Jan Karski (1914–2000)
Author of Story of a Secret State
About the Author
Jan Karski (1914-2000) served as a liaison officer of the Polish Underground during World War II and carried the first eyewitness report of the Holocaust to a mostly unbelieving West, meeting with President Roosevelt in 1943 to plead for Allied intervention. After the war Karski earned his PhD at show more Georgetown University, where he served as a distinguished professor in the School of Foreign Service for forty years. Karski has been recognized as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem. In 2012, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. show less
Image credit: E. Thomas Wood
Works by Jan Karski
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Karski, Jan
- Legal name
- Kozielewski, Jan (birth)
Karski, Jan (adopted) - Other names
- Piasecki (alias)
Kwaśniewski (alias)
Znamierowski (alias)
Kruszewski (alias)
Kucharski (alias)
Witold (nom de guerre) - Birthdate
- 1914-04-24
- Date of death
- 2000-07-13
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Lviv University
Georgetown University - Occupations
- diplomat
professor of history
military officer
resistance fighter
public speaker
author - Organizations
- Georgetown University
Armija Krajowa - Awards and honors
- Order of the White Eagle
- Relationships
- Zygielbojm, Szmul (colleague)
- Short biography
- Jan Karski was born Jan Kozielewski in Łódź, Poland. After graduating from a military academy, he served with a Polish Army mounted artillery regiment. In 1935, he received a master's degree in law and diplomatic science at the University of Lviv (Lwow), and then served in various junior diplomatic posts in Romania, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. In January 1939, he started work in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In September 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in the prelude to World War II, he was called up to fight. Karski's regiment was trapped and he was taken prisoner by the Red Army and sent to the Kozielszczyna camp. He concealed his status as an officer and was transferred to the Germans as a person born in Łódź, thus escaping the Katyń Forest massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets. He escaped the German POW train and returned to Warsaw, where he joined the armed Polish Resistance against the Nazis. He repeatedly crossed enemy lines to act as a courier between Occupied Poland and Western Europe. He was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and the Izbica transit camp by the Jewish underground in order to witness the conditions first-hand and report to the outside world. In 1942, Karski was dispatched to the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Allies to describe the destruction of the Jews in Poland and appeal for intervention. In 1943, he personally met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House. In 1944, he published Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, which became an instant bestseller, and went on an extensive speaking tour of the USA and Canada. However, his mission to stop the Holocaust failed. After World War II, he emigrated to the USA and earned a PhD from Georgetown University. He taught history at Georgetown for 40 years, specializing in East European affairs, comparative government, and international affairs. He also went on many more international speaking tours, this time sponsored by the U.S. State Department, and often testified before Congress on Eastern European matters. His other books included The Great Powers and Poland: From Versailles to Yalta (1982).
- Nationality
- Poland (birth)
USA - Birthplace
- Lodz, Poland
- Places of residence
- Lodz, Poland (birth)
Washington, D.C., USA - Associated Place (for map)
- Washington, D.C., USA
Members
Reviews
When British readers think of World War 2 resistance movements, they usually think of the French Resistance. In recent years, more has emerged into popular culture abut the Dutch and Norwegian underground. But this book shows that perhaps the most notable resistance movement of the Second World War was the Polish Underground. This book tells the story of that Underground from very close quarters.
Jan Karski was a graduate student in 1939, part of the social whirl in pre-war Warsaw. Having show more already done his military service, he was not surprised to get his call-up papers at the end of August 1939 recalling him to the artillery regiment he had served with. That was the start of a progress that would take him to the very depths of horror when he is taken to see the Warsaw Ghetto and then infiltrated into the Belzec concentration camp so that he could report accurately to both the Polish government in exile, and to the political leaders of the Allies, as to conditions in Poland, especially for Jews.
Poland was unique amongst the countries occupied by Nazi Germany, in that there was no official governmental collaboration with the invaders; there was no Polish Quisling or Pétain. Instead, the Polish Underground operated an entire shadow government. The Polish state went underground, operating as many of the state institutions - schools, newspapers, and of course the military - as could be devised. The Polish underground - and through them, the Polish people - followed a policy of non-cooperation with the Germans and a complete rejection of the legitimacy of the German 'Generalgouvernement' in Poland. There were collaborators, but the Polish underground had very little patience with them, or tolerance of them. (This makes Karski's realisation, late in the book, that circumstances may have forced some individuals into a degree of reluctant collaboration all the more significant.)
One of the themes of the book is the level of direct personal hatred against Germans amongst the wartime Polish. There are no good Germans in Karski's book; a few may be blackmailed into helping the underground, but for the most part there is indifference to the fates of even ordinary Germans. Many of them are depicted as untrustworthy to their own comrades, dissolute, self-serving and undisciplined. That the Polish underground exploits this is merely seen as a convenient truth.
