July 15, 2000
Jan
Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About
Holocaust By MICHAEL T.
KAUFMAN JAN
Karski, a liaison officer of the Polish
underground who infiltrated both the
Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration
camp and then carried the first eyewitness
accounts of the Holocaust to a mostly
disbelieving West, died on Thursday in
Washington. Mr. Karski, a retired
professor of history at Georgetown
University, was 86 years old. He died of heart and kidney ailments at
Georgetown University Hospital, the
university said. In the late summer of 1942, Mr. Karski,
then a 28-year-old clandestine diplomat in
Warsaw for the Polish government-in-exile
in London, was preparing for a secret
mission to carry information from
Nazi-occupied Poland to London and
Washington. Before leaving Warsaw, he was
visited by two leaders of the Jewish
underground who had managed to leave the
Ghetto briefly to tell him about what they
called "Hitler's war against the Polish
Jews." They said that by their calculations,
more than 1.8 million Jews had already
been killed by the Germans and that
300,000 of the 500,000 Jews jammed into
the Warsaw Ghetto had been deported to an
obscure village about 60 miles from Warsaw
where the Germans had set up a death
camp. They asked him if he could carry their
information to Winston Churchill
and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They
also asked if he would be willing to enter
the Ghetto and see for himself what was
happening. Mr. Karski, a Roman Catholic
from a patriotic Polish family who seems
to have been blessed with a photographic
memory, agreed. By that time he had already endured a
horrible war. Karski was his nom de guerre; he had
been born Jan Kozielewski, the
youngest of eight children, in Lodz,
Poland's second-largest city, on April 24,
1914. He was a prize student and was
recruited into the Polish diplomatic
service, where he was quickly given
coveted assignments to London and
Paris. But as war
approached, he enlisted in the army and
was serving as a cavalry officer in
1939 when German soldiers, followed
less than two weeks later by Russian
troops, invaded Poland and divided the
country. Mr. Karski was captured by the
Soviets and placed in a detention camp.
He escaped and joined the Polish
underground; most of the Polish
officers imprisoned with him were later
executed by Soviet troops. Mr. Karski became a skilled courier for
the underground, crossing enemy lines as a
liaison between the Polish fighters and
the West. He was captured by the Gestapo
while on a mission in Slovakia in 1940 and
was savagely tortured. Fearful that he
might reveal secrets, he slashed his
wrists and was put into a hospital. An
underground commando team helped him
escape, and he resumed his work as a
clandestine liaison officer. In October 1939, the Germans enclosed
the main Jewish areas in Warsaw with
barbed wire. In less than a year the
Ghetto was walled in, trapping half a
million Jews. By July 1942 the first mass
deportations of Jews to extermination
camps had begun. In the third week of August 1942, Mr.
Karski entered the cellar of an apartment
house on the so-called Aryan side of the
Ghetto wall and met with a youth from the
Jewish Combat Organization, then secretly
being formed in the Ghetto. The youth gave
him some ragged clothes and an armband
with a blue Star of David and led him
through a recently dug tunnel. As they
emerged, Mr. Karski saw the Ghetto streets
and tenements crowded with haggard, hungry
and dying Jews. Where Nazi Boys
Shot Jews for SportDecades later, when asked to describe
what he had seen, Mr. Karski would usually
simply say, "I saw terrible things." But on some occasions, for example in
"Shoah," Claude Lanzmann's classic
documentary about the Holocaust, he would
tell of seeing many naked dead bodies
lying in the streets, and describe
emaciated and starving people, listless
infants and older children with
expressionless eyes. He remembered
watching from an apartment while two pudgy
teenage boys in the uniforms of the Hitler
Youth hunted Jews for sport, cheering and
laughing when one of their rifle shots
struck its target and brought screams of
agony. One of the Jews who had prompted Mr.
Karski to enter the Ghetto, and who
escorted him, was a lawyer named Leon
Feiner. Mr. Karski recalled that Mr.
Feiner kept
murmuring,
"Remember this, remember this." There was
also another escort whose name Mr. Karski
never learned. They both urged Mr. Karski
to tell what he was witnessing to as many
people in the West as he could, though
they knew the facts would be hard to
believe. At the time of Mr. Karski's visit, the
expulsions from Warsaw had temporarily
subsided, but they were to intensify in
September as the liquidation of the Ghetto
resumed in earnest. Mr. Feiner was among
the hundreds of thousands who died. There were five points that the two men
in the Ghetto asked Mr. Karski to pass on
to the Allied leaders: - Preventing the extermination of the
Jews should be declared an official
goal of the Allies fighting
Hitler.
