Included on this page: Jan Karski Obituary, Reviews of Karski Documentary, Karski Interview

Jan Karski Obituary from The Telegraph UK July 25, 2000

JAN KARSKI, who has died in Washington aged 86, escaped from occupied Poland in 1942 to give the Allies their earliest firsthand warning about the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.

Yet the risks he took were largely in vain. While he was politely received in London and Washington, the Allied war leaders felt they could take no practical steps to assist the Jews before Hitler had been defeated. After the war, however, Karski was honoured by Israel as "a righteous gentile".

He was born Jan Kozielewski on April 24 1914 in Lodz, the youngest of eight children. His father, who owned a small factory, died when Jan was a child; his mother, a devoted Catholic, saw that he was educated under Jesuit influence.

Jan went on to study Law at Lwow University and then, after a year's military service, embarked on a career as a diplomat. He was posted to Switzerland, Romania and England, before being recalled to Warsaw in early 1939.

As a reserve officer, Kozielewski was mobilised in September that year, only to be immediately taken prisoner by the Red Army. But he escaped from a prison camp in Russia and joined the Polish underground in Warsaw. With his ability to carry detailed information in his head, he was soon selected for courier work.

In January 1940 he was sent to Paris, where the Polish Government-in-exile under General Sikorski had been established. He made the journey there and back, via Slovakia and Hungary, but a second secret trip a few months later was a disaster: he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia and imprisoned in Nowy Sacz.

Tortured so badly that he tried to kill himself, Kozielewski was eventually sent back to Poland by the Gestapo. There he was rescued from imprisonment by his friend Jozef Cyrankiewicz, later the Communist Prime Minister of Poland.

Not long afterwards, Kozielewski was approached by Leon Feiner, the Polish Jewish resistance leader, who asked him to undertake another mission - "to tell Churchill and Roosevelt that we know the Allies will win the war, but by then it will be too late for the Jews".

n addition, Feiner, believing that the Germans could be bribed, wanted him to request money with which to buy Jewish lives. Kozielewski, however, suspected the tales of Jews being killed were exaggerated, so it was agreed that he should visit the Warsaw Ghetto - from which thousands of Jews a day were being sent to extermination camps.

In the summer of 1942, Kozielewski, disguised as a ragged old Jew, and renamed Karski, slipped into the Warsaw Ghetto with Feiner to see things for himself.

"As we picked our way across the mud and rubble," he recalled, "the shadows of what had once been men and women flitted by us in pursuit of someone or something, their eyes blazing with some insane hunger or greed." The naked corpses of old men and children lay dead and dying in the gutters; cries of anguish echoed through the streets.

Karski then entered Belzec concentration camp disguised as a guard, and was even more shocked. "I saw horrible, horrible things I will never forget," he said later. "So I agreed to do what they asked of me."

In late 1942 he was sent to London, where Anthony Eden indicated that Britain had already done as much as she could by accepting 100,000 refugees. Karski noted that while "almost every individual was sympathetic to my reports concerning the Jews", the leaders of government to whom he spoke by-passed the promptings of their conscience.

Travelling on to America, he met President Roosevelt and raised the matter of providing hard currency to buy Jews out of the ghetto. The President rebuffed him: "No one will like to know that we are susidising Hitler with gold and silver. Mr Karski, this is impossible; we will not do it."

Karski then asked what he should tell his people. "You will tell them," said Roosevelt, "that we shall win the war and the enemy will be punished for their crimes. Justice will prevail."

The most concrete result of Karski's mission was a declaration by the Allies in December 1942: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. We declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny."

After his meeting with Roosevelt, Karski, whose cover was blown, remained in America for the rest of the war, writing and publishing his Story of a Secret State (1944), which sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

From 1945, Karski was employed by the Hoover Institute and Library in Stanford to collect documents about Poland in the Second World War. He also lectured across the world about his wartime experiences.

In 1994, Karski was made an honorary citizen of Israel. The next year President Lech Walesa made him a Knight of the White Eagle, the highest Polish honour.

Jan Karski's wife, the actress Pola Nirenska, died in 1992.