Those Germans in positions of command or power - including Gestapo and SS guards and officers - are portrayed as fanatical followers of Nazi ideology, which drives every decision of the occupying power. We have found out in more recent years that not all the local Nazi administrators - the Gauleiter - were necessarily as evil as they were depicted. Gauleiter were given a lot of latitude over how they carried out their orders, and Berlin was more concerned about results rather than means. Polish people I have spoken to have often wondered why Uncle A went to the camps whilst Uncle B survived; the answer is sometimes that Gauleiter A took a strict interpretation of "eliminating Jews" as meaning that they should be sent to the camps as quickly and completely as possible, whilst Gauleiter B, either through compassion or just a desire for an easy life, would be quite happy to get as many Jews as possible "Aryanised" through a bureaucratic process, achieving the objective of "eliminating Jews" via simply declaring them to be German and issuing the appropriate paperwork. But this was not known to Karski at the time.
Karski tells his story quite directly. The opening chapters, and indeed Karski's interactions later on with rural peasants, recalls the accounts of 1930s Europe as told by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a world now lost to us. His accounts of the tradecraft of the Polish underground are a textbook example of how to run an underground organisation. I was particularly interested in his account of the underground newspapers; in the 1980s, there was a CIA project to get duplicating presses (mimeographs) - Gestetners, Roneos and so on - to the Polish "underground press" of the Cold War era. This book showed me that Poland had a tradition of underground newspapers that preceded the Cold War, and set that later project into perspective.
Perhaps one of the strangest parts of the book concerned Karski's period in the captivity of the Gestapo. At one point, he is taken aside by an SS officer and treated to a meal, and drinks, and a civilised conversation. To us, this looks very much like a "good cop, bad cop" routine, which we have become familiar with from films, tv and crime novels, This was apparently unknown in Poland. But even more so, the conversation quickly takes a turn which suggests that the SS officer's interest in Karksi went beyond the military. Karski displays elsewhere a disdain for homosexuals which is typical of the era and at the same time is based on a complete ignorance of actual gay lives; if he had ever met any homosexuals, they were firmly closeted and never came onto his "gaydar". So when he was the object of what is clearly (to our modern eyes) a direct homosexual advance, it goes completely over his head.
This book tells us so much about Poland - Karski's common knowledge of Polish history and culture is almost completely unknown to us - and also about the Polish people. The opinions and attitudes are very telling; at one point, a Jewish Bund leader in Warsaw suggests that the only appropriate response by the Allies to the German policies towards Poland and the Jews generally would be to target the German people for extermination in the same way, almost taking the position that "that's the only language they will understand". I found this view to be quite alien; yet it tells us a lot about eastern European attitudes more generally, which should help illuminate our interactions with other nations' governments today. It helps us understand attitudes in modern Poland, in Hungary, in the Ukraine and Russia. We have been guilty of looking at these countries (and others) through the lens of our own viewpoints - and then wondering why we get them wrong.
There is an afterword by Andrew Roberts, taking Karski's story forward from 1944, when this book first appeared. Karski went to America to brief Roosevelt; he stayed there after the war and became a respected academic. One of the questions this book poses is why the Allies failed to take direct action to stop the Holocaust, even when faced with a first-hand account from Karski of the atrocities of the Ghetto and the camps. Roberts points out that the absence of photographic evidence made it difficult to exploit Karski's account as an authentic report; and having had governmental fingers burnt in World War I by the repeating of the "Germans bayoneting Belgian babies" trope which turned out to be untrue, Allied governments were reluctant to nail their colours to such a mast again. And there is good evidence to show that Allied governments had more knowledge of the Holocaust than they let on.
But hindsight is always 20/20. Karksi's account remains important as an eye-witness account of the German occupation of Poland, and a warning about taking ideological positions about people and translating them into action. It is a warning that we should all heed. show less
Jan Karski was a graduate student in 1939, part of the social whirl in pre-war Warsaw. Having show more already done his military service, he was not surprised to get his call-up papers at the end of August 1939 recalling him to the artillery regiment he had served with. That was the start of a progress that would take him to the very depths of horror when he is taken to see the Warsaw Ghetto and then infiltrated into the Belzec concentration camp so that he could report accurately to both the Polish government in exile, and to the political leaders of the Allies, as to conditions in Poland, especially for Jews.