- Allied propaganda should be used to
inform the German people of the war
crimes taking place and to publicize
the names of German officials taking
part.
- The Allies should appeal to the
German people to bring pressure on
Hitler's regime to stop the
slaughter.
- The Allies should declare that if
the genocide continued and the German
masses did not rise to stop it, the
German people would be held
collectively responsible.
- Finally, if nothing else worked,
the Allies should carry out reprisals
by bombing German cultural sites and
executing Germans in Allied hands who
still professed loyalty to Hitler.
Mr. Karski later said that the Jews'
proposals were "bitter and unrealistic,"
as if they knew such a program could not
and would not be carried out, and that he
had told them their five points went
beyond international law. For the rest of his life he remembered
the response of the man accompanying Mr.
Feiner: "We don't know what is realistic,
or not realistic. We are dying here! Say
it!" Mr. Karski asked what he should say to
Jewish leaders abroad. Unhesitatingly his
hosts told him that such leaders should
consider hunger strikes, fasting to death
if necessary, to shake the conscience of
the world. In Ukrainian
Outfit, A Scent of DeathMr. Feiner then asked if Mr. Karski was
still ready to carry out another
fact-finding mission: Would he be willing
to see for himself what was happening at
one of the camps to which the trainloads
of Jews were being sent? Mr. Karski consented, and a few days
later he and a member of the Jewish
resistance went by train from Warsaw to
Izbica, a small town near Warsaw. There, his Jewish guide turned him over
to the owner of a hardware store who was a
member of the Polish underground. Mr.
Karski was given the uniform of a
Ukrainian militiaman working under the
German command who had been bribed to take
the day off. Another Ukrainian guard --
also bribed -- then led him to a large
area encircled by barbed wire. Mr. Karski heard keening cries of men
and women and thought he smelled burning
flesh. Soon he witnessed the arrival of
several thousand starving and frightened
Jews who had been brought to the camp from
Czechoslovakia. He watched as their
valises and bags were taken away from
them. Then he saw Jews being beaten and
stabbed. Ranks of uniformed men pressed the
crowd onto waiting box cars that had been
coated with quicklime. Those who fell or
fainted or who could not move were thrown
into the cars. When no more bodies could
fit inside, the doors were shut. Mr.
Karski was told that the trains were
heading for a camp not far away where
their human cargo would be led into gas
chambers. But he was also told that
sometimes the trains were just left on
sidings until those inside starved or
suffocated. A Perilous
Journey, A Bleak ReceptionMr. Karski returned to Warsaw to
prepare himself for his dangerous journey
to London. He was given a key whose
soldered shaft contained microfilm of
hundreds of documents. He went to a
dentist and had several teeth pulled so
that the resultant swelling could provide
him with a reason why he couldn't talk if
he was stopped by Germans; he was certain
his Polish-accented German would give him
away. Using local trains, he went to Berlin,
the capital of the Reich, then through
Vichy France to Spain, where a rendezvous
led to passage to Gibraltar and then to
London. He turned over the key containing the
microfilm, described resistance activity
and assessed as bleak the prospects of
cooperation between the anti-Communist
Polish underground and the partisans, who
were sponsored by the same Soviets who in
1939 had joined Hitler in invading and
dividing Poland. He spoke of the Jews, saying their fate
was far more perilous than that of
non-Jewish Poles. But for many of his
Polish diplomatic superiors, the plight of
the Jews remained marginal to Poland's
struggle to regain its conquered land.
