Jan Karski’s Holocaust reports went unheeded

By Joe Spier

CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — On May 29, 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, posthumously to Jan Karski with these words “As a young officer in the Polish Underground, Jan Karski was among the first to relay accounts of the Holocaust to the world. A witness to atrocity in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi Izbica transit camp, he repeatedly crossed enemy lines to document the face of genocide and courageously voiced tragic truths all the way to President Roosevelt. Jan Karski illuminated one of the darkest chapters of history and his heroic intervention on behalf of the innocent will never be forgotten.”  Tragically, no one was listening to Jan Karski.

Jan Karski was born on June 24, 1914 in Lodz, Poland. He was the youngest of eight children in a Roman Catholic family. At the time Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Karski, aged 26, a university graduate, member of the diplomatic service and artillery officer in the Polish army was mobilized and sent to the front to defend against the Nazi invasion. On the first night of the war, the German Luftwaffe showered Karski’s encampment with incendiary bombs and powerful tanks roared towards the Polish positions. Ordered to retreat, Karski’s forces headed east where the Russian Red Army invading from that direction captured them.

Since he was a native of Lodz, by German definition an “old Germanic Territory,” Karski, in a prisoner exchange, was returned to German control within Poland. Two months after his capture, determined to escape to rejoin the Polish army and continue the fight against the Nazis, Karski, on a moving train taking him to a work site, jumped out of a window and headed into the countryside where he discovered that there no longer was any Polish army to rejoin. He made his way to Warsaw to the home of a friend. Unknown to Karski, the friend was a member of the Polish anti-Nazi Underground. Karski was soon recruited.

Karski’s ability to speak many languages and his photographic memory made him ideal for the job of courier linking underground cells and connecting the Underground in Poland with the Polish government-in-exile seated first in France and later in London. Karski almost immediately found himself following the dangerous routes of Underground messengers evading the ever-watchful Gestapo as he crossed and re-crossed all the battle lines of Europe executing special missions.

It was the end of May 1940. Holland and Belgium had fallen and the Germans were marching toward Paris. Karski started out with information for the Underground’s leaders in France, a tiny roll of microfilm outlining the plans for the organization of the Polish Underground hidden upon his person. As he entered Slovakia, German gendarmes captured him. Karski had been betrayed.

In prison, Karski was interrogated and tortured. Deprived of food and sleep, beaten with fists and truncheons, his teeth broken, slashed with a riding whip, he knew he would shortly succumb to the questioning. Instead, he slashed his wrists in an attempt to kill himself. He lost consciousness.  When Karski awoke, he was in an SS hospital. His suicide attempt had failed. Afterwards moved to another hospital in southern Poland, Karski with the aid of Polish doctors and nurses and a bribed guard was able to escape back into the hands of the Underground.

After a period in hiding, Karski returned to his clandestine liaison work, constantly on the move using different false identities and fake papers. In October 1942 the Polish Underground was sending Karski to London with over 1,000 pages of printed matter on microfilm the size of a couple of matchsticks secreted in the handle of a razor to report to the Polish government-in exile and the British and American authorities regarding the situation in Poland and the activities of the Underground.

But first Karski was to meet with leaders of the Jewish Underground. Their message was direct. Tell the leaders of the Allied Powers that the Jews of Poland are being systematically murdered. If the Allies do not help, three million Polish Jews are doomed. Karski was not, however, to be merely a spokesperson. He would be an eyewitness. Karski would be smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and into a Nazi transit camp.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, where previously 35,000 Jewish people had lived, 500,000 Jews were herded into an area of about 100 square city blocks surrounded by walls and barbed wire. There, they lived under conditions of unimaginable terror, of starvation and of disease. At first the Germans were content to use the inhabitants as forced labour and then commencing in July 1942, the Nazis began to systematically deport the Jews of the Ghetto to concentration camps where most perished in the gas chambers. By October, when Karski entered the Ghetto, 60,000 Jews were all that remained of the half-million doomed souls of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, posing as a Jew and wearing the obligatory Star of David, Karski witnessed firsthand the horrifying truth. Naked corpses were piled in the gutters. Emaciated and starving children were clothed in rags. Dazed men and women stumbled along with vacant eyes. Teen-aged, blond-haired boys in the uniform of the Hitler Youth hunted and killed Jews for sport. The stench of filth and human decay was everywhere. The Ghetto, as described by Karski, was a haze of disease and death.

