Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the
Holocaust
By E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski
(John Wiley & Sons, 316 pages, $24.95)
Reviewed by Joshua Muravchik
In 1979, I entered graduate school at Georgetown University and
signed up for a class, “The Government and Politics of Eastern
Europe,” taught by a Professor Karski, of whom I had never heard.
Aside from the fact that I didn’t know much about much, it turns
out there was a good reason why I hadn’t heard of him. Jan Karski
had published a best-selling book in 1944, Story of a Secret
State, an account of his activities in the wartime Polish
underground of which he was the leading emissary to the West. He
had also brought to London and Washington perhaps the earliest
authoritative, eyewitness accounts of Hitler’s holocaust of the
Jews. Yet, so far as he could tell, these had no effect. As a
result, when the war ended, he vowed to himself bitterly never to
talk further of his wartime experiences, a vow kept for a quarter
of a century. Thus, for those of us born too late to have known
Karski’s book when it was in print, my ignorance of this man was
far from unique.
By the time I took his class, Karski had abandoned his vow,
agreeing to be interviewed for French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s
epic documentary Shoah, of which Karski was widely seen as
the hero, thus bringing him to the attention of younger
generations. But the film was not released until some years later.
In the meantime, I found a copy of Story of a Secret State
on my parents’ bookshelves. Once I opened it, I could not put it
down, and from it, rather than from anything he revealed in his
lectures, I gathered the stature of this man.
Not that his lectures were impersonal. On the contrary, the
students who had been in the department longer than I joked that
the courses Karski taught were actually titled, “Karski 1, Karski
2, and Karski 3.” They were rich in anecdote, and often bore an
imprecise relationship to the highly detailed syllabi he
distributed the first day. But though he spoke of his experiences,
he did so with a modesty that hid his importance from any student
who did not learn details of his biography outside the classroom.
He would point to his left side and say, “the Russians broke these
ribs,” and then point to his right and say, “and the Nazis broke
these ribs,” laughing a deep belly-laugh. But he gave us no inkling
of what a major and costly operation was his rescue by the
underground from the hands of the Gestapo.
KARSKI HAD BEEN commissioned an officer, and he may have been an
aristocrat. Perhaps these explain his extraordinary carriage.
Although already 65, he stood straighter than any other man I have
ever seen. He was the apotheosis of Polish patriotism. Yet he had
been forced to spend almost all of his adult life in exile. “I am a
Yankee,” he would say, fully aware of how funny this sounded in his
strong Polish accent, but intending the superficial humor also to
reflect a deeper irony about the nature of his adopted country and
the sad fate of his native land. Such sardonic humor infused his
spellbinding lectures, and it seemed to me to be an outlet for the
frustrations that history had dealt him.
Since the screening of Shoah in the early 1980s,
Karski’s fame has spread among Jewish audiences. Although a plaque
honoring him had long since been placed in Jerusalem, the
government of Israel took the additional step of conferring
honorary citizenship on him on the occasion of his eightieth
birthday, last year. At the ceremony he declared: “Now, I, Jan
Karski… a Pole, an American, a Catholic, have also become an
Israelite! Gloria, Gloria in excelsis Deo” — a
statement made with manifest emotion and solemnity, but also
betraying a touch of that sardonic humor that I loved so in his
lectures.
Karski’s following among Jews is richly deserved. In 1942, the
Polish underground agreed to a request from the Jewish underground
in Poland to convey information about the annihilation of Polish
Jewry to the outside world. Karski, who was already assigned to
carry a batch of secret messages to the Polish government in exile
(in London), assumed this additional task. In order to fulfill this
mission to the utmost, Karski arranged to be smuggled into the
Warsaw ghetto for a detailed tour of its horrors. He did this not
once, but twice. Then, at still greater risk, he was disguised as a
local Ukrainian guard and insinuated into a Nazi death camp, so
that he could bear witness first-hand to its workings.
The risk and pain were largely in vain. After a clandestine
journey West, Karski brought word of the Holocaust to Anthony Eden,
Franklin Roosevelt, and the leaders of world Jewry. The response of
the governments was negligible (although Roosevelt did create the
War Refugee Board). The response of Jewish leaders ranged from
despair to disbelief. Szmul Zygielbojm, London representative of
the Jewish Socialist Bund, committed suicide as an act of
solidarity and protest. Justice Felix Frankfurter spent an evening
with Karski hearing a private detailed account of his observations
of the Holocaust and at the finish replied: “I am unable to believe
you.” During the duration of the war, Karski insisted on pressing
the issue of the fate of the Jews beyond the point that his Western
listeners or Polish colleagues considered meet. These responses and
non-responses helped to prompt Karski’s vow of silence.