Some even feared that any emphasis on the
victimization of the Jews might detract
attention from Poland's tragedy and
diminish their own appeals for help. And when Mr. Karski carried his
information about the destruction of the
Jews to British authorities, he was met by
even greater reluctance to act. "In February 1943, I reported to
Anthony Eden," he later wrote about
a secret meeting with the British foreign
secretary. "He said that Great Britain had
already done enough by accepting 100,000
refugees." In London, Mr. Karski met with
Szmuel Zygelboym, who represented
the Jewish Socialist Bund in the National
Council of the Polish government-in-exile,
to present the Polish Jews' urgings of
active resistance. Mr. Zygelboym listened in pain but then
said, "It's impossible, utterly
impossible." If he went on a hunger
strike, he said, the authorities would
send the police and drag him away to an
institution. But he added: "I'll do
everything I can do to help them. I'll do
everything they ask." A few months later, on May 12, 1943,
just after the Germans put down the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, Mr. Zygelboym sent a
letter to the president and prime minister
of the Polish government-in-exile, and
then took his own life. He wrote, "By my death I wish to make
my final protest against the passivity
with which the world is looking on and
permitting the annihilation of the Jewish
people." Did Western
Leaders Ignore
'Conscience'?In July 1943, Mr. Karski arrived in the
United States. Two months earlier,
attempts by the Germans to liquidate those
Jews still remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto
was met with armed resistance. In a
desperate, uneven struggle over three
weeks, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, more
than 10,000 Jews were killed in the
fighting or in fires set by the Germans to
destroy the Ghetto. The 56,000 Jews
remaining were taken to the Treblinka
death camp. "Almost every individual was
sympathetic to my reports concerning the
Jews," Mr. Karski said. "But when I
reported to the leaders of governments,
they discarded their conscience, their
personal feeling. "They provided a rationale which seemed
valid. What was the situation? The Jews
were totally helpless. The war strategy
was the military defeat of Germany and the
defeat of Germany's war potential for all
eternity. Nothing could interfere with the
military crushing of the Third Reich. The
Jews had no country, no government. They
were fighting, but they had no
identity." He kept telling what he knew, honoring
the promise he had given to the two men in
the Ghetto. A
secret
meeting was arranged between Mr. Karski
and President Roosevelt. He said
that commanders of the underground Home
Army were estimating that if there was to
be no Allied intervention in the next year
and a half, the Jews of Poland would
"cease to exist." He did not tell
Roosevelt of his own experiences or
observations. Mr. Karski believed that he failed to
move Roosevelt to any real action. But
John Pehle, who became head of the
War Refugee Board, a federal agency that
helped settle surviving Jews, said later
that Roosevelt had decided to establish
the board as a consequence of his talks
with Mr. Karski. The mission, Mr. Pehle
said, "changed U.S. policy overnight from
indifference to affirmative action." Mr. Karski was planning to return to
Warsaw and resume his clandestine work,
but his superiors told him that his
identity had become known to the Germans
and ordered
him to remain in the United States. His mission then was to promote the
cause of Poland, which once freed of
German occupation would have to contend
with Stalin's designs. He gave interviews,
wrote magazine articles and drew on his
own experiences to write a book, "Story of
a Secret State," which was published at
the end of 1944 by Houghton Mifflin and
became a Book of the Month Club
selection. Within a year the war came to an end,
and so did the Polish government-in-exile
that Mr. Karski had served. The Yalta
agreement had consigned postwar Poland to
the Soviet sphere, and Mr. Karski, who
knew and scorned Communism, did not return
to his native land. A Life in
Academics, A Family
TragedyInstead, at the age of 39, he enrolled
at the School of Foreign Service at
Georgetown. He received his doctorate in
two and a half years and stayed on,
teaching at Georgetown until his
retirement in 1984. He became a citizen in
1954. In 1965 he married Pola
Nirenska, a dancer and choreographer
who had been born Pola Nirensztajn
in Poland, the daughter of an observant
Jewish father. All her many relatives had
been killed in the Holocaust, but she had
survived the war in London and had become
a major force in dance in Washington --
teaching, choreographing her own work and
leading her own company -- when they
met. In 1992, Pola Nirenska, then 81 years
old, jumped to her death from the balcony
of their apartment in Bethesda, Md. Her
last dance piece, presented in Washington
in 1990, was inspired by Holocaust victims
she had known and was called "In Memory of
Those I Loved . . . Who Are No More." Soon after her death, Mr. Karski
established a $5,000 annual prize to be
awarded by the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research to authors documenting or
interpreting Jewish contributions to
Polish culture and science. Jan Karski leaves no immediate
survivors. Related files on this
Website: -
Death of Jan
Karski
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observations and knowledge on Jan Karski
and his reports from Nazi occupied Poland,
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