the [[Red Army]] between 17 and 20 September. Kozielewski was held prisoner in the [[Kozelsk#History|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 (rank)|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.<ref>Deroy Murdock (May 28, 2012), [https://web.archive.org/web/20120530205952/http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301080/wwii-hero-wins-presidential-medal-freedom-deroy-murdock "WWII Hero Wins Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jan Karski was the first to warn FDR about the Final Solution."], ''National Review'' Online. Internet Archive.</ref> |
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===Resistance=== |
===Resistance=== |
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[[File:Jan Karski missions en.png|upright=1.35|thumb|Jan Karski's missions]] |
[[File:Jan Karski missions en.png|upright=1.35|thumb|Jan Karski's missions]] |
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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 [[Service for Poland's Victory|SZP]] (''Służba Zwycięstwu Polski'')—the first [[resistance movement]] in occupied Europe, organized by General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski, the predecessor to [[Związek Walki Zbrojnej|ZWZ]], later the [[Armia Krajowa|Home Army]] (AK) |
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 [[Service for Poland's Victory|SZP]] (''Służba Zwycięstwu Polski'')—the first [[resistance movement]] in occupied Europe, organized by General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski, the predecessor to [[Związek Walki Zbrojnej|ZWZ]], later the [[Armia Krajowa|Home Army]] (AK). |
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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]].{{Citation needed|date=October 2010}} |
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==== The 1940 report on the territories occupied by the USSR ==== |
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At the request of [[Stanisław Kot]], Minister of the Interior of the [[Polish government-in-exile]], Karski submitted in February 1940 [[Karski's reports|reports on the situation in Poland]]. Kot's wife was Jewish, and he told Karski he was worried about her family back in Poland.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition, 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 46.</ref> |
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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 [[General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland|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.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=http://blog.europeana.eu/2019/01/jan-karski-witness-to-the-holocaust/|title=Jan Karski. Witness to the Holocaust|last=Zgierski|first=Jakub|date=2019-01-24|website=[[Europeana]] (CC By-SA)|language=en-GB|access-date=2019-01-31}}</ref> |
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One of these reports is entitled “The Situation of the Jews on Territories occupied by the USSR”. Karski writes there that, thanks to their capacity for adaptation, the Jews became flourishing in the territories in question; they have won key positions in political cells and are widely represented in various sectors, mainly commerce; but above all, they practice usury, exploitation, illegal trade, smuggling, traffic in currencies and spirits, pimping and supplying the army of occupation; the Polish population sees them as enthusiastic allies of the Communist invader, and Karski thinks that this is a correct view, but the attitude of the Jews, particularly that of Jews of modest means, seems to him understandable, given the insults that they had suffered from the Poles; however, he considers as indefensible the numerous acts of denunciation committed by Jews, sometimes members of the police, against Polish nationalist students or notable Poles, as well as the slanderous picture they paint of relations between Poles and Jews in Poland before the war; such conduct is unfortunately more common among Jews than evidence of loyalty to Poland.<ref>[[Tadeusz Piotrowski (sociologist)|Tadeusz Piotrowski]], ''Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947'', McFarland, 1998, p. 52, partially available at [https://books.google.be/books?id=hC0-dk7vpM8C&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52 Google Books]. An accurate description of the contents of this Karski report was first published by David Engel, “An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and Soviet Occupation Presented to the Polish Government-in-Exile, February 1940”, Jewish Social Studies , Flight. XLV, no. 1 (1983), p. 1-16.</ref> |
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<blockquote>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.<ref name=":0" /></blockquote> |
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==== The two contradictory reports of 1940 on the territories occupied by Germany ==== |
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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]],<ref name=wood>E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski (1994). Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons Inc. page 114; ISBN 0-471-01856-2</ref> midway between Lublin and Bełżec.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Weiss |first=Jakob |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DdeuKQEACAAJ&q=The+Lemberg+Mosaic |title=The Lemberg Mosaic |date=2010 |publisher=Alderbrook Press |isbn=978-0-9831091-1-2 |pages=409 |language=en}}</ref> 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.<ref name=wood/> |
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Karski also writes a report on the fate of the Jews in the Polish territories occupied by the Germans. According to this report, a large part of the Polish population profited from the expropriations of Jewish property, and "the Polish peasant" rejoiced at the way the Germans were ridding Poland of Jews (the mass extermination had not then begun). Karski, however, attaches to this report a version, intended for propaganda, in which the hostility of the Poles towards the Jews is replaced by a growing feeling of solidarity.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 revised edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 47-48.</ref> |
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===Reporting Nazi atrocities to the Western Allies=== |
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==== Courier missions ==== |
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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]]. |
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==== Black propaganda ==== |
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Like any resistant escaped from the clutches of the Gestapo, he was kept in virtual isolation for six or seven months (from July 1940 to January or February 1941). During this quarantine, he put his imagination at the service of [[black propaganda]] in the framework of the ''[[Operation N|Action N]]''. Presenting himself as a disappointed German, sometimes a civilian and sometimes a soldier, he wrote texts in which his leader gave him complete freedom to allege imaginary conflicts of conscience likely to demoralize the real Germans. These texts, once translated into German, were either sent to Germans by post or left in places that the occupying troops regularly frequented. Karski, for example, pretended to be loyal to Hitler but to find that his subordinates betrayed him, or he said that as a Catholic German, he was ashamed of the way his authorities treated the Jews.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 81-83.</ref><ref>Walter Laqueur, ''The Terrible Secret'', reissue, H. Holt, New York, 1998, p. 230.</ref> |
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==== Information analysis ==== |
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After his quarantine, he took part in the activities of the [[Bureau of Information and Propaganda]] of the [[Home Army]], where his task was first to analyze the publications of the various resistance groups, then the broadcasts of allied and neutral radio stations.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 revised edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 86-88.</ref> He would say in his 1944 book that his leaders, wishing to be informed seriously, wanted him not to listen to the content of the Allied broadcasts, which had a too strong propaganda character, but to help them to correct it with information from neutral countries.<ref>Jan Karski, ''Story of a Secret State'', 1944; in the Penguin 2012 edition, p. 251.</ref> He conducted this work in an apartment at ulica Czerwonego Krzyża 11 (for the location, see [https://goo.gl/maps/gH2ajY3XeH1rT1ev7 Google maps]), Warsaw. In 2016, a plaque was affixed to the building to note its significance in Karski's mission. In 2022, workers discovered a radio receiver, disguised as an electric stove, hidden under the floorboards of one of the apartments.<ref>''Thefirstnews'', "Secret WWII radio disguised as an ELECTRIC STOVE found under Warsaw apartment floorboards", February 11, 2022, [https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/secret-wwii-radio-found-under-warsaw-apartment-floorboards-27840 online].</ref> |
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==== Preparations for a mission to the West ==== |
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In the summer of 1942, [[Cyryl Ratajski]], delegate in Poland of the Polish government in exile, suggested that Karski go on a mission to this government, in London, in particular to study improvements to be made to communications between London and Warsaw and to denounce the disloyal actions of the pro-Soviet communists against the Polish resistance fighters.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 99-102.</ref> |
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Having learned of this mission,<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 104.</ref> Jews charge Karski with messages for Jewish personalities in the West and for the leaders of the allied countries.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 104-114.</ref> |
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In a note from November 30, 1942 for the Polish government-in-exile <ref>Reproduced in Wojtek Rappak, " 'Raport Karskiego' – kontrowersje i interpretacje", Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, 2014, nr. 10, p. 96-130, spec. 129, [https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=150145 online].</ref> Karski will say that he received a mandate from the [[General Jewish Labor Bund in Poland|Bund]] on behalf of all Jewry. Similarly, in a report from August 1943, he will speak of "fulfilling orders from the (Jewish) Socialist group",<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 184 and 284.</ref> but in his 1944 book he says he was contacted by ''two'' Jews, one of whom was the leader of the Bund ( socialist) and the other the leader of [[Zionism|the Zionist organization]].<ref>Jan Karski, ''Story of a Secret State'', 1944; in the Penguin 2012 edition, p. 347.</ref> According to Wood and Jankowski, Karski did not know the true identities of the men he met.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 104,</ref> Historians consider that the representative of the Bund was [[Leon Feiner]],<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 104,</ref> but the representative of Zionism could not be identified with certainty.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 104.</ref> So that Karski can speak as an eyewitness to the fate of the Jews, the two representatives give him a clandestine tour of the [[Warsaw ghetto]] and a camp of the Nazi system of extermination of the Jews.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 104-114.</ref> |
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David L. Landau, a former Jewish resistance fighter, claimed from 1993 that it was he who ensured Karski's safety when he entered the ghetto through an underground passage,<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. XVII and 104-114.</ref> but according to two historians, one Polish and the other Israeli, these are probably fabrications.<ref>Dariusz Libionka and Laurence Weinbaum (2011), ''Bohaterowie, hochsztaplerzy, opisywacze'', Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów'', {{ISBN|978-83-932202-8-1}}.</ref><ref>Alexander Zvielli, “The heroes and hucksters of Muranowski Square”, ''The Jerusalem Post'', 28 December 2014, [http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-heroes-and-hucksters-of-Muranowski-Square-386004 online].</ref> |
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==== Problems with the account of the camp visit ==== |
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Karski's visit to the camp is only attested to by his own statements and was questioned by several historians, starting with [[Raul Hilberg]] in 1986.<ref>Ernie Meyer, "Recording the Holocaust – interview of Raoul Hilberg", The Jerusalem Post, June 12, 1986, p. 9.</ref><ref>David Engel, “The Western Allies and the Holocaust, Jan Karski's Mission to the West, 1942-1944”, ''Holocaust and Genocide Studies'', 1990, p. 363-380.</ref> |
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Karski said, at the beginning (in his 1944 book ''Story of a Secret State''), that the camp in which he had entered was that of [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]], but the descriptions he gave did not correspond with what we know of the topography of this camp.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 114.</ref> |