A few days later, Karski, in the disguise of a Ukrainian camp guard, infiltrated the Izbica transit camp, located about 100 miles east of Warsaw. Izbica was a transfer point for deportation of Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps. As Karski watched, a freight train sat on tracks about 100 yards from the camp. Suddenly shots rang out and “a quivering cargo of flesh” was pushed toward the train. Panicked, many trampled underfoot, the mass of humanity was forced into overcrowded waiting boxcars, the last climbing over the heads and shoulders of those already in. Then the doors were slammed shut and iron bars locked in place. It took three hours to fill the train. At twilight, forty-six boxcars were packed and the train pulled away. Those on the train would be dead within days. Inside the camp only the dead and the dying remained.

A witness to Nazi genocide, Karski left Poland to tell the world. Armed with false papers, he embarked on a hazardous journey, which took Karski by train through Nazi-occupied Europe, then by foot across the Pyrenees into neutral Spain, a fishing boat to Gibraltar and finally to England on an American bomber.

Arriving in London, Karski informed members of the British War Cabinet of the systematic destruction of European Jewry and pleaded for the Allies to take strong action. The War Cabinet refused to act. The war strategy was the military defeat of Germany. Nothing could interfere with the crushing of the Third Reich. Saving the Jews from genocide was not made an official Allied war aim. There would be no targeted bombing; no air dropping leaflets warning the German populace that they would be the ones held to account; nothing to make the Nazis re-think. Then in February 1943, Karski met with British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden and recounted the horrors he had witnessed in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the Izbica transit camp and the extermination of the Jews. Eden showed little interest, responding that Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was said to be too busy to see Karski.

In July 1943, Karski took to Washington his gruesome account of the atrocities he had witnessed and of Hitler’s mass slaughter of the Jewish population. There he met with senior government officials, with leading Jewish dignitaries, with members of the clergy. Karski was stonewalled by disbelief and indifference. During a meeting between Karski and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, then America’s most powerful Jewish figure, Frankfurter did not believe him. Asked if he thought Karski was lying, Frankfurter replied, “I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him.”

Then on July 28, Karski had a lengthy Oval Office meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Karski began by relating the partisan activities of the Polish underground, to which the President was attentive asking many questions. However, when Karski recounted details of the mass killing of the Jews and implored that without Allied intervention the Jews of Europe would cease to exist, Roosevelt had little to say. At that time, the U.S. President viewed the suffering of the Jews as just a lamentable facet of what civilians bear in every war. Nor did Roosevelt want hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees clamoring for admission to America.

Disheartened, Karski prepared to surreptitiously return to Warsaw and resume his underground work but was warned by his superiors that the Nazis had discovered his identity. Karski was ordered to remain in the United States. Unable to convince the leaders of the civilized world to act, Karski went public with his story. He delivered lectures, gave newspaper and radio interviews, wrote magazine articles and authored a book Story of a Secret State whose final chapter is entitled “My Report to the World”. The book was published in 1944 before the end of the war.

After the war and the takeover of Poland by the Communists whom he abhorred, Karski remained in the United States. He enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. earning a doctorate. Appointed a professor, Karski stayed on at the University where he had a long and distinguished career teaching government studies until his retirement in 1994.

Following the years after the defeat of the Nazis, Karski spoke little about his wartime experiences and of what he had seen. Karski would not talk of it publicly until 1981 when Elie Wiesel prevailed upon him to speak out. Karski wrote this in 1987; “I read how leaders from the West, statesmen, militaries, intelligence services, ecclesiastical authorities and civil leaders were horrified by what had happened to the Jews. They declared not to know anything about the Holocaust because the genocide had been kept in secret. This version of facts still remains but it is just a myth. The extermination was not a secret to them.”

In 1982, Israel’s Yad Vashem recognized Karski as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, “in a world of total moral collapse, one of the small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values” and in 1994, Karski was awarded honorary citizenship of Israel. Jan Karski passed away in July 2000.

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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history.  You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com