Survivors Share Memories of ‘Jewish Tragedy’

Before the desperate Jewish resistance leaders smuggled him into the Warsaw ghetto and a Nazi concentration camp, they apologized to the young, Catholic, Polish underground member. “We are sorry,” they told 28-year-old Jan Karski one day in late September, 1942, “that you will have to take such memories as these with you throughout your life.”

He was used to danger, this Jan Karski, who served as a courier between the underground in Poland and the Polish government-in-exile from 1939 to 1943. Four times he had picked his way across Nazi-dominated Europe on secret missions. Captured by the Soviets in 1939, he escaped. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1940, he was tortured and tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide in order to protect underground secrets. A daring rescue effort by the Polish underground finally freed him.

All this was nothing to him; danger had become a way of life for the young man whose life as a diplomat had been ambushed in 1939 by the whims of war.

But this secret mission proposed by the two Jewish underground leaders involved danger of a different sort: The danger of being haunted by memories that cannot be tamed and processed by the civilized, conscious mind. It is the stuff of which nightmares are made. Still, the Jews felt that they had no choice but to ask the young man. The silence must be broken, they said, and the world informed of the terrible things happening in the Warsaw ghetto and in the camps. And then they set forth their proposal:

We know Hitler has decided on the total destruction of the Jews in Europe. This is our end. The Jews are totally helpless. The Poles may save individuals but they cannot stop extermination. You must take our message to London and you must try to get in touch with as many Allied leaders as possible. You must convince them that only the powerful Western Allies can help now.

There is a pause and the voice telling you this story stops; a lighter flares and the first of many cigarettes is lighted. Then the heavily accented voice continues:

But we know England; we know the West. What you are going to tell them is unprecedented. They may have doubts. It would help us if you could say that you saw it with your own eyes. We could smuggle you into the ghetto in Warsaw. No danger whatsoever to you. I will be your guide. And we could try to smuggle you into the Belzec camp. This is dangerous but we wouldn’t expose you to certain death. Will you go?

“I said, ‘I will go,’ ” recalls Karski now, stopping to tap out a cigarette in an ashtray, a move that reveals the faint scars on his wrist--remnants of the suicide attempt almost half a century ago. He is sitting in the living room of his tidy, white house in the suburbs of Washington.

But Karski is not here; he is back in the season of memory, back in the Poland of World War II:

“And then we went. Twice I saw the ghetto. I . . . saw . . . horrible . . . things,” he says slowly. “The first time I couldn’t take it. We left. But then I said: ‘I want to go again. I want to see.’ It was not difficult to get in.”

Nor out. Unless you were a Jew.

To get into the concentration camp, he dressed in a soldier’s uniform. “I spent 20 minutes, 30 minutes in Belzec,” says Karski, now 75 and a semiretired adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “I couldn’t take it,” he says, blinking his eyes against the tears.

Karski had been charged by the leaders of the Jewish resistance to tell the Western leaders about the impending extermination of an entire people and to demand that they take steps to halt it. Accordingly, in 1943, he met with top Allied leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. In the United States, he also had face-to-face meetings with Justice Felix Frankfurter and other Jewish intellectuals and leaders.

His reports to them included information about the desperate situation of the Jews in Poland. Afterward, he felt his “Jewish message” was largely ignored by the Allied leaders. “I thought it might help; it didn’t,” he says. In 1943 he was unable to return to Poland because of the danger involved. The following year, he wrote a book about his experiences and delivered more than 200 speeches in this country, always speaking of “the Jewish tragedy.”

“It was pure duty,” he says now of his commitment to speaking out. “At the time, I had to do it.”

At war’s end, however, Karski retreated into silence about his wartime experiences. He made the United States his home and enrolled at Georgetown University as a graduate student. After three years, he earned his doctorate in government (he already had a double master’s in law and diplomatic history earned before the war) and began a 37-year career as a highly respected professor at Georgetown. In 1985 he produced a massive book, “The Great Powers and Poland, 1919-1945,” which was hailed as a “truly remarkable work.”

He was “bitter,” he says, at war’s end when the leaders of the Western world expressed horror and surprise at what had happened in the concentration camps. He argues that it was impossible for them not to know.

“But please don’t write that Karski is the first one to inform the Western leaders,” he says. “That is a nonsense. There were Jewish escapees who had gone to Switzerland and Sweden, passing secret reports. The Polish underground had daily communication with London, reporting the situation of the Jews. And, most important, the Allied governments had secret agents in every country. So to argue the leaders did not know is a nonsense.

“But after the war American, British, French leaders, church officials--they go to Auschwitz, to Treblinka, to Buchenwald. Their comments were always the same. ