Remembering Jan Karski, the Pole who told FDR to his face about the Holocaust, and still wondered if he'd done enough.
On a mild, breezy day in
Lublin this summer, the chief rabbi of
Poland and the former chairman of the
Polish conference of bishops presided
at a tree-planting ceremony on the
grounds of a primary school. The
school is situated near the
tombstone-shaped monument to the
estimated 34,000 Jews of the Lublin
ghetto who were slaughtered at Belzec
in 1942. Inspired by the way Israel’s
Yad Vashem Holocaust museum honors its
“righteous among the nations,” this
particular ceremony paid tribute to a
man already honored at Yad Vashem and
elsewhere in Israel. His name was Jan
Kozielewski, but he was known as Jan
Karski.
The event in Lublin was part of a
two-day conference on the centennial
of Karski’s birth. I was present
because I had been one of his doctoral
students at Georgetown University in
Washington, DC. In registering for his
course in 1979, I had no idea who he
was or that 35 years earlier, he had
published a book, Story of a
Secret State, that became a
runaway best-seller in the U.S. An
account of his wartime activities in
the Polish underground, of which he
was a leading emissary to the West,
the book was intended to rally support
for Polish freedom. It also included
Karski’s eyewitness report on the mass
murder of Poland’s three million Jews,
already then well under way.
A year before its publication in
1944, Karski had presented the
essential message of his book in
private audiences with British Foreign
Minister Anthony Eden and U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as
well as with Western opinion leaders
and prominent members of the Jewish
community. Yet neither the book nor
these private briefings succeeded
either in halting the slaughter of the
Jews or in rescuing the freedom (and
postwar territorial integrity) of
Poland. As a result, the war’s end
left Karski with an all but unbearable
sense of frustration, which he dealt
with by vowing never to talk further
of what he had witnessed of the
Holocaust or of his own wartime
struggle in defense of Poland.
He kept this vow for over three
decades until, about a year before I
entered his class, he yielded to the
entreaties of the French filmmaker
Claude Lanzmann and allowed himself to
be interviewed for the epic
documentary, Shoah. That
nine-and-a-half hour film, finally
released in 1985, included countless
interviews, but Karski was widely seen
as its central figure, thus bringing
him to the attention of younger
generations.
In the meantime, now that I knew
the name, I’d noticed a copy of Story
of a Secret State that had long
been gathering dust on my parents’
bookshelves. Once I opened it, I was
unable to put it down. From it, rather
than from anything Karski revealed in
his lectures, I gathered the stature
of the man.
Not that Karski’s lectures
were impersonal. On the contrary, they
were replete with remembered incidents
that gave us glimpses into what he had
been through without ever suggesting
the scope or the significance of his
role. He would point to
his left side and say, “the
Russians broke these ribs,” point
to his right side and say, “and
the Nazis broke these ribs,” and
regale us with his deep laugh.
Had he told us more, laughter would
have seemed all the more
inappropriate. The Nazis
had not just broken his ribs but
knocked out his teeth and
subjected him to torture. “The
impact of the rubber truncheon,”
he wrote in Story of a Secret
State, “was something like the
sensation produced when a
dentist’s drill strikes a nerve,
but infinitely multiplied and
spread over the entire nervous
system.” So great was the pain
that he feared he would succumb
and reveal information; so he slit
his wrists, aiming to kill himself
rather than betray his comrades.
When the underground mounted a
risky operation to free him from
the Gestapo, the Germans
retaliated by executing (in one
account) twenty or (in another
account) thirty-five Polish
patriots. Their deaths would roil
Karski’s conscience
for the rest of his life.
But he did not tell us any of this.
His stoicism befit his status as a
commissioned officer who carried
himself with such dignified bearing
that he struck me and others as an
aristocrat, although in truth he was
of middle-class origins. The epitome
of Polish patriotism, he had been
forced to spend almost all of his
adult life in exile. The postwar
sellout of Poland by the Western
powers had devastated him. “To me,
every one of those events in Moscow
and Washington was like a stab in the
heart,” he told Maciej Kozlowski, the
author of a 2007 book on his exploits.