Poland was unique amongst the countries occupied by Nazi Germany, in that there was no official governmental collaboration with the invaders; there was no Polish Quisling or Pétain. Instead, the Polish Underground operated an entire shadow government. The Polish state went underground, operating as many of the state institutions - schools, newspapers, and of course the military - as could be devised. The Polish underground - and through them, the Polish people - followed a policy of non-cooperation with the Germans and a complete rejection of the legitimacy of the German 'Generalgouvernement' in Poland. There were collaborators, but the Polish underground had very little patience with them, or tolerance of them. (This makes Karski's realisation, late in the book, that circumstances may have forced some individuals into a degree of reluctant collaboration all the more significant.)
One of the themes of the book is the level of direct personal hatred against Germans amongst the wartime Polish. There are no good Germans in Karski's book; a few may be blackmailed into helping the underground, but for the most part there is indifference to the fates of even ordinary Germans. Many of them are depicted as untrustworthy to their own comrades, dissolute, self-serving and undisciplined. That the Polish underground exploits this is merely seen as a convenient truth.
Those Germans in positions of command or power - including Gestapo and SS guards and officers - are portrayed as fanatical followers of Nazi ideology, which drives every decision of the occupying power. We have found out in more recent years that not all the local Nazi administrators - the Gauleiter - were necessarily as evil as they were depicted. Gauleiter were given a lot of latitude over how they carried out their orders, and Berlin was more concerned about results rather than means. Polish people I have spoken to have often wondered why Uncle A went to the camps whilst Uncle B survived; the answer is sometimes that Gauleiter A took a strict interpretation of "eliminating Jews" as meaning that they should be sent to the camps as quickly and completely as possible, whilst Gauleiter B, either through compassion or just a desire for an easy life, would be quite happy to get as many Jews as possible "Aryanised" through a bureaucratic process, achieving the objective of "eliminating Jews" via simply declaring them to be German and issuing the appropriate paperwork. But this was not known to Karski at the time.
Karski tells his story quite directly. The opening chapters, and indeed Karski's interactions later on with rural peasants, recalls the accounts of 1930s Europe as told by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a world now lost to us. His accounts of the tradecraft of the Polish underground are a textbook example of how to run an underground organisation. I was particularly interested in his account of the underground newspapers; in the 1980s, there was a CIA project to get duplicating presses (mimeographs) - Gestetners, Roneos and so on - to the Polish "underground press" of the Cold War era. This book showed me that Poland had a tradition of underground newspapers that preceded the Cold War, and set that later project into perspective.
Perhaps one of the strangest parts of the book concerned Karski's period in the captivity of the Gestapo. At one point, he is taken aside by an SS officer and treated to a meal, and drinks, and a civilised conversation. To us, this looks very much like a "good cop, bad cop" routine, which we have become familiar with from films, tv and crime novels, This was apparently unknown in Poland. But even more so, the conversation quickly takes a turn which suggests that the SS officer's interest in Karksi went beyond the military. Karski displays elsewhere a disdain for homosexuals which is typical of the era and at the same time is based on a complete ignorance of actual gay lives; if he had ever met any homosexuals, they were firmly closeted and never came onto his "gaydar". So when he was the object of what is clearly (to our modern eyes) a direct homosexual advance, it goes completely over his head.
This book tells us so much about Poland - Karski's common knowledge of Polish history and culture is almost completely unknown to us - and also about the Polish people. The opinions and attitudes are very telling; at one point, a Jewish Bund leader in Warsaw suggests that the only appropriate response by the Allies to the German policies towards Poland and the Jews generally would be to target the German people for extermination in the same way, almost taking the position that "that's the only language they will understand". I found this view to be quite alien; yet it tells us a lot about eastern European attitudes more generally, which should help illuminate our interactions with other nations' governments today. It helps us understand attitudes in modern Poland, in Hungary, in the Ukraine and Russia. We have been guilty of looking at these countries (and others) through the lens of our own viewpoints - and then wondering why we get them wrong.
There is an afterword by Andrew Roberts, taking Karski's story forward from 1944, when this book first appeared. Karski went to America to brief Roosevelt; he stayed there after the war and became a respected academic. One of the questions this book poses is why the Allies failed to take direct action to stop the Holocaust, even when faced with a first-hand account from Karski of the atrocities of the Ghetto and the camps. Roberts points out that the absence of photographic evidence made it difficult to exploit Karski's account as an authentic report; and having had governmental fingers burnt in World War I by the repeating of the "Germans bayoneting Belgian babies" trope which turned out to be untrue, Allied governments were reluctant to nail their colours to such a mast again. And there is good evidence to show that Allied governments had more knowledge of the Holocaust than they let on.
