by Tec, Nechama
FIGURE 6.1 Jan Karski in 1943, taken during his mission to the United States to inform government leaders about Nazi policy in Poland. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jan Karski)
Among the most heroic Polish underground figures was Jan Kerski, born in Lodz in 1914. He was a courier and deeply involved with the Polish underground. Known as Jan Karski, he was a devout Catholic who served as an emissary, a link between the underground and the Polish government-in-exile in London. Among the numerous honors bestowed upon him after the war was Poland’s highest military decoration, the order of Virtuti Militaris. In Jerusalem, Yad Vashem paid tribute to Karski by distinguishing him with the title of the Righteous among the Nations (in Hebrew: Hasidei Umot Haolam). Karski’s story offers significant insights into wartime developments in Poland.
While still a young boy, Karski lost his father. His brother, Marian, eighteen years his senior, became a surrogate father and encouraged Jan’s educational and professional ambitions. His mother instilled in her younger son a tolerance for outsiders, including Jews. With this tolerance came an equally strong concern for social justice. And while Catholicism played an important role in Karski’s life, he placed an even higher value on the human spirit.
With his university degree, the aspiring young diplomat entered the Polish Foreign Service. In 1939 Karski enlisted in the Polish army with a rank of second lieutenant. Taken prisoner by the Soviets, he escaped to Warsaw, where he joined the newly established AK.
Karski was selected to be an international emissary. He may have been chosen for this kind of work because of his diplomatic background, impressive physical stamina, and photographic memory. Karski modestly described his role as follows: “I was only a courier. My duty was to transport information. In a sense I acted as a mailbox or a gramophone record. I hurried from one side of the front to the other. Everybody had me swear that I would tell what I heard to authorized people only.”5
As discussed, the Polish government-in-exile was primarily made up of four prewar parties—the Peasant Party, the Christian Labor Party, the National Party, and the Socialist Party.6 Of these, the socialists had the richest, most continuous tradition of fighting for independence.7 Karski notes that during the war, the Poles, unlike the French, for example, refused to become a part of the Nazi General Government, a separate administration region of occupied Poland.8
Karski outlined the basic principles guiding them all:
1. No collaboration with the enemy, under any circumstances.
2. The military army of the Polish underground was to coordinate its activities with the Polish government-in-exile.9
As a supporter of parliamentary democracy, Karski saw in this newly created wartime government in London an improvement over the earlier Polish governments. It had returned to the older tradition of parliamentary democracy, and in the end it offered more freedom than the prewar so-called democracy.10 Still, these changes did not mean that this newly created government was free of prejudices and abuses. The powerful Nationalist Party was characterized by anti-Semitism, and in general the government-in-exile was guided by self-interest rather than concern for any of its minority constituents, least of all the Jews.11
Additionally, official positions do not necessarily reflect reality in its entirety. For example, a statement made in 1942 by Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, deputy commander and then commander of the AK, claimed that the AK had offered assistance to the Warsaw ghetto underground with supplies of ammunition and arms, and Jewish underground leaders had rejected the offer. Israel Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski reject the veracity of this claim entirely, calling it a “fiction from beginning to the end.” “It is difficult,” they add, “to understand the motives in fabricating such a tale.”12 In 1943, the Jewish underground in the Warsaw ghetto did receive some guns and other aid from the AK. However, this help came only after Jewish resisters had successfully fought off the German attack on January 18, 1943.13
Turning to the earlier stages of the war and the initial German attacks upon Poland, it is usually accepted that a substantial number of Polish Jews joined the escaping crowds. No exact figures are available. According to some estimates, about 200,000 Jewish refugees reached Soviet-occupied Poland.14 Poles who lived in the eastern part of Poland suspected the Jewish newcomers of being communist sympathizers or, worse, Russian spies, however much they protested that they were propelled by fear of the Germans. Ironically, many of these Jewish refugees were sent by the Russians to Siberia. With the subsequent German occupation of this area, the remaining Jews were caught in the net of annihilation.
In 1940, at the age of twenty-five, Karski left for his first mission in France. There, in addition to the information he submitted to the government-in-exile, at the request of his superiors, he wrote a report about life in Poland under the German and Soviet occupations. A portion of this report dealt with the Jewish plight and the German occupation’s effect on the Jewish-Polish relations. In this document Karski called for the creation of a common front, an alliance through which the weaker partners—the Jews and the Poles—might work together against their deadly enemy, the German occupational forces. He argued that such an alliance would be morally advantageous to all Poles. At the same time, he deplored the fact that the Polish masses did not seem to sympathize with the Jews. Already insightful and concise, he surmised long before most that the Germans had targeted the Jews for total destruction.15
Karski returned to Poland via Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Within a few weeks, he was sent to France again. This time, however, the Gestapo arrested him in Slovakia. Although tortured, Karski revealed no secrets. Still, he feared that eventually he might succumb. At the first opportunity he had, he retrieved some razor blades he had hidden in his shoes and cut his wrists—only to be revived by the Germans. The brutal Nazi interrogation resumed. Shortly thereafter, however, it was interrupted by a daring and successful rescue operation executed by a Polish commando group. After he recovered, Karski continued to serve the AK.16
Karski was preoccupied by the Nazi annihilation of the Jews and was ready to do what he could to alleviate Jewish suffering. He took advantage of an opportunity to alert the leaders of the free world to the systematic murder of the Jews. In the latter part of 1942, in preparation for a transatlantic journey, Karski met with Jewish leaders in Poland and agreed to deliver their messages to Allies and others whom they deemed influential.