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Karski also said at the start that to enter the camp, he had put on the uniform of an Estonian guard and had been accompanied by another guard, Estonian too. In publications from 1986 and 1992, Raul Hilberg objected that the non-German guards at Belzec were Ukrainians and not Estonians. In the 1986 interview, Hilberg said he would not even devote a footnote to Karski's testimony.<ref>"Jan Karski, a messenger of the polish government in exile, states in his memoirs, Story of a Secret State (Boston, 1944), that he entered the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, that he visited Belzec disguised in an Estonian uniform, that Estonians as well as Ukrainians guarded the camp, that the inmates he saw were Warsaw Ghetto Jews, and that he witnessed the departure of a train filled with almost all of the camp prisoners. The description of the Warsaw Ghetto is convincing enough, but there were no Estonian guards at Belzec. Warsaw Jews were not sent to the camp; and no train filled with people left from there." "I would not put him (Karski) in a footnote in my book", said Hilberg. (Ernie Meyer, "Recording the Holocaust – interview of Raoul Hilberg", The Jerusalem Post, June 12, 1986, p. 9.</ref><ref>Raul Hilberg, ''Perpetrators (...)'', 1992; in the French translation ''Executeurs, victimes, témoins'', Gallimard, 1994, reissued 2001, p. 249.</ref><ref>Raul Hilberg, ''Sources of Holocaust Research'', 2001. (In the French translation , ''Holocauste : les sources de l'histoire'', Paris, Gallimard, 2001, p. 197-198.</ref> Karski later stated (in the Polish edition of 1999 of his book ''Story of a Secret State '') that the two guards in question were Ukrainians. To explain his variation, he asserted that, since the war was not over at the time of the publication of his book "Story of a Secret State", he wanted to spare Ukrainian sensibilities on a date when the Polish authorities in exile could still hope to preserve within Poland at least part of the eastern borders of the country annexed by Stalin in 1939.<ref>Céline Gervais-Francelle, ''Introduction'' to Jan Karski, '' Mon témoignage devant le monde'' (French translation of ''Story of a Secret State''), 2010, p. XIX of the large-format edition; p. 24-25 of the paperback edition.</ref> This explanation does not square well with the fact that in his 1944 book, Karski, in addition to Estonian guards, had mentioned Ukrainian guards.<ref>Jan Karski, '' Story of a Secret State'', Penguin Books, 2012, p. 368 and 370.</ref> The explanation also does not sit well with the fact that, long after the war, when Poland's hopes of an understanding with Ukraine had faded, Karski had again mentioned the Estonian guards several times.<ref>In the initial version of his book ''Story of a Secret State''', Karski, as mentioned above, had written that the guardian from whom he had borrowed the uniform and the guard who had accompanied him to the camp were both Estonian. He said the same thing about the companion when he was interviewed by [[Claude Lanzmann]] in October 1978 (transcript of the interview, p.30, [http://data.ushmm.org/intermedia/film_video/spielberg_archive/transcript/RG60_5006/3A728927-D49C-4B4B-ADB3-36C6E828385C.pdf online] on the website of the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]) and, as to the owner of the uniform, in a 1979 interview with Walter Laqueur (Walter Laqueur, ''The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's « Final Solution »'', 1980; in the French translation ''Le terrible secret'', Paris, 1981, p. 279) and in a 1987 interview with M. Kozlowski (reproduced in English translation in Antony Polonsky, ed., ''My Brother's Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust'', London, Routledge, 2002, first published in 1990, p. 89.). Raul Hilberg, in 1986 and again in 1992 (see above), noted this assertion as implausible, the only attested nationality of non-German guards at Belzec being the Ukrainian nationality. Karski then explained, in a 1993 interview with his biographers Wood and Jankowski, that he had said "Estonian" instead of "Ukrainian" for a security reason. (E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 revised edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 269, second note on page 111.) Quoting this explanation from 1993, different from the political explanation Karski later gave in the 1999 Polish edition of his book ''Story of a Secret State'' (see above), Wood and Jankovski (place quoted) add "Political considerations may also have prevented Jan from mentioning Ukrainian collaborators, since the Polish government-in-exile was keen to maintain good relations with Poland's Ukrainian minority."</ref> |
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Hilberg further noted that, contrary to what Karski said, the Jews detained at Belzec did not come from Warsaw and did not leave the camp in trains where they were to die, but were killed in the camp's gas chambers.<ref >Ernie Meyer, Recording the Holocaust – interview of Raoul Hilberg, The Jerusalem Post, June 12, 1986, p. 9.</ref><ref> Raul Hilberg, ''Perpetrators (...)'', 1992, French translation ''Executeurs, victimes, témoins'', Paris, 1994, reissued 2001, p. 249.</ref> |
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A solution to these difficulties was proposed in the first edition (1994) of Karski's biography by Wood and Jankowski<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 114.</ref> and in the Polish edition of Karski's book in 1999:{{Citation needed|date=July 2022}} the camp visited by Karski would not be Belzec, but a camp located in the [[Izbica Ghetto]], about 65 kilometers from Belzec. This explanation has been accepted by several historians, for example Jozef Marszalek,<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 revised edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 269.</ref> but not by all. D. Silberklang, for example, in 1994, objected that Karski knowing the geography of Poland very well, it was hard to believe that he could have been wrong.<ref>David Silberklang, “The Allies and the Holocaust: A Reappraisal », Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 24, 1994, p. 148.</ref> In a 2001 book, Raul Hilberg mentioned the Izbica theory, but still expressed the view that Karski's visit to an extermination camp was an addition to his real experiences.<ref>Raul Hilberg, ''Sources of Holocaust Resarch'', 2001; in the French edition, ''Holocauste : les sources de l'histoire'', Gallimard, 2001, p. 198.</ref> In 2018, the historian Steffen Hänschen notes topographical and chronological difficulties in the Izbica thesis and concludes that "it can hardly be said with certainty that Karski was in Izbica".<ref>Steffen Hänschen, ''Das Transitghetto Izbica im System des Holocaust '', Metropol, 2018, p. 165-167.</ref> |
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The authorship of the Izbica theory is attributed by Steffen Hänschen to Karski himself: "Only years later, when Karski passed Izbica Lubelska on a train journey from Warsaw to Bełżec, did he spontaneously declare that this was the place."<ref>Steffen Hänschen, ''Das Transit ghetto Izbica im System des Holocaust'', Metropol, 2018, p. 165-166.</ref> Steffen Hänschen seems to refer for this to the 1966 Polish edition of Wood and Jankowski's book,<ref>Thomas E. Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski, ''Karski. Opowieść o emisariuszu'', Kralow/Oświęcim 1996, p. 252 f.</ref> but these two authors do not mention this anecdote in the 2014 edition of their book.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, Izbica index entry, p. 298.</ref> |
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=== Mission to the West === |
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[[File:The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied.pdf|thumb|''[[The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland]]'', by the [[Polish government-in-exile]], publicized the [[Raczyński's Note]] addressed to the [[Allies of WWII|wartime allies]] of the then-[[Declaration by United Nations|United Nations]] on 10 December 1942]] |
[[File:The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied.pdf|thumb|''[[The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland]]'', by the [[Polish government-in-exile]], publicized the [[Raczyński's Note]] addressed to the [[Allies of WWII|wartime allies]] of the then-[[Declaration by United Nations|United Nations]] on 10 December 1942]] |
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{{main|Karski's reports}} |
{{main|Karski's reports}} |
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{{see also|Witold's Report|Raczyński's Note}} |
{{see also|Witold's Report|Raczyński's Note}} |
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Starting in 1940,<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Engel|first=David|date=1983|title=An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and Soviet Occupation Presented to the Polish Government-In-Exile, February 1940|journal=Jewish Social Studies|volume=45|issue=1|pages=1–16|issn=0021-6704|jstor=4467201}}</ref> 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 [[The Holocaust in Poland|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 Janta-Połczyńska|Walentyna Stocker]], the personal secretary and interpreter for Sikorski.<ref>{{cite news|newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/world/europe/walentyna-janta-polczynska-dead.html|title=Walentyna Janta-Polczynska, Polish War Heroine, Dies at 107|last=Roberts|first=Sam|date=20 April 2020|access-date=23 April 2020}}</ref> Based on Karski's microfilm, Polish Foreign Minister Count [[Edward Bernard Raczyński|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 [[Allies of World War II|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]]''.<ref>{{cite book |author=Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland |title=The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland |date=10 December 1942 |publisher=Roy Publishers |location=New York |url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/poland_report.pdf |access-date=19 June 2021}}</ref> |
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According to the state of historical research in 2019, Karski left Poland on September 27, 1942.<ref>Adama Puławski, "Kurier mimo woli. Jan Karski nie miał nic wspólnego z dokumentem, który przez wiele lat nazywany był „raportem Karskiego”, ''Gazety Wyborczej'', 17 August 2019. See abridged version under the title "Trzecia (ostatnia) misja kurierska Jana Karskiego. Mity i rzeczywistość", September 18, 2019, [https://ohistorie.eu/2019/09/18/jan-karski-mity-i-rzeczywistosc/ online].</ref> He passed through Germany, France and Spain to reach [[London]] via [[Gibraltar]]. He arrived in London on the night of November 25-26, 1942.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, pp. 121-127.</ref> |
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Karski met with Polish politicians in exile including the prime minister, as well as members of political parties such as the [[Polish Socialist Party|Socialist Party]], [[National Party (Poland)|National Party]], [[Labour Faction (1937)|Labor Party]], [[People's Party (Poland)|People's Party]], [[General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland|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. |
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Historians have long admitted (after [[Martin Gilbert]], it seems),<ref>[[Adam Puławski]], "Kurier mimo woli. Jan Karski nie miał nic wspólnego z dokumentem, który przez wiele lat nazywany był 'raportem Karskiego' ", ''Gazety Wyborczej'', August 17, 2019. See abridged version under the title "Trzecia (ostatnia) misja kurierska Jana Karskiego. Mity i rzeczywistość", September 18, 2019, [https://ohistorie.eu/2019/09/18/jan-karski-mity-i-rzeczywistosc/ online].</ref> that it is on the basis of writings carried by Karski that the [[Polish government-in-exile]], in London, transmitted to the allied governments, on December 10, 1942, [[Raczyński's Note]] on the extermination of the Jews in occupied Poland. These documents were then given the name of "Karski report". However, W. Rappak<ref>Wojtek Rappak, "„Raport Karskiego” – kontrowersje i interpretacje" (The “Karski Report” – Controversies and Interpretations), Holocaust. Studies and Materials, October 2014, abstract on the site [https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=150145 CEEOL].</ref> questioned whether the texts transported by Karski had been used to write Raczyński's Note. In 2019, the historian [[Adam Puławski]] categorically deduced from his research that Karski had nothing to do with the so-called "Karski report".<ref>Adam Puławski, "Kurier mimo woli. Jan Karski nie miał nic wspólnego z dokumentem, który przez wiele lat nazywany był 'raportem Karskiego' ", ''Gazety Wyborczej'', August 17, 2019. See abridged version under the title "Trzecia (ostatnia) misja kurierska Jana Karskiego. Mity i rzeczywistość", 18 September 2019, [https://ohistorie.eu/2019/09/18/jan-karski-mity-i-rzeczywistosc/ online].</ref> |
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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.<ref name="Karski2011">{{cite book|author=Jan Karski|title=Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World: My Report to the World|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=K2vthR_XmzYC&pg=PT407|date=5 May 2011|publisher=Penguin Books Limited|isbn=978-0-14-196844-5|pages=407ff}}</ref> Roosevelt asked no questions about the Jews.<ref name="BayerKobrynskyy2015">{{cite book|author1=Gerd Bayer|author2=Oleksandr Kobrynskyy|title=Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Images, Memory, and the Ethics of Representation|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nVRdCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA45|date=1 December 2015|publisher=Columbia University Press|isbn=978-0-231-85091-9|pages=45–}}</ref> 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 Samuel Wise|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.<ref name="Rashke1995">{{cite book|author=Richard L. Rashke|title=Escape from Sobibor|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=C3Y4Gj1PBwEC&pg=PA127|year=1995|publisher=University of Illinois Press|isbn=978-0-252-06479-1|pages=127ff}}</ref><ref name="Beir2013">{{cite book|author=Robert L. Beir|title=Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tnGCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT273|date=1 June 2013|publisher=Skyhorse|isbn=978-1-62636-366-3|page=273}}</ref><ref name="Karski2011"/> But Karski's accounts of the problems of stateless people and their vulnerability to murder helped inspire the formation of the [[War Refugee Board]],<ref name="Golsan2016">{{cite book|author=Richard J. Golsan|title=The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=t-fXDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA98|date=20 December 2016|publisher=Lexington Books|isbn=978-1-4985-5033-8|pages=98–}}</ref> changing US governmental policy from neutrality to support for war refugees and civilians in Europe,<ref name="Beir2013p276">{{cite book|author=Robert L. Beir|title=Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tnGCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT276|date=1 June 2013|publisher=Skyhorse|isbn=978-1-62636-366-3|pages=276–}}</ref> and after the war, inspiring the creation of the [[United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees|Office of High Commissioner for Refugees]].{{Citation needed|date=October 2020}} |
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The microfilms Karski was carrying, sent by another route, preceded him by ten days.<ref>"The materials which Karski took with him from Warsaw were passed to a Polish agent in Paris on October 4th who then placed them on a separate route to London where we think they arrived just before November 14th." (Wojtek Rappak, " 'Raport Karskiego' – kontrowersje i interpretacje" "The 'Karski Report' – Controversies and Interpretations", '' Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały'', 2014, No 10, p. 96-130; abstract [https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=150145 online].) Similar information in E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 revised edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 160-164.</ref> According to statements Karski made from 1987,<ref>Maciej Kozlowski, “Niespelona misja (...)”, Tygodnik Powszechny, n° 11, 1987; English translation “The Mission that Failed: An Interview with Jan Karski”, ''Dissent'', vol. 34, 1987, p. 326-334; English translation reproduced in Antony Polonsky (ed.), ''My Brother's Keeper (...)'', Routledge, 2002, p. 81-97, spec. 91.</ref> these microfilms notably contained information gathered by the Polish Resistance, the [[Armia Krajowa]], on the course of the [[Holocaust]] in [[History of Poland (1939–1945)|Occupied Poland]].<ref>David Engel, in 1993, notes that Karski never mentioned before 1987 "such" microfilmed report (i.e., from the context, a report on the fate of the Jews prepared by three underground officials) and that the microfilm has not yet been found. (David Engel, ''Facing a Holocaust...'', UNC Press Books, 1993, p. 200, end of note 43; preview at [https://books.google.be/books?id=a12WB1iknWwC&pg=PA200& Google Books]).</ref> Adam Puławski<ref>Adam Puławski] “Kurier mimo woli. Jan Karski nie miał nic wspólnego z dokumentem, który przez wiele lat nazywany był „raportem Karskiego” ", , ''Gazety Wyborczej'', August 17, 2019. See abridged version under the title "Trzecia (ostatnia) misja kurierska Jana Karskiego. Mity i rzeczywistość", 18 September 2019, [https://ohistorie.eu/2019/09/18/jan-karski-mity-i-rzeczywistosc/online].</ref> believes that a Polish agent who transmitted a set of documents at the Polish government-in-exile misrepresented them as all coming from Karski. The documents that Puławski considers to have been brought by Karski are a Bund letter of August 31, 1942; [[Zofia Kossak-Szczucka|Zofia Kossak]]'s "Protest" and lists of other Polish politicians. |
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According to [[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.<ref name="GG 2016" /> Without diminishing Karski's contributions, Puławski notes that facts about the Holocaust were available to the Allies for at least a year and half before Karski met with Roosevelt, thus to say that his mission was primarily to report on the Holocaust is an error.<ref>From an April 5, 2015 interview with Waldemar Kowalski of the [[Polish Press Agency]], as quoted in {{Cite book |publisher=Peter Lang |isbn=978-3-653-96123-2 |page=37 |editor=Irena Grudzinska-Gross |editor2=Iwa Nawrocki |last=Grudzinska-Gross |first=Irena |title=Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies |chapter=Polishness in Practice |location=Frankfurt a.M |access-date=2019-11-22 |date=2016 |chapter-url=https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/24041 |chapter-url-access=subscription}}</ref> |
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==== In England ==== |
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Arriving in London, Karski was interrogated on November 26 and 27 by the [[MI19]], one of the British intelligence services. In a section of the report devoted to the treatment of Jews by the German occupiers in Poland, there is mention of atrocities committed in the Warsaw ghetto, but the report nowhere mentions a visit by Karski to a camp. To explain this shortcoming, the historian Michael Fleming considers that it is due to censorship exercised by the [[Political Warfare Executive]] or to the fact that MI19 gave Karski the lowest rating (C) as a source of information.<ref>Michael Fleming, ''Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust'', Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 148.</ref> |
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Once freed, Karski gives [[Władysław Sikorski|Sikorski]] (prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces) a long report in which there is not a word on the plight of the Jews.<ref>David Engel, ''Facing a Holocaust (...)'', UNC Press Books, 1993, p. 200, note 43, partially available at [https://books.google.be/books?id=a12WB1iknWwC&pg=PA200&lpg=PA200&dq=%22when+Karski+arrived+in+London%22&source=bl&ots=4lTZ8Qh8Ie&sig=nbd3PCdCE8PuikdwtFyk6-40v9Q&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=0QLnVIqCAcmsUd73grAI&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22when%20Karski%20arrived%20in%20London%22&f=false Google Books]. D. Engel refers to document HIA - Karski, Box 1, from the archives of the [[Hoover Institution]].</ref> |
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On December 9, 1942, Karski was received by the president of the Polish government-in-exile, [[Władysław Raczkiewicz]]. Later, in a book of which an English translation will be published in 1970, [[Carlo Falconi]] will mention that Raczkiewicz on January 2, 1943 asked Pope [[Pius XII]] to speak publicly in favor of the Jews.<ref>Carlo Falconi , ''Silence of Pius XII'', 1970, p. 218-219; quoted by E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 139-140 and 275.</ref> Later still, Karski will say in 1979 to the historian Walter Laqueur<ref>Walter Laqueur, ''The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's “Final Solution”'', 1980 ; in the French translation ''Le terrifiant secret ; La "solution finale" et l'information étouffée'', Paris, 1981, p. 280-281.</ref> and in 1992 to his biographers Wood and Jankowski, that it was he who, in his interview with Raczkiewicz, had transmitted to him the request to intervene with the pope. However, the very detailed notes that Raczkiewicz took of this interview with Karski contain nothing about the fate of the Jews.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 139-140 and 275.</ref> |
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Karski meets with British Foreign Secretary [[Anthony Eden]].<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 150-151.</ref> Both Eden and Karski left reports of this interview.<ref>Eden, Anthony: Report to War Cabinet on conversations with Karski, February 17, 1943, CAB 66/34, [[Public Record Office|National Archives of United Kingdom]], London; Karski's notes on his conversations with personalities in London, 1943, Hoover Institution Archives, Karski papers, Box 1. These references are given by E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014 , Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 275.</ref> In a book published in 1978, [[Jan Nowak-Jeziorański|Jan Nowak]], another courier of the Polish resistance, wrote: "I knew from Jan Karski himself that he had taken advantage of an audience at Eden to speak in detail about the systematic and progressive extermination of the Jewish population. The British Secretary of State considered this meeting important enough to communicate the report to all the members of the War Cabinet. I found it in the Archives and was surprised to find that nothing Karski had said about the liquidation of the Jews was there. Why ? »<ref>Jan Nowak, ''Courier from Warsaw''; quoted from the French translation ''Courrier de Varsovie'', Gallimard, 1983, p. 232.</ref> In 1987, nine years after the publication of Nowak's book, Karski will give a different version: he had not spoken "in detail" to Eden about the extermination of the Jews, he had only tried to approach the subject, but Eden had interrupted him by saying that he already knew "Karski's report", which Karski later explained by assuming that Eden had read the report that the Polish government in exile had drawn up from the documents brought from Poland by Karski.<ref>Maciej Kozlowski, "Niespelona misja (...)", Tygodnik Powszechny, n° 11, 1987; English translation “The Mission that Failed: An Interview with Jan Karski”, ''Dissent'', vol. 34, 1987, p. 326-334; English translation reproduced in Antony Polonsky (dir.), ''My Brother's Keeper (...)'', Routledge, 2002, p.81-97, spec. 91-92. Historians E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 150-151, present a version close to that which Karski gave in 1987. They do not specify whether the reports written by Eden and by Karski in 1943 mention an attempt by Karski to evoke the fate of the Jews in front of Eden.</ref > |
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Karski also meets [[Roundell Palmer, 3rd Earl of Selborne|Lord Selborne]], Minister in charge of the [[Special Operations Executive]] (SOE). Karski told that after listening to the account of his visits to the Warsaw ghetto and the Belzec camp, Lord Selborne said to him: "Mr. Karski, during the First World War, we were propagandizing that the German soldiers were crushing the heads of Belgian babies against the wall. I think we were doing a good job. We had to weaken German morale, we had to arouse hostility towards Germany. The war was a very bloody war. We knew it was untrue. Speak about your problem, your report. Try to arouse public opinion. I want you to know you do contribute to the Allied cause. We want this kind of report. Your mission is very important." Karski adds, "He was telling me clearly, 'Mr. Karski, you know and I know it isn't so' ".<ref>Transcript of an interview of Karski with [[Claude Lanzmann]], p. 62-63, on the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] website, [https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn539109#?rsc=138107&cv=0&c=0&m=0&s=0&xywh=-749%2C-202%2C4101%2C4024 online]. Wood and Jankowski give a version where Selborne does not say that the false rumors were started by "us", but that, despite knowing they were false, "we" did not prevent them. (E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p.154.)</ref> |
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During 1942, the Polish government in exile had tried to get the Allies to use retaliatory bombing against the Germans, which the Allies had refused.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 151. The representatives of the Jews of Poland to the Polish government in exile also demanded reprisals. See Michael Fleming, ''Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust'', Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 332, note 78.</ref> However, according to Michael Fleming, the Polish government, in January 1943, had not given up trying to change the Allies' minds.<ref>Michael Fleming, ''Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust'', Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 163-164.</ref> Karski, in private interviews, denounces the refusal of reprisals by the Allies as condemning the Jews to disappear.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 137, 159, 274.</ref> |
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Besides his meetings with personalities, Karski is assigned to [[:pl:Świt (radiostacja)|''Świt'']], a radio station which broadcasts, from England, news, propaganda and instructions to the Polish resistance.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 142-143.</ref> |
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==== In the USA ==== |
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The Polish government in exile then sends Karski to the [[United States]]. According to Wood and Jankowski, the main purpose of this mission is to expose the disloyal acts of the Soviets towards the Polish resistance.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 162, 172.</ref> (An agent of the [[Office of Strategic Services|OSS]] will say in a report: "Karski's specialty seems to be propaganda against the Soviet.")<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 172.</ref> The members of the Polish government, worried about Stalin's annexationist aims, still hoped to make Great Britain and the United States take a firm position towards the USSR on this subject. They did not know that in reality the British and the Americans had already decided to satisfy Stalin and that Karski's tour of the United States was therefore a losing operation.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 172-173.</ref> |
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In agreement with the Polish government in exile, Karski told his interlocutors in America that he had arrived in England from Poland in February or March 1943 (instead of November 1942). According to Wood and Jankowski, this lie was intended to make the news reported by Karski seem fresher.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', 2014 revised edition, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 166.</ref> |
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Although the Polish government does not seem to have pressed him to discuss the fate of the Jews,<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 172.</ref> Karski, as in Great Britain, meets in the United States with leaders of the Jewish community. |
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[[:pl:Jan Ciechanowski (dyplomata)|Jan Ciechanowski]], ambassador of the Polish government in exile, obtains that he and Karski have, on July 5, 1943, an interview at the embassy with [[Felix Frankfurter]], judge at the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] and himself a Jew. Frankfurter, who a few months earlier had reacted cavalierly to accounts of Nazi atrocities presented to him by [[Nahum Goldmann]] (he had immediately spoken of something else),<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 167-168.</ref> says after listening to Karski's story: "Mr. Karski, a man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. so I must say: I am unable to believe you. " With the Ambassador protesting what he perceives as an accusation of lying and an outrage to the Polnish government-in-exile, Frankfurter replies: "Mr. Ambassador, I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference."<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 168. On p. 281, Wood and Jankowski refer to interviews that they had with Karski in 1987 and 1992. They report that Karski's conversation with Frankfurter is not mentioned in Frankfurter's diary, but that this diary is incomplete and that Frankfurter edited it before to bequeath it to the [[Library of Congress]]. On p. 167-168, Wood and Jankowski consider that the scene took place on the night of July 5 to 6, 1943, around one o'clock in the morning, after a dinner at the embassy in which Fankfurter took part with two other Jews: Ben Cohen and Oscar Cox, who reported on this dinner in a memorandum. According to Wood and Jankowski's account, Karski, during dinner, spoke only in passing of what he had seen himself, but Frankfurter lingered after the other guests and questioned him about his eye findings.</ref><ref>Interview of Karski by Claude Lanzmann in October 1978, transcription of the interview, p. 60-61, [https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn539109#?rsc=138107&cv=0&c=0&m=0&s=0&xywh=-749%2C-202%2C4101%2C4024 introduction] and [https://data.ushmm.org/intermedia/film_video/spielberg_archive/transcript/RG60_5006/3A728927-D49C-4B4B-ADB3-36C6E828385C.pdf text] at the website of the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. Contrary to Wood and Jankowski's account, Karski here places the conversation with Frankfurter after the meeting with Roosevelt, He says that the scene took place in the morning (between breakfast and lunch) and he gives the impression that at no time that day, Frankfurter was in the company of other guests.</ref> |
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Wood and Jankowski, Karski's biographers, conjecture that it was because of Frankfurter's disbelief that Karski, as appears from the archives and his own recollections, avoided mentioning his ocular findings in the interviews he had afterwards with representatives of the American government. For example, he observes this silence during an audience granted to him on July 28, 1943 by President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] and where he evokes the Nazi atrocities against the Jews without presenting himself as a direct witness.<ref >E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 168-169.</ref> |
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On the other hand, he will still report on his personal experiences during meetings with Jewish leaders.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski'' (...), revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 168-169.</ref> Frankfurter is not the only Jew in whom Karski encounters incredulity. Rabbi Morris Waldman, chairman of the [[American Jewish Committee]], sided with the Soviets in the conflict between them and the Poles. He recounts in his (unpublished) memoirs that, having been asked by Ciechanowski to support the diplomatic campaign of the Poles in this affair, he had asserted a firmly pro-Soviet position, then he adds this comment: "The Ambassador's face became white, either with fear or anger, probably both. I was certain that I had not made a friendly hit to the gentleman. I am told that he is a converted Jew."<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 186. According to the same book, p. 164 and 186, Ciechanowski had Jewish ancestry but was not a converted Jew.</ref> Waldman blamed the Polish government in exile for creating "a great deal of publicity about the Jewish tragedy in Europe, without even asking us if we considered it wise" and to count at the same time on the continuation of the war and the massacre of the Jews to settle the Jewish question in Poland.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 189.</ref> Waldman had an interview with Karski on August 10, 1943.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 186.</ref> In his memoirs he says: "I checked up carefully on Mr. Karski and got reliable information that some of his statements were untrue and on the whole the information he was circulating was not reliable."<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 189.</ref> |
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In the United States as in Great Britain, Karski pleads for reprisals against the Germans.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 178, 280.</ref> |
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From September 1943 to February 1944, he made a new stay in England, during which his government decided that he would henceforth address the public. Then he returned to the United States.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 192, 194, 198.</ref> |
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[[File:Karski.Znaczek1943.jpg|thumb|US stamp from 1943, a tribute to Polish Underground State]] |
[[File:Karski.Znaczek1943.jpg|thumb|US stamp from 1943, a tribute to Polish Underground State]] |
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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).<ref>Karski, Jan. (1944). "Polish Death Camp," ''Collier's'', 14 October 1944, pp. 18–19, 60–61.</ref><ref>Abzug, Robert. H. (1999). ''America Views the Holocaust, 1933–1945: A Brief Documentary History''. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, p. 183.</ref> |
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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.<ref name="GG 2016">From an 5 April 2015 interview with Waldemar Kowalski of the [[Polish Press Agency]], as quoted in {{Cite book |publisher=Peter Lang |isbn=978-3-653-96123-2 |page=37 |editor=Irena Grudzinska-Gross |editor2=Iwa Nawrocki |last=Grudzinska-Gross |first=Irena |title=Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies |chapter=Polishness in Practice |location=Frankfurt a.M |access-date=2019-11-22 |date=2016 |chapter-url=https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/24041 |chapter-url-access=subscription}}</ref> 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.<ref name="GG 2016" /> |
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==== The 1944 book ==== |
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In 1944, while serving in the United States, Karski wrote a book, ''Story of a Secret State'', about the [[History of Poland (1939–1945)|Polish secret State and the Polish underground]]. |
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In chapters XXIX and XXX, Karski says he witnessed [[the Holocaust]] by smuggling himself into the [[Warsaw ghetto]] and the [[Belzec extermination camp]]. |
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The publishing agent of this book was [[Emery Reves]], known also for having published the suspect book ''Hitler told me'' by [[Hermann Rauschning]] and the book ''I paid Hitler'', by [[Fritz Thyssen]], to which he seems to have added material that did not come from Thyssen. Reves forbids Karski any criticism of the USSR, arrogates the right to make the text more attractive and demands half of the copyright.<ref>Céline Gervais-Francelle, ''Introduction'' to the French edition of 2010 of Jan Karski's book, under the title ''Mon témoignage devant le monde'', p. 19 in the pocket edition, XVI in the large format edition.</ref> |
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According to Karski's biographers E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, "Story of a Secret State" is a "valuable but often unreliable source": security reasons (the war was not over when the book appeared) compelled Karski to include a significant amount of disinformation; diplomatic considerations prevented him from disclosing some of his contacts in London and Washington; finally, for the needs of the propaganda of the Polish government in exile and in the financial interest of the publisher of the book, use was made of "dramatic license".<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 202-204 and 256.</ref> |
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One of the requests of Reves and the publishing house (Houghton Mifflin Company) was that the book mentioned the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]] (April and May 1943), to which Karski objected that this event fell outside the scope of his narrative. Wood and Jankowski believe that it may have been as a result of this pressure from the publishers that the book came to allude to preparations for an armed revolt of the ghetto, preparations of which, according to the book, Karski allegedly was informed by one of the two Jews whom he met shortly before his departure from Warsaw. According to Wood and Jankowski, "this detail (...) does not conform to what has since become known of the origins of the revolt."<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 203.</ref> |
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The book, entitled ''Story of a Secret State'', was published in the same year 1944 (while the war was not over).<ref>''Story of a Secret State'' is the title of an edition dated January 1, 1944; see reproduction of the cover on [https://www.amazon.com/Story-Secret-State-Jan-Karski/dp/B014VH2PKU the Amazon site]. Another edition, also dated 1944, bears the title "Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State"; see [https://books.google.be/books/about/Courier_from_Poland.html?id=XkHvmgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y Google Books]. The words ''My Report to the World'', which is the title of the last chapter, were added in 2011 to the title of the book for an English edition ([https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/180783/story-of-a-secret-state-my-report-to-the-world-by-karski-jan/9780241407387 Penguin]) and in 2013 for an American reissue (see [https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg1=secret+state&argType1=all&searchCode1=KTIL&searchType=2&combine2=and&searchArg2=Karski&argType2=all&searchCode2=KPNC& Library of Congress Catalog]). Already in the French edition of 1948, the words "Mon témoignage devant le monde" ("My testimony before the world") had been added in the title of the book, before the words "Histoire d'un Etat secret" ("Story of a Secret State"); see [https://www.amazon.fr/t%C3%A9moignage-devant-monde-Histoire-secret/dp/B001806VB8 Amazon'site.</ref> (A selection had been featured in ''[[Collier's]]'' magazine six weeks before the book's publication.)<ref>Karski, Jan. (1944). "Polish Death Camp," ''Collier's'', 14 October 1944, pp. 18–19, 60–61.</ref><ref>Abzug, Robert. H. (1999). ''America Views the Holocaust, 1933–1945: A Brief Documentary History''. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, p. 183.</ref>The book was a great success with the public (more than 400,000 copies were sold)<ref>Georgetown University Press. {{cite web |url=http://press.georgetown.edu/newsfeeditem/georgetown-university-press-publish-jan-karski%E2%80%99s-story-secret-state |title=Archived copy |access-date=2015-01-26 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150518083741/http://press.georgetown.edu/newsfeeditem/georgetown-university-press-publish-jan-karski%E2%80%99s-story-secret-state |archive-date=18 May 2015}}</ref><ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20150518083741/http://press.georgetown.edu/newsfeeditem/georgetown-university-press-publish-jan-karski%E2%80%99s-story-secret-state Georgetown University Press]. See also E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 210-211.</ref> A film adaptation was planned but never realized. |
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Karski was opposed for a long time to a translation into Polish, because Polish readers would have noticed the liberties that the story took with the truth. It was not until 1999 that he finally gave in.<ref>E.T. Wood and S.M. Jankowski, ''Karski (...)'', revised edition of 2014, Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, p. 239 and 289.</ref> |
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''Story of a Secret State'' was faithfully republished in 2012 by Penguin Classics, but with the translation of additions that Karski had made to the text in the Polish edition of 1999.<ref>Jan Karski, ''Story of a Secret State, My Report to the World'', Penguin Classics, 2012, ''Note on the Text'', p. vii.</ref> |
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==Life in the United States== |
==Life in the United States== |
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At war's end, Karski remained in the United States in Washington, D.C. He began graduate studies at [[Georgetown University]], receiving his |
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.<ref>Karski, J. [http://www.proquest.com.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu ''Material Towards A Documentary History of the Fall of Eastern Europe (1938–1948)''; Ph.D. dissertation 1952 for Georgetown University; publication number AAT 0183534]</ref> In 1954, Karski became a naturalized citizen of the United States. |
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Karski taught Eastern European affairs, comparative government, and international affairs at Georgetown University for 40 years |
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. |
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[[File:Karski.Powell Colin.jpg|thumb|right|Jan Karski with General [[Colin Powell]] at the 1993 opening of the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]].]] |
[[File:Karski.Powell Colin.jpg|thumb|right|Jan Karski with General [[Colin Powell]] at the 1993 opening of the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]].]] |
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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). |
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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.<ref name="besson" /> |
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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.<ref name="besson">{{cite journal|url= https://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3467|title=Le Rapport Karski. Une voix qui résonne comme une source (The Karski Report. A Voice with the Ring of Truth, translated by John Tittensour)|last=Besson|first=Rémy|journal=Études photographiques|number=27|date=May 2011|access-date=16 August 2020}}</ref> |
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French film-maker [[Claude Lanzmann]] had interviewed Karski at length in 1978, as part of his preparation for his documentary ''[[Shoah (film)|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.<ref name="besson" /> 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.<ref name=":0" /> It ends with Karski saying that he made his report to leaders.<ref name="Jeffries2011" /> 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 was so different, and the interview so long, that it did not fit with his vision of the film and was thus not used.<ref name="arte" /> 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]]).<ref>{{cite book|url=https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/discovery/fulldisplay?websitecontext=L&vid=01UTORONTO_INST:UTORONTO&search_scope=UTL_AND_CI&tab=Everything&docid=alma991106568013506196|title=Shoah: a biased account of the Holocaust|access-date=19 June 2021|publisher=Polish American Congress|year=1987}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://esprit.presse.fr/archive/review/article.php?code=35435|title=Revue ESPRIT|access-date=11 January 2018}}</ref> |
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French filmmaker [[Claude Lanzmann]] interviewed Karski at length in 1978, as part of his preparation for his documentary ''[[Shoah (film)|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.<ref name="besson" /> 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.<ref name=":0" /> It ends with Karski saying that he made his report to leaders.<ref name="Jeffries2011">{{cite news |last1=Jeffries |first1=Stuart |date=9 June 2011 |title=Claude Lanzmann on why Holocaust documentary Shoah still matters |work=The Guardian |url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/09/claude-lanzmann-shoah-holocaust-documentary |access-date=19 June 2021}}</ref> 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.<ref name="arte">{{cite web |url=http://www.arte.tv/fr/semaine/244,broadcastingNum=1139154,day=5,week=11,year=2010.html |title=Programmes à la semaine - ARTE |access-date=2010-05-06 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100524024539/http://www.arte.tv/fr/semaine/244,broadcastingNum=1139154,day=5,week=11,year=2010.html |archive-date=24 May 2010}}</ref> 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]]).<ref>{{cite book|url=https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/discovery/fulldisplay?websitecontext=L&vid=01UTORONTO_INST:UTORONTO&search_scope=UTL_AND_CI&tab=Everything&docid=alma991106568013506196|title=Shoah: a biased account of the Holocaust|access-date=19 June 2021|publisher=Polish American Congress|year=1987}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.esprit.presse.fr/archive/review/article.php?code=3543|title=Revue ESPRIT|access-date=11 January 2018}}</ref> |
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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 (Poland)|Order of the White Eagle]], the highest Polish civil decoration, and the [[Order Virtuti Militari]], the highest military decoration awarded for bravery in combat. |
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 (Poland)|Order of the White Eagle]], the highest Polish civil decoration, and the [[Order Virtuti Militari]], the highest military decoration awarded for bravery in combat. |
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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 production of another documentary to correct what he thought was the bias in Lanzmann's ''Shoah.''{{citation needed|date=August 2020}} |
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.''{{citation needed|date=August 2020}} |
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During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995, Karski discussed the Allies' failure to rescue most of the Jews from mass murder: |
During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995, Karski discussed the Allies' failure to rescue most of the Jews from mass murder: |
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In 2010, French author [[Yannick Haenel]] published a novel ''Jan Karski'', drawn from the courier's World War II activities and memoir. Haenel also added a third part in which he inserted his own views into Karski's "character", particularly in his approach to Karski's meeting with President Roosevelt and other US leaders. Claude Lanzmann criticized the author strongly and argued that Haenel ignored important historic elements of the time. Haenel said that was part of his freedom in fiction.<ref name="besson" /><ref name="Jeffries2011" /> |
In 2010, French author [[Yannick Haenel]] published a novel ''Jan Karski'', drawn from the courier's World War II activities and memoir. Haenel also added a third part in which he inserted his own views into Karski's "character", particularly in his approach to Karski's meeting with President Roosevelt and other US leaders. Claude Lanzmann criticized the author strongly and argued that Haenel ignored important historic elements of the time. Haenel said that was part of his freedom in fiction.<ref name="besson" /><ref name="Jeffries2011" /> |
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In response, Lanzmann released the second half of his interview with Karski as a 49-minute documentary in 2010, edited and entitled ''[[The Karski Report]]'', also on ARTE.<ref name="arte" /><ref name="Jeffries2011" /> It is mostly about Karski's meeting with President Roosevelt and other American leaders. |
In response, Lanzmann released the second half of his interview with Karski as a 49-minute documentary in 2010, edited and entitled ''[[The Karski Report]]'', also on ARTE.<ref name="arte" /><ref name="Jeffries2011" /> It is mostly about Karski's meeting with President Roosevelt and other American leaders.<ref name="Jeffries2011" /> |
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Karski's wartime book was re-published posthumously by [[Georgetown University Press]] as ''My Report to the World: The Story of a Secret State'' (2013).<ref>{{cite web|last=Storozynski|first=Alex|title=Karski's Story of a Secret State – A Primer on the Polish Ethos |url=https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-storozynski/karski-story-of-a-secret-state_b_5044813.html |website=Huffington Post| date = 28 March 2014 | access-date = 25 December 2017}}</ref> A Tribute to Jan Karski panel discussion was held at the university that year in conjunction with the book's release. It featured a discussion of Karski's legacy by School of Foreign Service Dean [[Carol Lancaster]], Georgetown University Board Chair [[Paul Tagliabue]], former Secretary of State [[Madeleine Albright]], former National Security Advisor [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]], Polish Ambassador [[Ryszard Schnepf]], and Rabbi Harold S. White.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.georgetown.edu/webcasts/a-tribute-to-jan-karski.html |title=Georgetown University video of the event |publisher=Georgetown.edu |date=18 March 2013 |access-date=2014-03-04 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140222061218/http://www.georgetown.edu/webcasts/a-tribute-to-jan-karski.html |archive-date=22 February 2014}}</ref> |
Karski's wartime book was re-published posthumously by [[Georgetown University Press]] as ''My Report to the World: The Story of a Secret State'' (2013).<ref>{{cite web|last=Storozynski|first=Alex|title=Karski's Story of a Secret State – A Primer on the Polish Ethos |url=https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-storozynski/karski-story-of-a-secret-state_b_5044813.html |website=Huffington Post| date = 28 March 2014 | access-date = 25 December 2017}}</ref> A Tribute to Jan Karski panel discussion was held at the university that year in conjunction with the book's release. It featured a discussion of Karski's legacy by School of Foreign Service Dean [[Carol Lancaster]], Georgetown University Board Chair [[Paul Tagliabue]], former Secretary of State [[Madeleine Albright]], former National Security Advisor [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]], Polish Ambassador [[Ryszard Schnepf]], and Rabbi Harold S. White.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.georgetown.edu/webcasts/a-tribute-to-jan-karski.html |title=Georgetown University video of the event |publisher=Georgetown.edu |date=18 March 2013 |access-date=2014-03-04 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140222061218/http://www.georgetown.edu/webcasts/a-tribute-to-jan-karski.html |archive-date=22 February 2014}}</ref> |
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==Personal life== |
==Personal life== |
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Karski had several siblings, mostly brothers: Marian, |
Karski had several siblings, mostly brothers: Marian, Boguslaw, Cyjrian, Edmund, Stefan, and Uzef and a sister Laura. |
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Karski's eldest brother, Marian Kozielewski (b. 1898), reached the rank of colonel in the military and was also considered a hero in World War II. He had been arrested by the Germans in Warsaw in 1940 and was among Catholic Poles who survived being imprisoned as political prisoners at [[Auschwitz concentration camp]]. After being released in 1941, he returned to Warsaw and joined the resistance. The Kozielewski brothers admired [[Jozef Pilsudski]] and members of the "forgotten army", who had suffered many deeply personal wounds. After the war Marian emigrated initially to Canada, where he married. He struggled as a refugee, holding low-level jobs after settling in Washington, D.C., in 1960 near his brother Jan. Marian Kozielewski committed suicide there in 1964 and is buried at [[Mount Olivet Cemetery (Washington, D.C.)|Mount Olivet Cemetery]]. |
Karski's eldest brother, Marian Kozielewski (b. 1898), reached the rank of colonel in the military and was also considered a hero in World War II. He had been arrested by the Germans in Warsaw in 1940 and was among Catholic Poles who survived being imprisoned as political prisoners at [[Auschwitz concentration camp]]. After being released in 1941, he returned to Warsaw and joined the resistance. The Kozielewski brothers admired [[Jozef Pilsudski]] and members of the "forgotten army", who had suffered many deeply personal wounds. After the war, Marian emigrated initially to Canada, where he married. He struggled as a refugee, holding low-level jobs after settling in Washington, D.C., in 1960 near his brother Jan. Marian Kozielewski committed suicide there in 1964 and is buried at [[Mount Olivet Cemetery (Washington, D.C.)|Mount Olivet Cemetery]]. |
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In 1965, Karski married [[Pola Nirenska|Pola Nireńska]], a 54-year-old Polish Jew who was a dancer and choreographer. |
In 1965, Karski married [[Pola Nirenska|Pola Nireńska]], a 54-year-old Polish Jew who was a dancer and choreographer. With the exception of her parents, who had emigrated to [[Israel]] in 1939 shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland, all of her family had been murdered in the [[Holocaust]]. She committed suicide in 1992. |
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Karski died of unspecified heart and kidney disease in Washington, D.C., in 2000. He died at [[Georgetown University Hospital]].<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/15/world/jan-karski-dies-at-86-warned-west-about-holocaust.html |last=Kaufman |first=Michael T. |title=Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About Holocaust |work=New York Times |date=15 July 2000 }}</ref> He was interred at [[Mount Olivet Cemetery (Washington, D.C.)|Mount Olivet Cemetery]] in Washington, next to the graves of his wife, [[Pola Nirenska]], and brother Marian. He and Pola had no children. |
Karski died of unspecified heart and kidney disease in Washington, D.C., in 2000. He died at [[Georgetown University Hospital]].<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/15/world/jan-karski-dies-at-86-warned-west-about-holocaust.html |last=Kaufman |first=Michael T. |title=Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About Holocaust |work=New York Times |date=15 July 2000 }}</ref> He was interred at [[Mount Olivet Cemetery (Washington, D.C.)|Mount Olivet Cemetery]] in Washington, next to the graves of his wife, [[Pola Nirenska]], and brother Marian. He and Pola had no children. |
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[[File:Mural Jan Karski Kto nie potępia ten przyzwala ul. Lubelska w Warszawie.JPG|thumb|A mural ''He who does not condemn, acquiesces'' commemorating Karski at 30/32 Lubelska Street in [[Warsaw]].]] |
[[File:Mural Jan Karski Kto nie potępia ten przyzwala ul. Lubelska w Warszawie.JPG|thumb|A mural ''He who does not condemn, acquiesces'' commemorating Karski at 30/32 Lubelska Street in [[Warsaw]].]] |
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On 2 June 1982, |
On 2 June 1982, Yad Vashem recognised Jan Karski as [[Righteous Among the Nations]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/karski.asp |title=Yad Vashem recognizes Karski |publisher=yadvashem.org |access-date=2016-08-30 |archive-date=25 April 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130425202955/http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/karski.asp |url-status=dead }}</ref> A tree bearing a memorial plaque in his name was planted that same year at Yad Vashem's Avenue of the [[Righteous Among the Nations]] in [[Jerusalem]]. |
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In 1991, Karski was awarded the [[Wallenberg Medal]] of the [[University of Michigan]]. Statues honoring Karski have been placed in New York City at the corner of 37th Street and Madison Avenue (renamed as "Jan Karski Corner")<ref>[http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/11/12/2007-11-12_statue_salutes_polish_man_who_warned_fdr.html "Statue salutes Polish man who warned FDR of Nazi camps"], ''New York Daily News'', 12 November 2007</ref> and on the grounds of [[Georgetown University]]<ref>{{cite web |url=http://sfs.georgetown.edu/53301.html |title= |
In 1991, Karski was awarded the [[Wallenberg Medal]] of the [[University of Michigan]]. Statues honoring Karski have been placed in New York City at the corner of 37th Street and Madison Avenue (renamed as "Jan Karski Corner")<ref>[http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/11/12/2007-11-12_statue_salutes_polish_man_who_warned_fdr.html "Statue salutes Polish man who warned FDR of Nazi camps"], ''New York Daily News'', 12 November 2007</ref> and on the grounds of [[Georgetown University]]<ref>{{cite web |url=http://sfs.georgetown.edu/53301.html |title=Remembering the Man who Tried to Stop the Holocaust - Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service - Georgetown University |access-date=2010-03-21 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100609041259/http://sfs.georgetown.edu/53301.html |archive-date=9 June 2010}}</ref> in Washington, DC.<ref>"Monument to Honor Dr. Jan Karski", ''Polish-American Journal''. 30 September 2002. vol 91; No. 9; page 8</ref> Additional benches, which were made by the Kraków-based sculptor Karol Badyna, are located in [[Kielce]], [[Łódź]], and [[Warsaw]] in Poland, and on the campus of [[Tel Aviv University]] in Israel. The talking Karski bench in [[Warsaw]] near the Museum of the History of Polish Jews has a button to activate a short talk by Karski about the war. [[Georgetown University]], [[Oregon State University]], [[Baltimore Hebrew University|Baltimore Hebrew College]], [[Warsaw University]], [[Maria Curie-Skłodowska University]], and the [[University of Łódź]] all awarded Karski [[doctor honoris causa|honorary doctorates]]. |
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In 1994, Karski was made an honorary citizen of [[Israel]] in honor of his efforts on behalf of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Karski was nominated for the [[Nobel Prize]] and formally recognized by the UN General Assembly shortly before his death. |
In 1994, Karski was made an honorary citizen of [[Israel]] in honor of his efforts on behalf of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Karski was nominated for the [[Nobel Prize]] and formally recognized by the UN General Assembly shortly before his death. |
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Shortly after his death, the Jan Karski Society was established, initiated by his close friend, collaborator and biographer, Professor Waldemar Piasecki. The society preserves his legacy and administers the Jan Karski Eagle Award, which he |
Shortly after his death, the Jan Karski Society was established, initiated by his close friend, collaborator and biographer, Professor Waldemar Piasecki. The society preserves his legacy and administers the Jan Karski Eagle Award, which he established in 2000. The list of laureates includes: [[Elie Wiesel]], [[Shimon Peres]], [[Lech Walesa]], [[Aleksander Kwaśniewski]], [[Tadeusz Mazowiecki]], [[Bronisław Geremek]], [[Jacek Kuroń]], [[Adam Michnik]], [[Karol Modzelewski]], [[Oriana Fallaci]], [[Dagoberto Valdés Hernández]], [[Stanisław Dziwisz]], ''[[Tygodnik Powszechny]]'' magazine, the [[Hoover Institution]], and the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. |
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After Karski's death, his estate was involved in a legal dispute with [[YIVO]] over a legacy gift that Karski made. The [[Supreme Court of Maryland|Maryland Court of Appeals]] (now known as the Supreme Court of Maryland) settled the dispute.<ref>{{Cite case|case=YIVO Inst. for Jewish Rsch. v. Zaleski|reporter=[[Atlantic Reporter|A.2d]]|court=[[Supreme Court of Maryland|Maryland Court of Appeals]]}}</ref> |
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In April 2011, the Jan Karski US Centennial Campaign was created to increase interest in the life and legacy of the late Polish diplomat, as the centennial year of his birth in 2014 approached. The US campaign, headed by Polish-American author [[Wanda Urbanska]], worked in partnership with the International Legacy Program at the [[Museum of Polish History]] in Warsaw, under the direction of Ewa Wierzynska. Polish Consul General Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka hosted a gala kickoff dinner in New York City on 30 May, consisting of representatives from Georgetown University, and the Polish Catholic and Jewish groups who comprised the steering committee. |
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In April 2011, the Jan Karski US Centennial Campaign was created to increase interest in the life and legacy of the late Polish diplomat, as the centennial year of his birth in 2014 approached. In November 2012, having met its major goals, the Jan Karski US Centennial Campaign was succeeded by the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, which continues to promote Karski's legacy and values. The president of the foundation is Polish-American author [[Wanda Urbanska]]. The foundation sponsored three major conferences about Karski in his centennial birth year, at Georgetown University in Washington, at Loyola University in Chicago, and in Warsaw.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Foundation History and Mission |url=https://www.jankarski.net/en/about-us/foundation-history.html |access-date=2022-10-17 |website=Jan Karski Educational Foundation |language=en}}</ref> |
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The campaign group was seeking to obtain the [[Presidential Medal of Freedom]] for Karski in advance of his anniversary. In addition, they wanted to promote educational activities, including workshops, artistic performances, and a reprint of his 1944 book, ''Story of a Secret State''. In December 2011, the support of 68 US Representatives and 12 US Senators was obtained and a supporting nomination for the medal was submitted to the White House.<ref>{{cite web|author=Jan Karski |url=http://www.jankarski.net |title=Jan Karski Educational Foundation (home) |publisher=Jankarski.net |access-date=2014-03-04}}</ref> On 23 April 2012, US President [[Barack Obama]] announced that Karski would receive the country's highest civilian honor, the [[Presidential Medal of Freedom]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/23/president-obama-announces-jan-karski-recipient-presidential-medal-freedo|title=President Obama Announces Jan Karski as a Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom|date=26 April 2012|via=[[NARA|National Archives]]|work=[[whitehouse.gov]]|access-date=27 April 2012}}</ref> The medal was awarded posthumously by President Obama on 29 May 2012 and presented to [[Adam Daniel Rotfeld]], the former Foreign Minister of Poland and himself a Jewish Holocaust survivor.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/05/29/2012-presidential-medal-freedom-ceremony/ |title=2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony |date=29 May 2012 |via=[[NARA|National Archives]] |work=[[whitehouse.gov]] |access-date=2014-03-04 }}</ref> Jan Karski's family was not invited to the presentation ceremony, which they strongly protested. The medal, along with other honors given to Karski, is on display at the "Karski office" in Łódź Museum. This is in accordance with the wishes of his surviving family, led by his niece and goddaughter Dr. Kozielewska-Trzaska. |
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The campaign group was seeking to obtain the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Karski in advance of his anniversary. In addition, they wanted to promote educational activities, including workshops, artistic performances, and a reprint of his 1944 book, ''Story of a Secret State''. In December 2011, the support of 68 US Representatives and 12 US Senators was obtained and a supporting nomination for the medal was submitted to the White House.<ref>{{cite web|author=Jan Karski |url=http://www.jankarski.net |title=Jan Karski Educational Foundation (home) |publisher=Jankarski.net |access-date=2014-03-04}}</ref> On 23 April 2012, US President [[Barack Obama]] announced that Karski would receive the country's highest civilian honor, the [[Presidential Medal of Freedom]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/23/president-obama-announces-jan-karski-recipient-presidential-medal-freedo|title=President Obama Announces Jan Karski as a Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom|date=26 April 2012|via=[[NARA|National Archives]]|work=[[whitehouse.gov]]|access-date=27 April 2012}}</ref> The medal was awarded posthumously by President Obama on 29 May 2012 and presented to [[Adam Daniel Rotfeld]], the former Foreign Minister of Poland and himself a Jewish Holocaust survivor.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/05/29/2012-presidential-medal-freedom-ceremony/ |title=2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony |date=29 May 2012 |via=[[NARA|National Archives]] |work=[[whitehouse.gov]] |access-date=2014-03-04 }}</ref> Jan Karski's family was not invited to the presentation ceremony, which they strongly protested. The medal, along with other honors given to Karski, is on display at the "Karski office" in Łódź Museum. This is in accordance with the wishes of his surviving family, led by his niece and goddaughter Dr. Kozielewska-Trzaska. |
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A controversy erupted when a misspoken word in Barack Obama's Presidential Medal of Freedom speech came to be known as ''Gafa Obamy'' or 'Obama's gaffe',<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303674004577435262640946168 |work=The Wall Street Journal |title=Matthew Kaminski: 'Gafa Obamy' |date=30 May 2012}}</ref> when the president referred to "a Polish death camp" instead of "a death camp in Poland" when talking of the Nazi German transit death camp that Karski had visited. [["Polish death camp" controversy|"Polish death camps"]] is a term often used to refer to Nazi concentration camps in Poland, as opposed to (as may be implied) Polish concentration camps. The terms "Polish death camp" or "Polish concentration camp" reportedly originated with ex-Nazis working for the West German secret services. Historian Leszek Pietrzak explains the propaganda strategies from the 1950s.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://zakazanahistoria.nowyekran.pl/post/31477,jak-niemcy-polakow-wrabiali-w-mordowanie-zydow |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111029055425/http://zakazanahistoria.nowyekran.pl/post/31477%2Cjak-niemcy-polakow-wrabiali-w-mordowanie-zydow |url-status=dead |archive-date=2011-10-29 |title=Jak Niemcy Polaków wrabiali w mordowanie Żydów – Leszek Pietrzak – NowyEkran.pl |access-date=2014-03-04}}</ref> President Obama later characterized his term as a misstatement and his characterization was accepted by Polish President [[Bronisław Komorowski]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.president.pl/en/news/news/art,309,president-on-barack-obamas-letter.html |title=President of the Republic of Poland / News / News / President on Barack Obama's letter |publisher=President.pl |date=1 June 2012 |access-date=2014-03-04}}</ref> |
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A controversy erupted when a misspoken word in Barack Obama's Presidential Medal of Freedom speech came to be known as ''Gafa Obamy'' or 'Obama's gaffe',<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303674004577435262640946168 |work=The Wall Street Journal |title=Matthew Kaminski: 'Gafa Obamy' |date=30 May 2012}}</ref> when the president referred to "a Polish death camp" instead of "a death camp in Poland" when talking of the Nazi German transit death camp that Karski had visited. [["Polish death camp" controversy|"Polish death camps"]] is a term often used to refer to Nazi concentration camps in Poland, as opposed to (as may be implied) Polish concentration camps. The terms "Polish death camp" or "Polish concentration camp" reportedly originated with ex-Nazis working for the West German secret services. Historian Leszek Pietrzak explains the propaganda strategies from the 1950s.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://zakazanahistoria.nowyekran.pl/post/31477,jak-niemcy-polakow-wrabiali-w-mordowanie-zydow |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111029055425/http://zakazanahistoria.nowyekran.pl/post/31477%2Cjak-niemcy-polakow-wrabiali-w-mordowanie-zydow |url-status=dead |archive-date=2011-10-29 |title=Jak Niemcy Polaków wrabiali w mordowanie Żydów – Leszek Pietrzak – NowyEkran.pl |access-date=2014-03-04}}</ref> President Obama later characterized his term as a misstatement and his characterization was accepted by Polish President [[Bronisław Komorowski]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.president.pl/en/news/news/art,309,president-on-barack-obamas-letter.html |title=President of the Republic of Poland / News / News / President on Barack Obama's letter |publisher=President.pl |date=1 June 2012 |access-date=2014-03-04}}</ref> |
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In November 2012, having met its major goals, the Jan Karski US Centennial Campaign was succeeded by the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, which continues to promote Karski's legacy and values, particularly to young people from middle school through college age. The president of the foundation is Polish-American author [[Wanda Urbanska]].<ref>{{cite web|author=Jan Karski |url=http://www.jankarski.net |title=www.jankarski.net |access-date=2014-03-04}}</ref> The foundation sponsored three major conferences about Karski in his centennial birth year, at Georgetown University in Washington, at [[Loyola University Chicago|Loyola University]] in Chicago, and in Warsaw. |
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In early February 2014, the Jan Karski Society and the Karski family appealed to President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski to posthumously promote Jan Karski to the rank of brigadier general in recognition of his contribution to the war effort as well as all couriers and emissaries of underground Polish state. The appeal received no response for a year. Member of the Polish parliament Professor [[Tadeusz |
In early February 2014, the Jan Karski Society and the Karski family appealed to President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski to posthumously promote Jan Karski to the rank of brigadier general in recognition of his contribution to the war effort as well as all couriers and emissaries of the underground Polish state. The appeal received no response for a year. Member of the Polish parliament Professor [[Tadeusz Iwiński]] recently openly criticized the president of Poland for inaction on Karski's behalf.{{citation needed|date=April 2015}} |
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On 24 June 2014, the "Jan Karski Mission Accomplished" Conference took place in Lublin under the patronage of Professor [[Elie Wiesel]], Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, [[Aleksander |
On 24 June 2014, the "Jan Karski Mission Accomplished" Conference took place in Lublin under the patronage of Professor [[Elie Wiesel]], Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, [[Aleksander Kwaśniewski]], President of Poland (1995–2005), [[Moshe Kantor]], President of the European Jewish Congress, and [[Michael Schudrich]], Chief Rabbi of Poland. |
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==Remembrance== |
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==Remembering Karski's mission== |
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[[File:Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska section 40 - Mt Olivet - Washington DC - 2014.jpg|thumb|Grave of Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska at [[Mount Olivet Cemetery (Washington, D.C.)|Mount Olivet Cemetery]] in Washington, D.C.]] |
[[File:Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska section 40 - Mt Olivet - Washington DC - 2014.jpg|thumb|Grave of Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska at [[Mount Olivet Cemetery (Washington, D.C.)|Mount Olivet Cemetery]] in Washington, D.C.]] |
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Former Foreign Minister of Poland [[Władysław 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."<ref>[http://www.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/jahrgang2005/februar2006/download/210a25b641ad11dbaf97c1fbeff912521252/original_IP_02-05_Dok-Web.pdf Address by the former Foreign Minister of Poland Wladysław Bartoszewski at the ceremony of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 27 January 2005] see pp. 156–157 {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200322033443/http://www.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/jahrgang2005/februar2006/download/210a25b641ad11dbaf97c1fbeff912521252/original_IP_02-05_Dok-Web.pdf |date=22 March 2020 }}</ref> |
Former Foreign Minister of Poland [[Władysław 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."<ref>[http://www.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/jahrgang2005/februar2006/download/210a25b641ad11dbaf97c1fbeff912521252/original_IP_02-05_Dok-Web.pdf Address by the former Foreign Minister of Poland Wladysław Bartoszewski at the ceremony of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 27 January 2005] see pp. 156–157 {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200322033443/http://www.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/jahrgang2005/februar2006/download/210a25b641ad11dbaf97c1fbeff912521252/original_IP_02-05_Dok-Web.pdf |date=22 March 2020 }}</ref> |
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A full-length play on Karski's life and mission, ''Coming to See Aunt Sophie'' (2014), written by Arthur Feinsod, was produced in Germany and Poland. |
A full-length play on Karski's life and mission, ''Coming to See Aunt Sophie'' (2014), written by Arthur Feinsod, was produced in Germany and Poland. An English translation was produced in [[Bloomington, Indiana]] at the Jewish Theatre in June 2015, and in [[Australia]] in August of that year. |
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A new play, ''My Report to the World'', written by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, premiered at Georgetown University during the conference honoring Karski's centennial year. It starred Oscar-nominated actor [[David Strathairn]] as Karski. It was performed in Warsaw before being produced in New York in July 2015; Strathairn played |
A new play, ''My Report to the World'', written by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, premiered at Georgetown University during the conference honoring Karski's centennial year. It starred Oscar-nominated actor [[David Strathairn]] as Karski. It was performed in Warsaw before being produced in New York in July 2015; Strathairn played the Karski role in all productions. Goldman directed the play in both Washington DC and New York. The July performances were presented in partnership with [[The Museum of Jewish Heritage]], The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at [[Georgetown University]], Bisno Productions, and the Jan Karski Educational Foundation. |
