In Memoriam: Jan Karski
April 24, 1914 to July 13, 2000
by Clay Risen

The only hero I ever knew died last week. His name was Jan Karski, and he was a courier for the Polish resistance during World War II. He was also one of the few gentiles to speak out against the Holocaust, and one of a handful who brought an eyewitness testimony of the atrocity to the Allies.

I met Karski in January, 1998, as a reporter for the Georgetown Hoya. Karski had joined the Georgetown faculty after the war, and the university wanted the paper to get a final account of his life story into the school record. In turn, the Hoya sent Andrew Curry (another Hoya staff writer) and I to interview him in his Bethesda apartment. Karski was known for his reticence concerning his war record, and so it was no small achievement on the part of the university that we were able to sit and listen to the man pour out his life.

Karski spoke for almost three hours, with hardly any prompting. He told us the whole story — of his early days as a Polish army officer, of his capture by the Russians and his subsequent escape. Of his numerous trips carrying messages to the West, across the snow-covered Slovakian hills. Of being captured and tortured by the Germans, and how, after trying to kill himself, he was rescued by the resistance.

As he was in Warsaw preparing for his next mission, Karski was approached by members of the Jewish underground. They asked him if he would carry evidence to the Allies that proved the Germans were in the process of eliminating the Jewish population under its control. Karski agreed, and he also assented to being snuck into the Warsaw Ghetto and Izbica, a transit concentration camp. He had no idea what he would see, and he told us that he almost fainted several times during his undercover tour — beatings, stabbings, starving children and thousands of Jews being forced into cattle cars, headed for points unknown.

Karski travelled through France to Spain and on to Britain and the United States. There he fulfilled his promise, meeting with the likes of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and President Roosevelt, as well as influential leaders of the Jewish communities in both countries.

It was a story I knew already, having read his biography and his file in the university archive. But what I had no idea of — until I saw it on his face, heard it in his voice — was his conviction that he had failed. That he could have done more, that he should have done more. Most people he met with dismissed his story. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told him, "I am not saying that you are a liar. But I do not believe you." Only Roosevelt paid him any heed, setting up the War Refugee Board the next year.

Karski wanted to return to Poland, but he was told it was too dangerous. And so he settled in the United States, a young man who had already seen too much, living in a world that refused to validate his experience.

On the spectrum of heroes, Karski gravitates toward the tragic. The deed that made him great also made him a shadow of his former self, a vessel filled with a vision of hell and the knowledge that he was powerless to stop it. Unlike so many people we call heroes — sports stars, statesmen — Karski didn't ask for it, didn't even plan on it, but when the plea for help came, he offered himself up and sacrificed his peace of mind for the opportunity to bear witness.

Having known Karski, I'm convinced that his is the only kind we can really call heroes. Everyone wants to be like Mike, and most of us would trade for the life of John Kennedy, even knowing we would be cut down at the height of our glory. We look up to these people and wish we could be like them, convinced they are somehow better than us.

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