“Now my world, my hopes and plans, lay
in ruins.” Karski’s tormented older
brother Marian, who with Jan’s help
had found refuge from Poland’s postwar
Communist regime in America but never
found comfort in a country that he
felt had betrayed their own, committed
suicide in the 1960s.
Karski sublimated his own inner
torment by means of humor and irony.
“I am a Yankee,” he would resonantly
declare—in his even more resonant
Polish accent. The same sardonicism
permeated everything he tried to
convey to us, his innocent American
students, about the cruelties of
history. In 1948, in the course of the
Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia,
Jan Masaryk, the country’s foreign
minister, had met his death falling
from a window. It was a matter of
debate, Karski informed us, whether
Masaryk had jumped or was pushed, but
he, Karski, knew the truth: Masaryk
had jumped, “but with help.”
Apart from conveying the
barbarities of Nazi and Communist
conquests, Karski also did a masterful
job giving us a feel for a region
where life had always been so
different from ours. He spoke
of the centrality of the Polish
church, telling of peasant families
who possessed but a single pair of
shoes, worn by the father to early
mass on Sunday morning and then
passed along from son to son until
each had attended a mass properly
shod. He described the church’s
struggle with the Communists,
issuing a report card on its
successive leaders: Cardinal
Mindszenty had been foolish,
Wyszynski was a Mindszenty with
brains, Wojtyla (later to become
Pope John Paul II) the smartest of
all.
Nor was the sarcasm that I so
relished always devoted to such somber
matters. Lecturing us about Communist
Yugoslavia and its senescent dictator,
Karski remarked: “Marshal Tito is
carrying on with a
thirty-five-year-old opera singer. For
a man of my age, that is a real
inspiration.”
Following the screening of Shoah
in the 1980s, Karski’s
fame spread among Jewish audiences. His heroic
reputation was richly deserved,
for it had not been by mere
coincidence that he came to
witness the Nazi war against the
Jews. In 1942, the Polish
underground had agreed to convey
information about the
annihilation of Polish Jewry to
the outside world. Karski,
already assigned to carry secret
messages to the Polish
government-in-exile in London,
assumed this additional burden
as well. In order to fulfill his
mission, he first arranged to be
smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto
for a detailed tour of its
horrors. He visited not once,
but twice. Then, at still
greater risk, he had himself
insinuated into a Nazi death
camp disguised as a local
Ukrainian guard.
In 1943, Karski’s high-profile
activities in London and Washington
led his superiors to veto his return
to Poland. He spent the last
two years of the war in the Allied
countries, advocating for Poland but
also—on his own initiative—for the
Jews. Decades later, after
the airing of Shoah, his
public activities in the latter domain
increased. Speaking about the
Holocaust, he would invariably stress
its singularity, just as he had done
in Story of a Secret State:
“brutality and inhumanity of
proportions completely out of the
realm of anything I had previously
experienced, and that actually made me
revise my conception of the range of
what could occur in the world I
inhabited.”
On his eightieth birthday,
the state of Israel, which had long
since honored Karski with a plaque
and tree at Yad Vashem, took the
additional step of conferring
honorary citizenship on him. At the
ceremony, moved and solemn but in
full possession of his trademark
sense of irony, he declared: “Now,
I, Jan Karski, Jan Kozielewski, a
Pole, an American, a Catholic, have
also become an Israelite! Gloria,
gloria in excelsis Deo!“
Karski’s efforts on behalf
of the Jews were all the more
remarkable because this was not his
primary mission. As he put it in describing
to Lanzmann his audience with FDR:
For me
the Jewish problem was not the only
problem. For me the key problem was
Poland: Curzon line, Soviet demands,
Communists in the underground
movement, fear of the Polish nation,
what is going to happen to Poland.