But hindsight is always 20/20. Karksi's account remains important as an eye-witness account of the German occupation of Poland, and a warning about taking ideological positions about people and translating them into action. It is a warning that we should all heed. show less
It’s quite rare for an LT recommendation to prompt me to buy a book straight away; it’s also unusual for me to read a book very shortly after purchasing it (as illogical, as that may sound!). However, labfs39’s comments about Story of a Secret State have had me do both those things.
Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski) was a young officer in the Polish Army at the start of the Second World War, but was captured by Soviet forces just a few days into the war. He managed to engineer his show more inclusion in an exchange of prisoners that saw him handed over to the Germans, before escaping and making his way back to Warsaw. On looking up an old university friend, he was invited to join the Polish underground. In this memoir, originally published in 1944 and expanded in 1999, he not only describes his work as a courier, propagandist and liaison officer, including his capture by and escape from the Gestapo, but also reveals to us the structure and organisation of the Polish underground state, as well as describing the conditions in occupied Poland for both Jews and non-Jews.
Much of this book reads like a thriller, although there is no danger of forgetting that the events described were all too real, but the sections concerning the workings of the underground state, operating under the authority of and in close communication with the Polish government-in-exile, were also fascinating. In spite of knowing that Poland would go on to suffer for another 50+ years after its “liberation”, I was greatly impressed, and moved, to read of the authorities’ efforts to maintain a fully-functioning representative state that would be ready to take over following the Allies’ victory, in which Poland continued to believe. The wholesale non-recognition of the Nazi occupation and refusal by the Polish people to collaborate in any way is awe-inspiring. These firm principles and this self-belief and strong sense of nationhood help to explain how Poland was able to make such a successful transition to democracy after 1989 and why it is the strong and stable country it is today.
By far the most painful sections to read are those towards the end of the book detailing Karski’s observations during a visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and to a Nazi extermination camp, and his subsequent, unsuccessful, pleas to the highest authorities in the UK and US to do something to stop the sickening mass murder of the Jewish people.
This is a highly important book and I am so glad I have read it.
Edit | More show less
Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski) was a young officer in the Polish Army at the start of the Second World War, but was captured by Soviet forces just a few days into the war. He managed to engineer his show more inclusion in an exchange of prisoners that saw him handed over to the Germans, before escaping and making his way back to Warsaw. On looking up an old university friend, he was invited to join the Polish underground. In this memoir, originally published in 1944 and expanded in 1999, he not only describes his work as a courier, propagandist and liaison officer, including his capture by and escape from the Gestapo, but also reveals to us the structure and organisation of the Polish underground state, as well as describing the conditions in occupied Poland for both Jews and non-Jews.
Much of this book reads like a thriller, although there is no danger of forgetting that the events described were all too real, but the sections concerning the workings of the underground state, operating under the authority of and in close communication with the Polish government-in-exile, were also fascinating. In spite of knowing that Poland would go on to suffer for another 50+ years after its “liberation”, I was greatly impressed, and moved, to read of the authorities’ efforts to maintain a fully-functioning representative state that would be ready to take over following the Allies’ victory, in which Poland continued to believe. The wholesale non-recognition of the Nazi occupation and refusal by the Polish people to collaborate in any way is awe-inspiring. These firm principles and this self-belief and strong sense of nationhood help to explain how Poland was able to make such a successful transition to democracy after 1989 and why it is the strong and stable country it is today.
By far the most painful sections to read are those towards the end of the book detailing Karski’s observations during a visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and to a Nazi extermination camp, and his subsequent, unsuccessful, pleas to the highest authorities in the UK and US to do something to stop the sickening mass murder of the Jewish people.
This is a highly important book and I am so glad I have read it.
Edit | More show less
You will be forgiven if at first you mistake Jan Karski's 1944 memoir for a thrilling spy novel. His story is gripping. In 1939 Karski was called up and sent to the front; the first day of the war, his position was destroyed and the army was in a disorganized retreat. Captured by the Red Army coming from the West, he was transported by freight train to Siberia where, with a bit of cunning and bravado, he was able to be transferred back to German-occupied Poland. Finding German camps even show more worse than Soviet ones, Karski was able to escape and return to Warsaw. Shocked at the speed with which the Germans had destroyed Poland, he was determined to fight and soon found his way into the Polish Underground. He began as a simple courier, but his intelligence and determination marked him for increasingly difficult tasks. As his responsibilities grew, so did the danger, until he was finally caught by the Gestapo. And on it goes.