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==Awards and decorations== |
==Awards and decorations== |
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* {{cite book|author=Jan Karski|year=2001|title=Story of a Secret State|page=391|publisher=Simon Publications|isbn=1-931541-39-6}} |
* {{cite book|author=Jan Karski|year=2001|title=Story of a Secret State|page=391|publisher=Simon Publications|isbn=1-931541-39-6}} |
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===About Karski=== |
===About Karski=== |
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* E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski (1994). ''Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust.'' John Wiley & Sons Inc. page 316; {{ISBN|0-471-01856-2}} |
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* [[George Creel]], "Revenge in Poland, By Mr. B, as told to George Creel", ''Collier's'', 30 October and 6 November, 1943. This "Mr. B." is Karski, as certified by Maciej Kozłowski, "The Emissary, Story of Jan Karski", English translation by Joanna Maria Kwiatowska, © The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Warsaw 2007, [https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/sites/default/files/karski.pdf online], ISBN 978-83-7399-233-7. |
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* E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski (1994). ''Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust.'' John Wiley & Sons Inc. page 316; {{ISBN|0-471-01856-2}} Revised edition, 2014 (Texas Tech University Press and Gihon River Press, ISBN 9780896728820. |
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* J. Korczak, ''Misja ostatniej nadziei'', Warszawa 1992. |
* J. Korczak, ''Misja ostatniej nadziei'', Warszawa 1992. |
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* E. T. Wood, ''Karski: opowieść o emisariuszu'', Kraków 1996. |
* E. T. Wood, ''Karski: opowieść o emisariuszu'', Kraków 1996. |
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* J. Korczak, ''Karski'', Warszawa 2001. |
* J. Korczak, ''Karski'', Warszawa 2001. |
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* Maciej Kozłowski, "The Emissary, Story of Jan Karski", English translation by Joanna Maria Kwiatowska, © The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Warsaw 2007, [https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/sites/default/files/karski.pdf online], ISBN 978-83-7399-233-7. |
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* S. M. Jankowski, ''Karski: raporty tajnego emisariusza'', Poznań 2009. |
* S. M. Jankowski, ''Karski: raporty tajnego emisariusza'', Poznań 2009. |
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* Henry R. Lew, ''Lion Hearts'' Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne, Australia 2012. |
* Henry R. Lew, ''Lion Hearts'' Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne, Australia 2012. |
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* [[Polish Secret State]] |
* [[Polish Secret State]] |
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* [[Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust]] |
* [[Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust]] |
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* [[Victor Martin]] – a Belgian academic, sent by the [[Belgian resistance]] to report on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp |
* [[Victor Martin (sociologist)|Victor Martin]] – a Belgian academic, sent by the [[Belgian resistance]] to report on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp |
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* [[Witold Pilecki]] |
* [[Witold Pilecki]] |
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* [[Irena Sendler]] |
* [[Irena Sendler]] |
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==References== |
==References== |
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{{reflist |
{{reflist}} |
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<ref name="GG 2016">From an April 5, 2015 interview with Waldemar Kowalski of the [[Polish Press Agency]], as quoted in {{Cite book |publisher=Peter Lang |isbn=978-3-653-96123-2 |page=37 |editor=Irena Grudzinska-Gross |editor2=Iwa Nawrocki |last=Grudzinska-Gross |first=Irena |title=Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies |chapter=Polishness in Practice |location=Frankfurt a.M |access-date=2019-11-22 |date=2016 |chapter-url=https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/24041 |chapter-url-access=subscription}}</ref> |
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<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=http://blog.europeana.eu/2019/01/jan-karski-witness-to-the-holocaust/|title=Jan Karski. Witness to the Holocaust|last=Zgierski|first=Jakub|date=2019-01-24|website=[[Europeana]] (CC By-SA)|language=en-GB|access-date=2019-01-31}}</ref> |
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<ref name="besson">{{cite journal|url= https://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3467|title=Le Rapport Karski. Une voix qui résonne comme une source (The Karski Report. A Voice with the Ring of Truth, translated by John Tittensor)|last=Besson|first=Rémy|journal=Études photographiques|number=27|date=May 2011|access-date=16 August 2020}}</ref> |
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<ref name="arte">{{cite web |url=http://www.arte.tv/fr/semaine/244,broadcastingNum=1139154,day=5,week=11,year=2010.html |title=Archived copy |access-date=2010-05-06 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100524024539/http://www.arte.tv/fr/semaine/244,broadcastingNum=1139154,day=5,week=11,year=2010.html |archive-date=24 May 2010}}</ref> |
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<ref name="Małecki">{{cite web |url=http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20131127/KRAJSWIAT/131129618 |trans-title=Jan Karski urodził się 24 czerwca 1914 roku. Nic tego nie zmieni |title=Jan Karski was born 24 June 1914. Nothing is going to change that |date=27 November 2013 |publisher=Dziennikwschodni.pl |author=Patryk Małecki |location=[[Washington, D.C.]] |via=Internet Archive|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202230009/http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20131127/KRAJSWIAT/131129618 |archive-date=2 December 2013}}</ref> |
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Latest revision as of 08:46, 21 March 2024
Jan Karski | |
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![]() Jan Karski photo portrait | |
Born | Jan Kozielewski 24 April 1914[a] |
Died | 13 July 2000 (aged 86) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Nationality | Polish, American |
Other names | Jan Kozielewski (birth name); Piasecki, Kwaśniewski, Znamierowski, Kruszewski, Kucharski, and Witold (akas) |
Occupation(s) | Polish resistance fighter; diplomat; activist; professor; author |
Known for | World War II resistance and the Holocaust rescue |
Spouse | Pola Nireńska |
Righteous Among the Nations |
---|
![]() |
By country |
Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski, 24 June 1914[a] – 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,[a] Poland.[1][4] 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).[1]
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/JanKarski.handwritten.birthday.jpg/220px-JanKarski.handwritten.birthday.jpg)
Karski had two brothers and one sister.[citation needed] 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.[4] 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
Resistance
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Jan_Karski_missions_en.png/300px-Jan_Karski_missions_en.png)
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.[citation needed]
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.[5]
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.[5]
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,[6] midway between Lublin and Bełżec.[7] 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.[6]
Reporting Nazi atrocities to the Western Allies
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/The_Mass_Extermination_of_Jews_in_German_Occupied.pdf/page1-220px-The_Mass_Extermination_of_Jews_in_German_Occupied.pdf.jpg)
Starting in 1940,[8] 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.[9] 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.[10]
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.[11] Roosevelt asked no questions about the Jews.[12] 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.[13][14][11] But Karski's accounts of the problems of stateless people and their vulnerability to murder helped inspire the formation of the War Refugee Board,[15] changing US governmental policy from neutrality to support for war refugees and civilians in Europe,[16] and after the war, inspiring the creation of the Office of High Commissioner for Refugees.[citation needed]
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Karski.Znaczek1943.jpg/220px-Karski.Znaczek1943.jpg)
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).[17][18]
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.[19] 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.[19]
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.[20] 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.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Karski.Powell_Colin.jpg/220px-Karski.Powell_Colin.jpg)
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.[21]
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.[21] 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.[5] It ends with Karski saying that he made his report to leaders.[22] 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.[23] 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).[24][25]
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.[citation needed]
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 Jews", because they are ashamed, they want to keep their reputations. They didn't help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough.[26]
The documentary film My Mission (1997), directed by Waldemar Piasecki and Michal Fajbusiewicz, presented the full details of Karski's wartime mission. In 1999, Piasecki published Tajne Panstwo (Secret State, edited and adapted from Karski's wartime book), which became a bestseller. In the same year, the Museum of the City of Łódź opened "Jan Karski's Room", displaying memorabilia, documents, and decorations, all organized under Karski's supervision.
After Karski's death
In 2010, French author Yannick Haenel published a novel Jan Karski, drawn from the courier's World War II activities and memoir. Haenel also added a third part in which he inserted his own views into Karski's "character", particularly in his approach to Karski's meeting with President Roosevelt and other US leaders. Claude Lanzmann criticized the author strongly and argued that Haenel ignored important historic elements of the time. Haenel said that was part of his freedom in fiction.[21][22]
In response, Lanzmann released the second half of his interview with Karski as a 49-minute documentary in 2010, edited and entitled The Karski Report, also on ARTE.[23][22] It is mostly about Karski's meeting with President Roosevelt and other American leaders.[22]
Karski's wartime book was re-published posthumously by Georgetown University Press as My Report to the World: The Story of a Secret State (2013).[27] A Tribute to Jan Karski panel discussion was held at the university that year in conjunction with the book's release. It featured a discussion of Karski's legacy by School of Foreign Service Dean Carol Lancaster, Georgetown University Board Chair Paul Tagliabue, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Polish Ambassador Ryszard Schnepf, and Rabbi Harold S. White.[28]
Personal life
Karski had several siblings, mostly brothers: Marian, Boguslaw, Cyjrian, Edmund, Stefan, and Uzef and a sister Laura.
Karski's eldest brother, Marian Kozielewski (b. 1898), reached the rank of colonel in the military and was also considered a hero in World War II. He had been arrested by the Germans in Warsaw in 1940 and was among Catholic Poles who survived being imprisoned as political prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp. After being released in 1941, he returned to Warsaw and joined the resistance. The Kozielewski brothers admired Jozef Pilsudski and members of the "forgotten army", who had suffered many deeply personal wounds. After the war, Marian emigrated initially to Canada, where he married. He struggled as a refugee, holding low-level jobs after settling in Washington, D.C., in 1960 near his brother Jan. Marian Kozielewski committed suicide there in 1964 and is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery.
In 1965, Karski married Pola Nireńska, a 54-year-old Polish Jew who was a dancer and choreographer. With the exception of her parents, who had emigrated to Israel in 1939 shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland, all of her family had been murdered in the Holocaust. She committed suicide in 1992.
Karski died of unspecified heart and kidney disease in Washington, D.C., in 2000. He died at Georgetown University Hospital.[29] He was interred at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, next to the graves of his wife, Pola Nirenska, and brother Marian. He and Pola had no children.
Honors and legacy
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Jan_Karski_Statue_in_Tel_Aviv_University.jpg/220px-Jan_Karski_Statue_in_Tel_Aviv_University.jpg)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Karski_bench_NY.jpg/220px-Karski_bench_NY.jpg)
On 2 June 1982, Yad Vashem recognised Jan Karski as Righteous Among the Nations.[30] A tree bearing a memorial plaque in his name was planted that same year at Yad Vashem's Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem.
In 1991, Karski was awarded the Wallenberg Medal of the University of Michigan. Statues honoring Karski have been placed in New York City at the corner of 37th Street and Madison Avenue (renamed as "Jan Karski Corner")[31] and on the grounds of Georgetown University[32] in Washington, DC.[33] Additional benches, which were made by the Kraków-based sculptor Karol Badyna, are located in Kielce, Łódź, and Warsaw in Poland, and on the campus of Tel Aviv University in Israel. The talking Karski bench in Warsaw near the Museum of the History of Polish Jews has a button to activate a short talk by Karski about the war. Georgetown University, Oregon State University, Baltimore Hebrew College, Warsaw University, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, and the University of Łódź all awarded Karski honorary doctorates.
In 1994, Karski was made an honorary citizen of Israel in honor of his efforts on behalf of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Karski was nominated for the Nobel Prize and formally recognized by the UN General Assembly shortly before his death.