IT WAS NOT ONLY Karski’s efforts to save the Jews that failed,
but also to save Poland. Among the many messages he brought from
the underground to the Polish leaders in London, one theme repeated
itself: a Soviet-controlled alternative underground was being built
by the Communists. Whatever it did to oppose the Nazis, this
apparatus directed at least as much of its energies against the
non- Communist underground and exile government. It even betrayed
underground members to the Nazis. Once in London, Karski discovered
that his reports of Communist perfidy evoked the anger of the
Western allies — not toward Stalin but rather toward the
non-Communist Poles for making an issue of it and thereby sounding
a disharmonious note within the anti-Nazi alliance.
Soon Karski found himself in private audiences with British
officials, including one with Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, in
which the British broached the idea of revisions in Poland’s
eastern boundaries in order to cede territory to the USSR. Karski
soon grasped the bitter truth that the great democracies, which had
felt compelled to go to war over Poland’s independence (after
having indolently abetted the growing menace of Hitlerism), were
now prepared to deliver Poland, at war’s end, bound and mutilated
to Stalin.
Despairing of Britain’s cynical realism, the Polish leadership
convinced itself that it would find salvation in Washington. Hence
Karski was dispatched to the United States to rally support for
Poland and to raise an alarm about Soviet aims. The American
electorate contained a significant number of voters of Polish
descent, to placate whom Roosevelt was prepared to make gestures
and remarks that resembled support for Poland. But these were
deliberately misleading. American politics was less influenced than
British politics by cold realism but more influenced by
sympathy for Stalin’s Russia. Washington was no less willing than
London to sell Poland out.
Karski’s older brother, Marian, who had been like a father to
him, and for whom Karski secured refuge in America, committed
suicide in 1964. One reason, say Karski’s biographers, was that
Marian “never reconciled himself to living in the United States,
one of the countries that had, in his view, betrayed Poland to the
Communists.”
THOSE BIOGRAPHERS, E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski,
have produced a book, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the
Holocaust, that is well researched, and unfailingly
interesting. It is not, however, as mellifluous as Karski’s own
Story of a Secret State, although it may be more reliable
in some details since Karski’s book was written in 1944 under
severe constraints, most of which arose from considerations of
security but some also from politics.
The biography’s subtitle emphasizes Karski’s role in relation to
the Holocaust. This is an understandable marketing strategy, as
Karski is more famous among Jews than among most other Americans,
and Jews are big book-buyers. But this was only one part of
Karski’s story, and it would be a shame if that story does not find
a wider American audience. (In Poland, as I have discovered in my
contacts with Polish democrats over the past seven years, Karski’s
name is well known.)
Wood and Jankowski, relying on interviews with Karski, ascribe
his battle against the Holocaust to the fact that he was “raised
[by his mother] to respect and maintain friendly relations with the
Jewish community,” which in fact he had done. But this can hardly
have distinguished Karski from many other Poles. Karski’s story is
not the story of a man with a good mother and some childhood Jewish
friends. Rather it is the story of a man with an uncommon
dedication to right in a world in which there is not only much evil
but also many willing to accommodate it. Among these were Poles
indifferent to the fate of Jews, and Americans and Englishmen
indifferent to the fate of Poles. Although Wood and Jankowski’s
biography is not rich in detail about Karski’s personal life, what
it gives us also suggests his abiding sense of right.
I recall how shocked he was — this man who had personal
experience with Nazism, Communism, and Western betrayal — at
evidence of unprincipled behavior by his students at Georgetown.
All grades would be based on exams, he announced: he would no
longer assign term papers because he had discovered that these
could be bought. Each time I visited him in his office, he gave me
the same lecture after discovering that my wife was working while I
was in graduate school. He had seen men put through Georgetown
medical school by their nurse wives, only to abandon them after
becoming doctors. This was an unconscionable thing, he said,
seeming to imply that if I ever did such a thing he would
retroactively change my grade to an F.
A real man of principle, this Karski, one who would be worth
studying even were he not also a witness to momentous events, a
great intellect, and a hero. Wood and Jankowski’s account is more
workmanlike than graceful, but it covers Karski’s public life in
welcome detail: Karski says he learned a lot from reading it. We
are indebted to them for bringing him closer.
Joshua Muravchik is a research scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute.