"The Karski Report," a filmreviewed in the following two articles, was shown in February 2011 by The Lincoln Center Film Society. I am looking for a copy of thr DVD but have been unable to find one. A scene from it, about a minute long, is on You Tube. (from HLS)

"The Karski Report" in Variety 7/9/2011
"Le Rapport Karski"
(Documentary -- France)
By RONNIE SCHEIB

Polish resistance emissary Jan Karski details his meetings with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Claude Lanzmann’s “The Karski Report.”
A Les Films Aleph production. Directed by Claude Lanzmann.
With: Jan Karski, Claude Lanzmann. (French, English dialogue)

An extraordinary if belated addendum to his epic, nine-hour "Shoah," Claude Lanzmann's "Karski Report" consists of passages omitted from the 1985 film. Here, Polish resistance emissary Jan Karski vividly re-creates his meetings with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in which he described the ongoing extermination of Poland's Jews. Almost as interesting for its theatrical representation as for its revelations about the American response to the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust, this 49-minute docu clearly merits niche play and could easily be paired with Lanzmann's earlier "outtakes" offering, "A Visitor From the Living."
Lanzmann's interview with Karski played a crucial role in "Shoah," the Polish liaison officer weeping as he recounted what he saw in the Warsaw ghetto and a concentration camp he identified as Belzec. At the end of Karski's "Shoah" segment, he declared, "I reported what I saw." In this docu's footage, culled from the second day of shooting and tonally quite distinct, Karski elaborates on that declaration.

No longer merely emotionally reactive, Karski immediately takes control of the interview, detailing the exact circumstances of his historic encounters with American leaders. To begin, he clarifies the limits of his influence within the international pecking order: While the Polish government-in-exile regarded him as a hero who commanded the ear of those in power, in America he was received only on sufferance for limited interviews. Extensively briefed by his ambassador, he was given a clear mandate to report on conditions in Poland, which included a comprehensive update on the dire "Jewish problem" but stressed one overriding concern: the fate of occupied Poland.

Clearly awed by Roosevelt, Karski depicts him as a consummate statesman/strategist manipulating the fate of the whole world. Not only did Roosevelt sweepingly promise to protect Poland; he even guaranteed the Polish ambassador a hefty slice of East Prussia after the inevitable Allied victory.

Lanzmann, anxiously pursuing his agenda, impatiently asks if Roosevelt followed up on Karski's comments about the desperate plight of the Jews. Karski replies that although the president solicitously inquired about the fate of Polish horses commandeered by the Nazis, he asked nothing about the extermination of Jews, instead referring Karski to his close friend and confidant, Frankfurter.

Frankfurter's reaction to the breaking Holocaust news proved even more shocking, as he flatly states: "I don't believe it." Karski further explains that Frankfurter did not doubt his veracity, but that his brain was incapable of accepting what he heard, leading to a quasi-scholarly meditation on the mind's inability to accept entirely unprecedented horror.

Throughout, Karski attempts to explain, for himself and for posterity, why his mission failed, his presentation taking on the qualities of obsessive re-enactment. He rises from his chair to prepare the audience for the shock of Frankfurter's response, stopping for maximum impact before delivering the bombshell. His impressions of Roosevelt, down to the almost unconscious mimicry of his mannerisms, elicit nuanced camerawork from ace lenser William Lubtchansky, inclusive of extreme closeups and pullbacks.

Camera (color), William Lubtchansky; editor, Chantal Hymans; sound, Bernard Aubouy. Reviewed at Film Comment Selects, New York, March 3, 2011. Running time: 49 MIN

THE FILM FILE
THE KARSKI REPORT
(director: Claude Lanzmann; 2010)
by Richard Brody

Claude Lanzmann’s new documentary—composed almost entirely of footage from interviews that he filmed in 1978 with Jan Karski, an officer in the Polish underground during the Second World War, but didn’t include in “Shoah”—presents a vivid and meticulous account of one of the most historically significant political discussions ever to take place. Karski explains that, in 1943, he went on a mission to Washington, D.C., to brief President Roosevelt on the state of the Polish resistance, as well as on the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the Belzec concentration camp, to which he was a witness. Roosevelt then sent Karski to speak with the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, who, upon hearing Karski’s description of the horrors befalling Jews in Poland, spoke words that Karski reproduces, for Lanzmann’s camera, with a theatrical fervor that embodies the shock he felt upon hearing them: “I do not believe you.” Lanzmann’s film confronts epochal conundrums in moral epistemology—the leap of faith required to conceive the inconceivable and to recognize what Karski calls the “unprecedented,” and the paradoxical primacy of oral testimony as a mode of representation and understanding—which are at the core of “Shoah” and of the cinema itself.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/the_karski_report_lanzmann?printable=true#ixzz1Rep

