Jan Karski

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Jan Karski
Head of the statuette of Jan Karski in Warsaw
Statuette by Jan Karski in Tel Aviv University
Wall painting, Warsaw

Jan Karski , actually Jan Kozielewski (born April 24, 1914 in Łódź , † July 13, 2000 in Washington, DC ), was a Polish officer and courier of the Polish Home Army . The lawyer and diplomat was one of the most important witnesses of the Holocaust , alongside Witold Pilecki .

Polish Home Army courier

Karski grew up in Lodz . While studying law and diplomacy at the University of Lviv , he won a popular rhetoric competition . After passing his exam in 1935 and one year of military service in Włodzimierz , he was accepted as a diplomatic candidate in the Polish Foreign Ministry . He was trained at the ILO in Geneva , at the Polish consulate in London and in Warsaw . In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II , he was drafted into the Polish army as an officer and after the military defeat was taken prisoner by the Soviets . In the uniform of a common soldier, he was transferred to the Wehrmacht during a prisoner exchange between the Soviets and the Germans near Przemyśl and was taken to a prison camp near Radom in the Generalgouvernement . He jumped off the train while being transported to a forced labor camp . Karski joined the Polish Home Army ( Armia Krajowa ) fighting underground . His language skills made him an important courier between the Polish government- in- exile in London and the leadership of the Home Army in Poland. He carried messages between Poland, France and Great Britain in secret and dangerous missions .

Eyewitness to German crimes

The young diplomat adopted the code name Karski in 1942 when he set off on his last and most dangerous mission for the Polish underground army Armia Krajowa (AK). Between 1942 and 1943 he informed the Polish government-in-exile in London as well as the British and US governments of the tragic situation in Poland and the systematic murder of the Jews . Karski reported as an eyewitness because he was smuggled into the Izbica assembly camp in a uniform of the Ukrainian militia , from which fully loaded freight trains left for a nearby Belzec extermination camp .

Karski got into the Warsaw ghetto through a tunnel of the Jewish resistance . There he saw the starved children and the dying Jewish population on the streets. One of the people who escorted him from the ghetto was the Jewish resistance fighter Leon Feiner .

In July 1943, Karski met personally with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and told him about the situation in Poland and what he had seen. He also spoke to other US politicians, leaders of Jewish organizations and Catholic archbishops, but to no avail. Felix Frankfurter , judge at the US Supreme Court , was also one of his interlocutors. His descriptions were not believed or they were classified as exaggerations by the Polish government in exile (see contemporary knowledge of the Holocaust ).

After the Second World War

At the end of the war , Karski was unable to return to communist Poland as an employee of the Polish government in exile . He settled in the United States and gave lectures at Georgetown University in Washington, DC In 1949 he began studying at the School of Foreign Service in Georgetown , which he was able to complete with a PhD after just under three years . In 1954 he finally became a US citizen.

In his 1944 book Story of a Secret State , Karski wrote about his time as a courier on a secret mission and his experiences in occupied Poland . In 1985 he published the book The Great Powers and Poland . E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski described the life of Jan Karski in the book Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (published in German as Jan Karski - One against the Holocaust, As a courier on a secret mission , Bleicher Verlag, 1997 ). Elie Wiesel wrote the foreword to the German edition of this book .

It was only in the 1985 documentary Shoah by director Claude Lanzmann , in which only contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust were interviewed, that Jan Karski was able to break his silence. Claude Lanzmann first approached Karski in 1977 with the idea of ​​including him in his planned documentary, which was to be based only on the testimony of witnesses, victims and perpetrators. For over a year Lanzmann tried in letters and phone calls to persuade Karski to cooperate without accepting his refusal. Lanzmann was convinced that Karski had a historical responsibility to testify in the film. Finally, in October 1978, Lanzmann and his team shot for two days in Karski's house. The survey lasted four hours each; the cut from the interviews with Karski takes up forty minutes in the final version. Lanzmann deleted almost everything that Karski mentioned about his attempts to shake up the world. Karski made it clear that he would have preferred if the parts of the interview that dealt with his assignment in the West had also been shown. However, he did not condemn the film, but called for an "equally great, equally truthful" film that reveals "a second reality of the Holocaust", "... not to contradict the one shown by Lanzman, but to complement it".

Karski said:

“I know how much the film has been criticized, especially by Poles, but I have only one thing to say: This is the greatest film that has ever been made about the Holocaust against the Jews in the war - which Lanzmann gave me from the beginning had insured. "

- Jan Karski

In 1997, on January 27th, he reported again on his experiences in the Cologne synagogue.

Awards

His most important awards are two Polish orders: Order of the White Eagle (highest civilian decoration ) and Order Virtuti Militari (highest military decoration ).

