Jan Karksi

Righteous Among Nations  

Jan Karski was the non de plume of Jan Kozielewski, the youngest of eight children, born in a tenement house at 71 Kilinskiego Street on the 24 April 1914. 

Following secondary school he went to Lvov in 1931 to study there. He was awarded with a Doctor of Law and Diplomacy title, and he later worked in the diplomatic corps, in pre-war Poland and secured coveted oversees postings in London and Paris.

Just prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland Jan Kozielewski enlisted in the army and served as a cavalry officer, when first the Germans then the Soviets invaded Poland in September 1939. He was captured by the Soviet forces and incarcerated in a detention camp.  Jan Kozielewski escaped from the camp and joined the Polish underground, whilst most of his fellow captives were later executed by the Soviets.

Now Jan Karski, he became a skilled courier for the underground, working with the Allied forces in the West. Whilst employed on underground work he was arrested by the Gestapo in Preshov Slovakia in 1940, and he was brutally tortured.

Fearing that he might reveal secrets and betray his underground colleagues, he slashed his own wrists, and was put into a hospital, from where he was able to escape, with the help of the Underground.

In the third week of August 1942, in the midst of the Nazi mass deportation of the Jews of Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp, Jan Karski entered the Warsaw Ghetto, and met two Jewish leaders, Leon Feiner and Adolf Berman, this visit is reproduced in full- see Jan Karski inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

They both urged Jan Karski to inform the Allied leaders about the mass extermination of Polish Jewry. They both urged Karski to take to the Allies the following proposal:

• Preventing the extermination of the Jews should be declared an official goal of the Allies.

• Allied propaganda should be used to inform the German people of the war crimes taking place and to publicise the names of the officials taking part.

• The Allies should appeal to the German people to bring pressure on Hitler’s regime to stop the slaughter.

• The Allies should declare that if the genocide continued and the German masses did nothing to stop it, the German people would be held collectively responsible.

• Finally if nothing else worked, the Allies should carry out reprisals by bombing German cultural sites and executing Germans in Allied hands who still professed loyalty to Hitler.

Jan Karski knew that the proposals were bitter and unrealistic and beyond international law , and told them so, but sought advice from the two Jewish Bund leaders as to what he should say to Jewish leaders who lived abroad.

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/karski.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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