The following are selections taken from interviews was for a proposed movie about Karski. There is no record that it was produced. (HLS)

Karski: In his own words
Written by E.Thomas Woo, Co-author, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust
June 14, 2008

For me, working on a documentary film about Jan Karski means spending time with an old friend. For the first time in more than a decade, I have had occasion to pore over transcripts from my many interviews with the Professor. As I was researching his life story in 1992 and 1993, we spoke by telephone several times a month and I met him in Washington a half-dozen times.

The in-person interviews took place at the two high-rise apartments he owned, in succession, in Friendship Heights, just northwest of the D.C. line in Maryland. The encounters took years off my life. I could not wish otherwise, then or now. Throughout the time I was meeting with him about the prospective biography, Karski chain-smoked filterless Lucky Strikes in the hermetically sealed rooms where we conversed. A non-smoker, I wheezed through the days and invariably returned to Nashville in clothes that smelled like the waiting room of an East German train station.

(One day around 1997, I walked into Karski’s home to find the usual miasma absent. “My doctor, he says is not good for my health,” he blithely explained. “So I quit.” (The man had smoked for more than 60 years.)

Professor Karski would allow me to query him in detail for hours on end. At pauses between the formal interviews, he would coach me on issues we might want to cover next. Whatever the topic, as soon as we reached the hour of 5 p.m., he would pause and look at me with a gleam in his eye. “Meester Wood,” he would say in his deeply accented baritone. “This is a very interesting conversation. But don’t you think we ought to have a drink?”

Off went the tape recorder; out came the bourbon and Cinzano as we recessed to his dining room. Karski dispensed the vermouth into his Manhattan in tiny amounts. I would later witness him politely bedeviling bartenders across the U.S. and Europe over an excess of vermouth in his drink. He generally raised the issue after his third sip, beckoning the server with his craggy index finger: “Excuse me. Ees this a Manghattan?” The result was always a topping up of the offending libation with more bourbon. Intentionally or not, Karski thus made sure that any hour was happy hour.

Our evening conversations across the table often served as an antidote to the horrors and disappointments I had made him revisit in the day’s interviews. For me, they served as tutorials in foreign policy analysis, clandestine tradecraft, Central European history and a host of other subjects ranging from opera to academic politics – always interspersed with plenty of gossip. I treasure the memory of the time I spent just hanging out with the Professor. I wish I had been able to record those chats, but of course he would never have spoken so freely in that case.

....................

"The interviews begin:

What is your exact birthdate?

Jan Karski: April 24, in my passport. I was born April 24, 1914. Now, jokingly, my mother was always quarreling with my father, telling us: When they took me to be baptized at the age of six months or something, my father, my godfather (a certain Jaszinski), the priest-- all of them were drunk. This was Poland. No sissies. No stupid Americans or English, they drink to be in a better mood. In Poland, alcohol is expensive. You drink to get drunk.

"So my mother was joking that they gave the wrong date. She said I was born in June, not in April. And also a complication, because when I was born, still Russia was there. And Russian calendar is 13 days earlier than ours. So when Poland emerged, the day of my birth was 13 days later. So by our standard, the date was April 11."

"My best friends, my first close buddies, were Jewish boys. Salus Fuchs I remember to this day, he wanted to be a great pianist. I was 13-14 years old. I didn't see the world behind him."

"Since the age of 12 I became a member of religious organization Sodalicja Maria?ska. I was very religious. By our modern standard you could call it fanatic or bigoted Catholic, which I am not now, an old man."

Can you tell me about your family and your life before the war?