For his courageous actions and attempts to save Poles and Jews, Karski became an honorary citizen of Israel . On the “ Avenue of the Righteous ” in Jerusalem , which leads to the Yad Vashem memorial , he was allowed to plant a tree that bears his name. Universities Georgetown University , Oregon State University , Baltimore Hebrew College , Hebrew College of America , Warsaw University , Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and the University of Łódź awarded him an honorary doctorate. Karski was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Foundation for Moral Courage , founded by filmmaker Sy Rotter in 1992 , has been presenting the Jan Karski Award since 2000 .

In 2012 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom .

In December 2016, Karski was posthumously promoted to general by Polish President Duda .

Places of memory of J. Karski

  • In 2015, the sculpture #KarskiNYC - by Karol Badyna , was created in New York City . There are similar works by him in Washington / DC (2002), Kielce (2005), New York (2007), Łódź (2009), Tel-Aviv (2009) and Warsaw (2013). It is also often called the Great Pole's Bench (the bench for a great Pole ). The bank stands in front of the Polish Consulate General. She implicitly invites the viewer to sit next to him. There is an explanatory inscription on the side wall of the bank. Parts of his memories can be heard from a tape.

Movies

  • Jan Karski. (fr. Le rapport Karski ). Documentary by Claude Lanzmann , France 1978, 49 min .; bilingual first broadcast on March 17th, 2010 on ARTE .
  • News from the underground. Documentary by Andreas Hoessli, CH 1997, 60 min.
  • Karski and rulers of humanity (pl. “Karski i władcy ludzkości”), documentary by Sławomir Grünberg, Polska 2015

Interviews

Fonts

  • Story of a secret state. Houghton Mifflin, Boston & Riverside Press, Cambridge 1944.
    • again: Simon Publications, 2001, ISBN 1-931541-39-6 .
    • My Report to the World: History of an Underground State , ed. by Celine Gervais-Francelle, translated from French into German by Franka Reinhart and Ursel Schäfer; Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2011; 620 pp., Ill .; ISBN 978-3-88897-705-3 . - See the review by Heiko Haumann in: Swiss Journal for History , Volume 64, 2014 No. 1 pp. 189–191; ISSN 0036-7834.
    • Partial print: The ghetto. in Dschungel, supplement to jungle world , # 7 of February 17, 2011, pp. 19–23 (readable online. In print: p. 18 photo Karskis from 1943, with traces of torture).
  • The great powers and Poland 1919-1945: from Versailles to Yalta. University Press of America, Lanham et al. a. 1985, ISBN 0-8191-4399-5 .
  • Material towards a documentary history of the fall of eastern Europe (1938–1948). Thesis (Ph. D.), Georgetown University, 1952.

literature

  • Lelio Bonaccorso, Marco Rizzo: Jan Karski - Witness to the Shoah . Graphic Novel, bahoe books , Vienna 2018
  • Yannick Haenel : Jan Karski. Roman, Editions Gallimard, Paris 2009 (French).
  • Marta Kijowska : Courier of Memory. The life of Jan Karski. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-66073-3 .
  • E. Thomas Wood; Stanisław M Jankowski: Jan Karski - one against the Holocaust. Piper Verlag, Munich and Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22596-9

Web links

Commons : Jan Karski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Marta Kijowska : What's wrong with the Poles? Portrait of a contradicting nation. dtv, Munich 2018, p. 34.
  2. ↑ E. Thomas Wood; Stanisław M Jankowski: Jan Karski one against the Holocaust Piper Verlag, Munich and Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22596-9 , p. 165.
  3. ↑ In a video interview with his biographer E. Thomas Wood, Jan Karski describes this encounter with Richter Frankfurter: Unable to Believe , 1996, duration approx. 6 min.
  4. ^ Jan Karski - Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved May 30, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Transcription of the interview by Claude Lanzmann with Karski in Washington in 1978 in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , PDF document, 93 pages (part of the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection; not available separately)
  6. ↑ sequence listing s. Cassette 4
  7. ^ E. Thomas Wood, Stanislaw M. Jankowski: Jan Karski - One against the Holocaust , 2nd edition 1997, Bleicher Verlag.
  8. ↑ See also Karski's review of the Lanzmann film for a Polish magazine from November 1985, which was published in French translation in 1986: Jan Karski, Shoah , in: Esprit , February 1986
  9. ^ Wolf Oschlies : Jan Karski (1914–2000), Misunderstood Warner before the Holocaust . Oschlies quotes and translates Karski's statements in Cologne.
  10. ↑ Jan Karski Award ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Foundation for Moral Courage. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.moralcourage.org
  11. ↑ The White House: President Obama Names Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients (April 26, 2012, accessed May 30, 2012)
  12. ↑ At msz.gov.pl
  13. ↑ Information about the film on the arte.tv website : [1]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. As a DVD from Absolut Medien in the complete edition of L's films@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.arte.tv  
  14. ↑ About Gerhart M. Riegner , Jan Karski and Rudolf Vrba . Entry in the Cinematography of the Holocaust of the Fritz Bauer Institute : Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cine-holocaust.de
personal data
SURNAME Karski, Jan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kozielewski, Jan (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish officer and courier of the Polish Home Army
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 2000
Place of death Washington, DC