To add credence to this part of his mission, with the help of these Jewish underground leaders, Karski was first smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto, in order to gain first-hand knowledge of the Jewish plight. To report on another phase of Jewish destruction, Karski, dressed as a guard, was smuggled into the transit camp Izbica Lubelska. Jews from all over Europe were brought to this camp, which served as a traffic regulator for Jews destined for the death camp Belzec. In Izbica Lubelska, the Jewish prisoners were robbed of their possessions, humiliated, brutalized, and often simply murdered. Some of the Jewish survivors were transferred to Belzec and gassed upon arrival.17
Not only was Karski risking his life through these visits, he also endangered his psychological health. His biographers, E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw Jankowski, describe how while in Izbica Karski suffered a kind of breakdown, weeping and gesticulating, essentially losing self-control. Only his escort’s angry shouts of “Follow me! Follow me!” roused him from his stupor. Hustling Karski from the camp, the guide vented his fury through clenched teeth: “You acted like you were crazy in there! With your crazy gestures! You endanger people! You’ve got no business being here! Come on!”18
Subsequently, in England and in the United States, Karski met with many world leaders, including President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and the British foreign minister Anthony Eden. He also met with such dignitaries as Szmuel Zygielbojm, a Polish-Jewish leader of the socialist Bund, who had escaped from Poland and established himself in London in order to mobilize support for the Jewish people. However, Zygielbojm was never successful in o
btaining any significant guarantees of aid. After many failures, disheartened by the lack of sympathy, and in protest, Zygielbojm committed suicide. In a letter, he explained himself, arguing “that the responsibility for the crime and murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allies, on their governments, who to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime.”19
Karski’s reports about the plight of the Jewish people and the messages from the Jewish Polish leaders who pleaded for help also fell on deaf ears. For the Allies, as for other governments, the systematic murder of the Jews by the Germans was not a primary concern. Years later, commenting on this mission, Karski described it as “an obvious failure. Six million Jews died, and no one offered them effective help. Not any nation, not any government, not any church. The help they did receive, heroic help, was provided only by scattered individuals.”20
The 1942 meetings with high-ranking governmental officials convinced Karski that the Jews had been abandoned by the world’s governments, and he said as much on multiple occasions. However, his experiences also convinced him that while the murderers of Jews by far outnumbered those who wanted to save them, the Jews were not entirely alone. “We hear it said that the Jews were abandoned by governments, social structures, church hierarchies, but not by ordinary men and women.”21
Significantly, Karski was convinced that in reflecting on and studying the Holocaust, it was counterproductive to concentrate only on the murderers and ignore the minority that was determined to save Jews. He argued that we must adhere to the historical truth by showing how thousands of Christians tried to save Jews and were often prepared to die doing so. Some did. Karski was convinced that overlooking those who risked their lives to save the oppressed only perpetuated the idea that “everybody hates the Jews.”22
Karski believed that for the Jewish people, focusing exclusively on their wartime destruction would develop into a psychic wound that would never heal. He identified with Jewish suffering and with their apprehension that with time the Holocaust would become one of those forgotten historical events, lost among so many other human tragedies. He therefore understood Jewish fears of the Holocaust becoming trivialized and the resulting single-minded focus on Jewish destruction. Nevertheless, he felt that this emphasis on Jewish annihilation, while understandable, was ultimately counterproductive. First, because historically it was untrue; many people opposed Jewish annihilation. Second, because it perpetuated the notion that anti-Semitism was universal.
Karski’s humanism extended to other oppressed groups and individuals as well. His identification with the downtrodden grew out of his moral convictions and having witnessed the suffering of various groups. Still, it was the Jewish annihilation that preoccupied him. His first report for the Polish government-in-exile, then in France, written in 1940, was filled with vivid examples of helplessness and humiliation. Karski reported:
One time I was at the Gestapo to obtain a pass of some sort. A Jewish woman came in, a member of the educated class, very frightened. She was expecting a child. She was requesting a pass for herself or for her doctor to be on the street after 8:00 pm should it be necessary to begin delivery then.
The female secretary, a Volksdeutsche, responded, “You don’t need a pass. We are not going to facilitate the birth of a Jew. Dogs are dying from hunger and misery, and still you want to give birth to Jews? Heraus! Heraus! [Get out of here!]”23
In another part of this same report, Karski wrote:
I was in the Kercelak (a kiosk stand in Warsaw). A frozen Jew is the proprietor. A German soldier comes by. He takes socks, combs, soap—wants to walk off without paying. The Jew demands money. The soldier pays no attention. The old man raises his voice; his frightened neighbors hold him back and calm him; they are afraid for him. The old man shouts, or rather howls: “What will he do to me? What will he do to me? He can only kill me. Let him kill me. Let him kill me. Enough of all this! I can’t go on any more.”
The German walked away; he didn’t pay. As he was leaving, he muttered, “Verfluchte Juden. [Damned Jews].”24
Karski was also sensitive to and identified with the dangerous and life-threatening conditions of low-ranking underground workers. In his book, Story of a Secret State, his reports are full of compassion. “Pitiful were the young girls who distributed the underground press. It was a thankless job—this was a simple mechanical task—men did not want it; men insisted on playing more important roles. The death rate among these girls was very high.”25 Couriers had a slightly higher status than those who distributed illegal literature. As we have seen, most were women. Karski was keenly aware of the special dangers that female couriers faced. A courier’s job, he noted, required that many people “knew every detail of her life—and in clandestine work that was bad. . . . They were overloaded with work and doomed from the start.”26
Late in 1943, Karski’s position in the Polish underground changed drastically. On the way to Poland, he stopped in London and was told that Germans were aware of his trip to the United States and were issuing broadcasts that Karski was a Bolshevik agent paid by American Jews to slander the Third Reich by spreading lies. The Polish prime minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk determined that Karski’s return to Poland would be too risky. “I was marked by the scars on my wrists. Actually, the Polish government did not know what to do with me. I knew too many secrets.”27
Karski wound up working in Washington on the Polish Embassy staff. He remembered those years as the busiest of his life. He delivered some two hundred lectures, and in 1944 wrote Story of a Secret State. “In most of the lectures, interviews, articles, and in my book, I informed the public about what was happening to the Jews in Poland.”28 Karski was continuously frustrated by the Allies’ refusal to do anything about the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people. The end of the war proved how right he had been, and, perhaps in a gesture of defiance and rage, Karski stopped talking about the Holocaust altogether.
The United States became Karski’s permanent home. By 1952 he had earned a Ph.D. at Georgetown University, where he stayed on as a professor, teaching courses on Eastern Europe, government, and international affairs. Soon surrounded by a circle of devoted students, Karski became an admired figure on the Georgetown Campus. In 1962, he married Pola Nirenska, a distinguished dancer and choreographer, and a Polish Jew.
FIGURE 6.2 Jan Karski at Georgetown University in 1982. The same year, Karski was honored by Yad Vashem and designated as one of the Righteous among the Nations for his work as a resistance fighter. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Carol Harrison)
He revisited his past only at the insistent urgings of Claude Lanzmann, the director of the film Shoah. An admirer of Lanzmann’s talents, Karski regretted that the film did not include the story of Christians who had risked their lives to save Jews. He thought there should be a special film focusing exclusively on the rescue of Jews by Christians, which he believed was necessary for those generations that had not witnessed the Holocaust, Jew and Gentile alike, “in order not to lose their faith in mankind.”29
Karski speculated that of the Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe, an estimated half a million had received some help from non-Jews. The rescuers came from every quarter—nuns, peasants, workers, and so on. “The organized structures fell short of expectations, but not the ordinary people. And there were perhaps millions of such individuals. In this lies a hidden source of optimism, and this optimism should be passed on to those generations for whom the Holocaust is not more than a page from a history textbook.”30
When asked to comment about the postwar reaction to the Holocaust, Karski’s consistent answer was that while he read about how Western leaders—“statesmen and generals, church hierarchies, civic leaders” –claimed that they had no knowledge about the Nazi genocide, they knew. “According to them, the murder of six million Jews was a well-guarded sec
ret. This version of wartime events persists in many quarters even today. This version is no more than a myth. They knew.”31 In Karski’s estimation,
Anybody who wanted to know about German crimes against the Jews could have known, and not only through me. There were many other sources. But this truth could not get through. This was not only due to ill will. The Holocaust, this systematic extermination of an entire nation, happened for the first time in the history of mankind. People were not prepared for such a truth. And that is why these truths were rejected, even subconsciously. The most trustworthy witnesses were rejected. There are things which minds and hearts refuse to accept.32
Jan Karski’s death in 2000 deprived the world of a humanitarian whose courage and selfless dedication gave hope to many.33 He proved that Christian and Jewish passivity during the Holocaust was a myth. In most wartime settings—ghettos, forests, concentration camps—conditions were not conducive to resistance, and yet, in myriad shapes and guises, both Jews and Christians found the strength to stand up to German oppression. They found a way to cooperate, and to oppose the enemy.
Conclusion
“Not Alone”
Wartime cooperation against the Germans was expressed in a wide range of efforts that frequently moved beyond the expected and often took the form of acts of kindness. The Holocaust offers many examples of such acts.