Jan Karski: "It was a normal life. A middle-class family, with the exception that my mother was very religious. She made me exceedingly religious. When I was a young boy I was fanatically Catholic. My education came from the Jesuits. I actually wanted to make heaven”
"We would look at how [Adam] was painted by Michaelangelo, by da Vinci. He was cleancut, good-looking, innocent. 'It was that Eve! That Eve! With that serpent behind her!' At that time, I remember, we didn't know what did Eve actually do to Adam to make him vicious and to bring this original sin upon the world. We had no idea what is sex, what do you do with the girl. I only knew: 'Don't touch the girls. Because serpent.'" [laughter]

"My mother never called him Pilsudski. She only called him 'father of the country.' 'You must be worthy of the father of our country.' I was fanatically pro-Pilsudski. Fanatically. Today I am a Pilsudskite. Because he was a dictator. But he became a dictator because there was such chaos in Poland: 90 different political parties, no stable government, governments would be emerging and collapse two weeks later, because every government was a coalition. Five, six, seven parties. There was no stability, chaos, poverty. Into this Pilsudski came and established a military dictatorship. He was extremely popular in Poland among the masses. He was incorruptible. He had two daughters, and they were attending some regular public school, and they went to school by regular tramways. He didn't give them a government car. His wife, Madame Pilsudska, never owned a fur. He was a benevolent dictator. He was an old man, father of the country."

Jan Karski: "Among other things, he was extremely popular among the Jews. His idea was 'Salus res publica suprema lex esto': the interest of the state is supreme-- not that of any particular ethnic groups. Consequently, he was against any discrimination, against any anti-Semitism. 'We have one country,' he would say. 'All must be treated equally. Jews, Ukrainians must be treated the same way the Poles are treated. This is their country, too.' And if it was otherwise, he would use the whip."

Jan Karski continues:
"Poland was between those two powers, Russia and Germany, both of them expanding. Poland tried to maintain neutrality. The tragedy was that Poland was too weak to enforce its neutrality. Consequently, throughout all of Polish history-- today it's the same situation, and tomorrow it will be still-- whatever Russia will emerge, it will be stronger than Poland. Whatever Germany will emerge, it will be stronger than Poland. Poland is sandwiched between both of them. If both of them agree on the partition of Poland, Poland will be partitioned. If one of them decides to attack Poland, and the other will be neutral, Poland will lose the war. This is the tragic situation. Our Polish ancestors, a thousand years ago-- I blame them! Why did they choose this corner of Europe to establish Poland? Why couldn't they choose Madagascar?"

"We were eight. One brother died when I was still a baby. I was the youngest one. The difference between the oldest brother and I was 18 years. So when my father died, my oldest brother became like my father. He educated me, he was sending me abroad etc. Eventually it was this man who was commander of all security in Warsaw when the war broke out. Because he was a legionnaire. He was a soldier of Pilsudski during the First World War. And again, crazily, crazily, fanatically for Pilsudski. Whatever Pilsudski said and did was more important than the Holy Scriptures.

“At the age of six I went to what is called in the United States an elementary school. I went one year early because I was a good boy. [laugh] Already my mother taught me to read, to recite poetry etc. I spend there until the age of 14, and then to the high school, again one year ahead of the other boys my age."

"You knew that certain streets were inhabited almost exclusively by the poorest Jews. In my class of 70-80 students, there were some eight to ten Jewish students. Jewish students kept to themselves usually; they did not mix with the Catholic Poles. And the first year there, I was hopelessly weak in mathematics. Cursed. I remember they tried to teach me algebra, and to this day I don't understand anything of algebra. Or physics-- to this day I have no idea how a telephone works. Now, I was always strong in Polish history, literature, poetry. I could recite Polish classics, etc. And after several days I notice there is a group of Jewish boys who kept to each other, and all of them were strong exactly in what I was hopeless at-- mathematics, physics, etc.

"All of them weak in Polish history and literature-- they were not interested; they were Jews and probably spoke Yiddish at home. And I got the idea and I approached one of them, named Izio Fuchs. He was older than any one of us. Rumors were that he had some one or two years' mental weakness. But he was completely normal. Yiddish accent. I approached him... and we became friends. The man who was mostly charged by Izio to take care of me was Kuba Przytycki. Whenever I would get a low grade he would scold me-- 'I'm trying to help you, and look what you do!' A wonderful relationship. Lejba Ejbuszyc, he lived in Baluty, the worst part of Lodz, where there were bandits and hoodlums. His language was horrible. Whatever he would say, he would always start or end with, 'And I fuck it. Ja pierdole.' He was big, very strong. Nobody could beat him and everybody was afraid of him, so he was left alone. Aggressive, contemptuous, 'Yeah, I'm Jewish, so what!'