Shortly after his death, the Jan Karski Society was established, initiated by his close friend, collaborator and biographer, Professor Waldemar Piasecki. The society preserves his legacy and administers the Jan Karski Eagle Award, which he established in 2000. The list of laureates includes: Elie Wiesel, Shimon Peres, Lech Walesa, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Bronisław Geremek, Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik, Karol Modzelewski, Oriana Fallaci, Dagoberto Valdés Hernández, Stanisław Dziwisz, Tygodnik Powszechny magazine, the Hoover Institution, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
After Karski's death, his estate was involved in a legal dispute with YIVO over a legacy gift that Karski made. The Maryland Court of Appeals (now known as the Supreme Court of Maryland) settled the dispute.[34]
In April 2011, the Jan Karski US Centennial Campaign was created to increase interest in the life and legacy of the late Polish diplomat, as the centennial year of his birth in 2014 approached. In November 2012, having met its major goals, the Jan Karski US Centennial Campaign was succeeded by the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, which continues to promote Karski's legacy and values. The president of the foundation is Polish-American author Wanda Urbanska. The foundation sponsored three major conferences about Karski in his centennial birth year, at Georgetown University in Washington, at Loyola University in Chicago, and in Warsaw.[35]
The campaign group was seeking to obtain the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Karski in advance of his anniversary. In addition, they wanted to promote educational activities, including workshops, artistic performances, and a reprint of his 1944 book, Story of a Secret State. In December 2011, the support of 68 US Representatives and 12 US Senators was obtained and a supporting nomination for the medal was submitted to the White House.[36] On 23 April 2012, US President Barack Obama announced that Karski would receive the country's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.[37] The medal was awarded posthumously by President Obama on 29 May 2012 and presented to Adam Daniel Rotfeld, the former Foreign Minister of Poland and himself a Jewish Holocaust survivor.[38] Jan Karski's family was not invited to the presentation ceremony, which they strongly protested. The medal, along with other honors given to Karski, is on display at the "Karski office" in Łódź Museum. This is in accordance with the wishes of his surviving family, led by his niece and goddaughter Dr. Kozielewska-Trzaska.
A controversy erupted when a misspoken word in Barack Obama's Presidential Medal of Freedom speech came to be known as Gafa Obamy or 'Obama's gaffe',[39] when the president referred to "a Polish death camp" instead of "a death camp in Poland" when talking of the Nazi German transit death camp that Karski had visited. "Polish death camps" is a term often used to refer to Nazi concentration camps in Poland, as opposed to (as may be implied) Polish concentration camps. The terms "Polish death camp" or "Polish concentration camp" reportedly originated with ex-Nazis working for the West German secret services. Historian Leszek Pietrzak explains the propaganda strategies from the 1950s.[40] President Obama later characterized his term as a misstatement and his characterization was accepted by Polish President Bronisław Komorowski.[41]
In early February 2014, the Jan Karski Society and the Karski family appealed to President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski to posthumously promote Jan Karski to the rank of brigadier general in recognition of his contribution to the war effort as well as all couriers and emissaries of the underground Polish state. The appeal received no response for a year. Member of the Polish parliament Professor Tadeusz Iwiński recently openly criticized the president of Poland for inaction on Karski's behalf.[citation needed]
On 24 June 2014, the "Jan Karski Mission Accomplished" Conference took place in Lublin under the patronage of Professor Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, President of Poland (1995–2005), Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress, and Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland.
Remembrance
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Jan_Karski_and_Pola_Nirenska_section_40_-_Mt_Olivet_-_Washington_DC_-_2014.jpg/220px-Jan_Karski_and_Pola_Nirenska_section_40_-_Mt_Olivet_-_Washington_DC_-_2014.jpg)
Former Foreign Minister of Poland Władysław 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."[42]
A full-length play on Karski's life and mission, Coming to See Aunt Sophie (2014), written by Arthur Feinsod, was produced in Germany and Poland. An English translation was produced in Bloomington, Indiana at the Jewish Theatre in June 2015, and in Australia in August of that year.
A new play, My Report to the World, written by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, premiered at Georgetown University during the conference honoring Karski's centennial year. It starred Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn as Karski. It was performed in Warsaw before being produced in New York in July 2015; Strathairn played the Karski role in all productions. Goldman directed the play in both Washington DC and New York. The July performances were presented in partnership with The Museum of Jewish Heritage, The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, Bisno Productions, and the Jan Karski Educational Foundation.
Awards and decorations
- Order of the White Eagle
- Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, twice
- Home Army Cross
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (United States)
Works
By Karski
- "Polish Death Camp." Collier's, 14 October 1944, pp. 18–19, 60–61.
- Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State, Boston 1944 (Polish edition: Tajne państwo: opowieść o polskim Podziemiu, Warszawa 1999).
- Wielkie mocarstwa wobec Polski: 1919–1945 od Wersalu do Jałty. wyd. I krajowe Warszawa 1992, Wyd. PIW ISBN 83-06-02162-2
- Tajna dyplomacja Churchilla i Roosevelta w sprawie Polski: 1940–1945.
- Polska powinna stać się pomostem między narodami Europy Zachodniej i jej wschodnimi sąsiadami, Łódź 1997.
- Jan Karski (2001). Story of a Secret State. Simon Publications. p. 391. ISBN 1-931541-39-6.
About Karski
- E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski (1994). Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons Inc. page 316; ISBN 0-471-01856-2
- J. Korczak, Misja ostatniej nadziei, Warszawa 1992.
- E. T. Wood, Karski: opowieść o emisariuszu, Kraków 1996.
- J. Korczak, Karski, Warszawa 2001.
- S. M. Jankowski, Karski: raporty tajnego emisariusza, Poznań 2009.
- Henry R. Lew, Lion Hearts Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne, Australia 2012.
See also
- Bermuda Conference
- Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
- Polish Secret State
- Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust
- Victor Martin – a Belgian academic, sent by the Belgian resistance to report on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp
- Witold Pilecki
- Irena Sendler
- Szmul Zygielbojm
Footnotes
- ^ a b c Karski's date of birth is sometimes given as 24 April 1914, based on his baptismal records in Russian and subsequently shown on his official birth certificate. 24 June was confirmed by Karski's family lawyer, Dr. Wieslawa Kozielewska-Trzaska, by Karski's niece and god-daughter, and by the Jan Karski Society, an organization established shortly after his death to preserve his legacy. It is the date Karski himself used on handwritten documents, including several diplomatic dossiers at the League of Nations.[1]
24 April was the birth date shown on both the diploma for Karski's master's degree (awarded in 1935) and his certificate from the Artillery Reserve Officer Cadet School (awarded in 1936).[2]
In March 2014, the United States Senate adopted a resolution honoring Karski on the centennial of his birth, 24 April 2014. The resolution was withdrawn and revised to recognize Karski on 24 June 2014, according to the Polish Press Agency.[3]
Karski's diplomatic passport showed his date of birth as 22 March 1912.[citation needed]
References
- ^ a b c Patryk Małecki (27 November 2013). "Jan Karski was born 24 June 1914. Nothing is going to change that" [Jan Karski urodził się 24 czerwca 1914 roku. Nic tego nie zmieni]. Washington, D.C.: Dziennik Wschodni. Archived from the original on 2 December 2013 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Jan Karski. Fotobiografia, by Maciej Sadowski, Warsaw: Veda, 2014 [page needed]
- ^ Polish Press Agency. "World News. Archived copy". Archived from the original on 28 April 2014 – via Internet Archive, 2014-04-28.
- ^ a b Biskupska, Jadwiga (17 February 2022). Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation. Cambridge University Press. p. 160. ISBN 978-1-316-51558-7.
- ^ a b c Zgierski, Jakub (24 January 2019). "Jan Karski. Witness to the Holocaust". Europeana (CC By-SA). Retrieved 31 January 2019.
- ^ a b E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski (1994). Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons Inc. page 114; ISBN 0-471-01856-2
- ^ Weiss, Jakob (2010). The Lemberg Mosaic. Alderbrook Press. p. 409. ISBN 978-0-9831091-1-2.
- ^ Engel, David (1983). "An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and Soviet Occupation Presented to the Polish Government-In-Exile, February 1940". Jewish Social Studies. 45 (1): 1–16. ISSN 0021-6704. JSTOR 4467201.
- ^ Roberts, Sam (20 April 2020). "Walentyna Janta-Polczynska, Polish War Heroine, Dies at 107". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 April 2020.
- ^ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland (10 December 1942). The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland (PDF). New York: Roy Publishers. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
- ^ a b Jan Karski (5 May 2011). Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World: My Report to the World. Penguin Books Limited. pp. 407ff. ISBN 978-0-14-196844-5.
- ^ Gerd Bayer; Oleksandr Kobrynskyy (1 December 2015). Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Images, Memory, and the Ethics of Representation. Columbia University Press. pp. 45–. ISBN 978-0-231-85091-9.
- ^ Richard L. Rashke (1995). Escape from Sobibor. University of Illinois Press. pp. 127ff. ISBN 978-0-252-06479-1.
- ^ Robert L. Beir (1 June 2013). Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation. Skyhorse. p. 273. ISBN 978-1-62636-366-3.
- ^ Richard J. Golsan (20 December 2016). The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory. Lexington Books. pp. 98–. ISBN 978-1-4985-5033-8.
- ^ Robert L. Beir (1 June 2013). Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation. Skyhorse. pp. 276–. ISBN 978-1-62636-366-3.
- ^ Karski, Jan. (1944). "Polish Death Camp," Collier's, 14 October 1944, pp. 18–19, 60–61.
- ^ Abzug, Robert. H. (1999). America Views the Holocaust, 1933–1945: A Brief Documentary History. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, p. 183.
- ^ a b From an 5 April 2015 interview with Waldemar Kowalski of the Polish Press Agency, as quoted in Grudzinska-Gross, Irena (2016). "Polishness in Practice". In Irena Grudzinska-Gross; Iwa Nawrocki (eds.). Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang. p. 37. ISBN 978-3-653-96123-2. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
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- ^ a b c Besson, Rémy (May 2011). "Le Rapport Karski. Une voix qui résonne comme une source (The Karski Report. A Voice with the Ring of Truth, translated by John Tittensour)". Études photographiques (27). Retrieved 16 August 2020.
- ^ a b c d Jeffries, Stuart (9 June 2011). "Claude Lanzmann on why Holocaust documentary Shoah still matters". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
- ^ a b "Programmes à la semaine - ARTE". Archived from the original on 24 May 2010. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
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- ^ "Revue ESPRIT". Retrieved 11 January 2018.
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- ^ Storozynski, Alex (28 March 2014). "Karski's Story of a Secret State – A Primer on the Polish Ethos". Huffington Post. Retrieved 25 December 2017.
- ^ "Georgetown University video of the event". Georgetown.edu. 18 March 2013. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
- ^ Kaufman, Michael T. (15 July 2000). "Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About Holocaust". New York Times.
- ^ "Yad Vashem recognizes Karski". yadvashem.org. Archived from the original on 25 April 2013. Retrieved 30 August 2016.
- ^ "Statue salutes Polish man who warned FDR of Nazi camps", New York Daily News, 12 November 2007
- ^ "Remembering the Man who Tried to Stop the Holocaust - Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service - Georgetown University". Archived from the original on 9 June 2010. Retrieved 21 March 2010.
- ^ "Monument to Honor Dr. Jan Karski", Polish-American Journal. 30 September 2002. vol 91; No. 9; page 8
- ^ YIVO Inst. for Jewish Rsch. v. Zaleski (Court case). A.2d.
{{cite book}}
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ignored (help) - ^ "Foundation History and Mission". Jan Karski Educational Foundation. Retrieved 17 October 2022.
- ^ Jan Karski. "Jan Karski Educational Foundation (home)". Jankarski.net. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
- ^ "President Obama Announces Jan Karski as a Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom". whitehouse.gov. 26 April 2012. Retrieved 27 April 2012 – via National Archives.
- ^ "2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony". whitehouse.gov. 29 May 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2014 – via National Archives.
- ^ "Matthew Kaminski: 'Gafa Obamy'". The Wall Street Journal. 30 May 2012.
- ^ "Jak Niemcy Polaków wrabiali w mordowanie Żydów – Leszek Pietrzak – NowyEkran.pl". Archived from the original on 29 October 2011. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
- ^ "President of the Republic of Poland / News / News / President on Barack Obama's letter". President.pl. 1 June 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
- ^ Address by the former Foreign Minister of Poland Wladysław Bartoszewski at the ceremony of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 27 January 2005 see pp. 156–157 Archived 22 March 2020 at the Wayback Machine
External links
- Works by or about Jan Karski at the Internet Archive
- Jan Karski – his activity to save Jews' lives during the Holocaust, at Yad Vashem website
- The Jan Karski papers at the Hoover Institution Archives
- Interviews with Jan Karski
- U.S Holocaust memorial Museum, Claude Lanzmann Interview with Jan Karski
- Jan Karski at culture.pl