Equally fascinating is his description of the Polish Underground and the entire Polish Government which existed within Poland, under the radar of the German and Russian occupiers. All branches of the government existed in this shadow world, and unlike the rest of occupied Europe, Poland never accepted it's defeat or the right of the Germans to rule. There was no collaborative government. General Sikorski was the head of the Polish diplomatic and military corps outside the country, and Karski was a key conduit of information between the Polish government and its functionaries abroad. In this role, Karski was able to testify to the world as to the state of the Polish Underground, the Polish Government underground, and the fate of the East European Jews. The second half of the book contains much of what he shared with the Allies: how the government functioned, what family life was like, the state of education, and what he witnessed inside the Warsaw Ghetto and an extermination transit camp outside Belzec.
Both a memoir and a testament to life within Poland during the occupation, Story of a Secret State is well-written, informative, and difficult to put down. The importance of Jan Karski and his testimony is hard to overestimate and now is the perfect time to read this book. Poland's Parliament declared that 2014 is Jan Karski Year, and conferences have been scheduled in Brussels, Berlin (with the participation of Timothy Snyder), Washington, DC, Chicago, and Warsaw. On April 1, 2014 the United States Senate unanimously passed a resolution (S.Res.371), honoring the legacy and accomplishments of Jan Karski on the centennial of his birth. To learn more, see excerpts from his interview with Claude Lanzmann for the movie Shoah and the website dedicated to Jan Karski Year. show less
Equally fascinating is his description of the Polish Underground and the entire Polish Government which existed within Poland, under the radar of the German and Russian occupiers. All branches of the government existed in this shadow world, and unlike the rest of occupied Europe, Poland never accepted it's defeat or the right of the Germans to rule. There was no collaborative government. General Sikorski was the head of the Polish diplomatic and military corps outside the country, and Karski was a key conduit of information between the Polish government and its functionaries abroad. In this role, Karski was able to testify to the world as to the state of the Polish Underground, the Polish Government underground, and the fate of the East European Jews. The second half of the book contains much of what he shared with the Allies: how the government functioned, what family life was like, the state of education, and what he witnessed inside the Warsaw Ghetto and an extermination transit camp outside Belzec.
Both a memoir and a testament to life within Poland during the occupation, Story of a Secret State is well-written, informative, and difficult to put down. The importance of Jan Karski and his testimony is hard to overestimate and now is the perfect time to read this book. Poland's Parliament declared that 2014 is Jan Karski Year, and conferences have been scheduled in Brussels, Berlin (with the participation of Timothy Snyder), Washington, DC, Chicago, and Warsaw. On April 1, 2014 the United States Senate unanimously passed a resolution (S.Res.371), honoring the legacy and accomplishments of Jan Karski on the centennial of his birth. To learn more, see excerpts from his interview with Claude Lanzmann for the movie Shoah and the website dedicated to Jan Karski Year. show less
I grabbed this book from the library when I was there with time on my hands to read, and none of the books I was currently reading with me. This book quickly became my go-to book and I was up late 3 nights running to finish it. The author's powers of observation and recollection of events is amazing, considering the detail with which he writes. I believe it was originally published in 1944, so the events of WWII about which he writes would have been very recent for him.
The author is a show more Polish soldier whose front-line career was over before it really even got started. After being a PoW for a relatively short period he manages to escape whilst taking part in a prisoner exchange between Russia and Germany. He slinks back to his home town and after a visit to a former acquaintance, he finds he has become part of the fledgling Polish underground movement. And so begins the incredible story of Jan Karski. He describes with chilling detail the events and sights he is involved with, and gives a fantastic insight into how the underground was able to operate so efficiently and effectively. Even though his reports went directly to the UK and American leaders, change wasn't to come quickly enough for the thousands and thousands of Jewish people who were the victims of the most horrific cruelty and degradation at the hands of the German gestapo.
Aside from the extremely upsetting account of his clandestine visit to an extermination camp (which is illuminating in the most awful way), this book makes for excellent, exciting and informative reading on WWII. show less
The author is a show more Polish soldier whose front-line career was over before it really even got started. After being a PoW for a relatively short period he manages to escape whilst taking part in a prisoner exchange between Russia and Germany. He slinks back to his home town and after a visit to a former acquaintance, he finds he has become part of the fledgling Polish underground movement. And so begins the incredible story of Jan Karski. He describes with chilling detail the events and sights he is involved with, and gives a fantastic insight into how the underground was able to operate so efficiently and effectively. Even though his reports went directly to the UK and American leaders, change wasn't to come quickly enough for the thousands and thousands of Jewish people who were the victims of the most horrific cruelty and degradation at the hands of the German gestapo.
Aside from the extremely upsetting account of his clandestine visit to an extermination camp (which is illuminating in the most awful way), this book makes for excellent, exciting and informative reading on WWII. show less
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