"The second was Sasha Goldberg. I didn't like him particularly because he was fat and had very bad complexion, to begin with. But he was rather rich. He would boast that he doesn't care for Poland at all. His dad knows all financiers in the world. And when he finishes the gimnazjum, he will go immediately to England, where his dad will introduce him to all financiers in the world. And financiers are richer and more powerful than bankers, only we are stupid and we don't understand. He understands because his dad told him. We tolerated him because he had very nice apartment. He lived alone, his father apparently away on business. He had a maid who stayed with him. From time to time he would invite us all and she would prepare beautiful cookies for us with coffee and Schlagzane-- an Austrian specialty, some sort of ice cream with a certain taste.

"Next boy: Izio Fuchs. He had such respect from us all. The head teacher of our class, Mrs. Gastmannowa, would never address him directly. Never, 'Izio come here!' but rather, 'Let Izio come.' He commanded respect because he was so very Jewish. He would come to the class with his holy books, and during the class intermission he would go always to the same place and pray. The boys called him a Jewish prophet. Nobody hurt him, but he was a little held in ridicule. In our group, he had absolute authority. He was the one who appointed Kuba Przytycki: 'You will help Kozielewski with his chemistry, physics etc.' Next: His younger brother, the best-looking boy in Lodz. He wanted to be a pianist. He had no spite in his heart. He wanted to be friends with everybody, jumping to everybody like a dog. Everybody liked Salus, but I liked him more than anybody else. He called me Koziol [billy-goat]-- a play on my name."

Jan Karski: "My mother was very liberal, very tolerant, while my father was a nationalist. So there was bad political feeling between them. Second, my mother claimed that she came from a better family than my father. Her family looked down on my father's family-- some petty, provincial thing."

"There were Jewish boys and Jewish girls at university, not so many as in high school, but yes. Only, 1931 to 1935, every year it was a little worse, with nationalism, chauvinism, anti-semitism, etc. 1931, not outspoken. But I remember two last classes, 34-35, already, 'Jews to the back benches.' Already students demonstration, numerus clausus. It was ugly. [How did you react?] I did not react. I don't want to boast. No, I did not react. At that time, I hated it, of course, but I didn't take part in any counter-demonstrations. But I saw it." [for career reasons] "A diplomat represents the country and he wears a dinner jacket."

"Yes, naturally, I was always repelled as a student at those anti-semitic outbursts-- beating the Jews, the last benches only for them, standing up to make room for the Polish ethnic students etc. Only, I do not hesitate to say it, before the war I was not an active defender of the Jews. I wanted to to get out of any domestic politics, not to be controversial, because at the university I already knew I will enter diplomatic service-- I had good contacts.

"So the first one or two years at university I was active in Pilsudskite youth, Legion Mlodych. I became even a commander of the local student association, Legion Mlodych. But I was so inefficient-- I am not a leader by nature; I never was-- and I didn't want to endanger my career. So I got out. Some of my friends, like Lerski, when he became a student, he actually defended the Jews. So they crushed his head; he spent several weeks in the hospital. [ZBIGNIEW CONFIRMS THIS.] I didn't want to get involved in these affairs-- they might disfigure my face and I wouldn't be an attractive ambassador. But I saw in that first period anti-Semitism in Poland now freely revealed, because no government to punish them. Moreover, I suspect that some Poles from extreme right were thinking, 'The Germans are bad, they subjugated us, but at least in one respect they do what we want them to do....'"

[In regards to Anti-Semitism at the University]

"But I remember one professor in particular, Ludwik Ehrlich, prominent scholar, he wrote a European-wide book on The Law of Nations, international law. He himself was born Jewish and he became Catholic. And as sometimes happens, converts become crazy, he became fanatically Catholic, going to masses with students every Sunday etc. Everybody was afraid, because he required the presence at lectures, and his assistant unexpectedly from time to time would read the name from the roll. So he would burst out: 'Why are you standing in the back? There is plenty of room up here. I cannot conduct my lecture with you hovering back there. You disturb me. Have a seat.' And the Jews would come, and the Endeks could not object. Ehrlich wouldn't say, 'You rightist anti-Semites' etc.-- only 'You disturb me.'

"Every anti-Semite will tell you his best friend is Jewish, but nevertheless: At the time I had Jewish friends. But I would be a liar if I said I got involved."

................

http://www.pljournal.com/people/tom-wood-interview-on-jan-karski.html