This was the emphasis. I speak to the
president in those terms. . . . Then I
come to the Jewish problem: “Mr.
President, I have also [another]
mission. Before having left Poland I
was charged with this mission by the
most important Jewish leaders.”
Heartbreakingly, Karski’s
efforts to save Poland were no more
successful than his efforts on
behalf of the Jews. Just as he was
perhaps the first to bring
authoritative word of the Holocaust,
so he was also among the first to
alert the West to the secret,
Soviet-controlled campaign to pave
the way for a Communist takeover
once the Nazi occupiers were driven
out.
To
Western leaders, dependent on their
alliance with Stalin, Karski was just
rocking the boat. He soon grasped the
bitter truth that the great
democracies, which, after having
indolently abetted the growing menace
of Hitlerism, had felt compelled to go
to war over Poland’s independence,
were prepared at war’s end to deliver
a bound and mutilated Poland to
Moscow.
One of the most poignant scenes in
Story of a Secret State
records Karski’s exchange with one
of the leaders of the Jewish
underground: “You other Poles are
fortunate,” the leader tells him.
“You are suffering, too. Many of you
will die, but at least your nation
goes on living. . . . [Y]our country
will emerge again but the Polish
Jews will no longer exist.” It is
true that Polish Jewry was
completely destroyed, but the Jewish
nation was to rise like a phoenix
from the ashes while it took nearly
a half-century until Poland could
resume its national life.
That resurrection began with the
rise of Solidarity in 1980. Only a
year earlier, Karski had informed my
class that “dissidents in Communist
states are insignificant. If they
weren’t, they would be wiped out.” In
this instance, his hard-earned
cynicism misled him. True enough,
Solidarity was soon suppressed, but it
was far from wiped out. Eventually,
continued agitation by the new Polish
underground helped to bring down the
Communist system and the Soviet
empire.
Even while expressing to students
his fervent hope that Solidarity would
exercise caution and not overreach,
Karski wanted it to succeed and gave
it his support. Joseph E. Ryan, a
student and political activist who
befriended Karski at Georgetown,
recalls being with him at a Washington
D.C. rally for Solidarity and of his
subsequent appearance at a retreat for
student activists where he spoke about
Poland’s struggles. Ryan also recalls
Karski speaking in Georgetown’s main
chapel at a Holocaust memorial
service. There he confessed that,
confronted with the deafness of the
British and American governments to
his pleas, he had contemplated
committing suicide to send a message:
He
always wondered whether he did enough
to stop the Holocaust, and said that
when he died, he would have to account
for it when he faced God. That [writes
Ryan] was one of the most powerful
presentations I have seen in my life.
In their excellent biography, Karski:
How One Man Tried to Stop the
Holocaust (1994), E. Thomas Wood
and Stanislaw Jankowski attribute
Karski’s stance on the Holocaust to
his mother, who “raised [him] to
respect and maintain friendly
relations with the Jewish
community.” But surely many other
Polish mothers raised their sons on
similar injunctions. How many of
those sons risked their lives,
repeatedly, to try to save Jews?
What explains Karski is to be found
not in his upbringing—even if that is
what he told his biographers. His
strict sense of right and wrong may
have been shaped by his mother, but
his unbreakable determination to do
right no matter the risk or the
price had to have come from a place
more mysterious and deep within.
It is to honor that essential quality
of soul that a tree now grows in
Lublin, matching the one in Jerusalem.
Both bear testament to the rarest of
men, one who managed to save neither
the Jews nor his beloved Poland but
who laid on the line everything he had
in the attempt—and in so doing left a
model of courage and righteousness for
the generations.
______________
Joshua Muravchik is the author
most recently of Making
David into Goliath: How the
World Turned against Israel.
A somewhat different version of this
essay was delivered at a memorial
conference in Lublin marking the
centennial of Jan Karski’s birth.
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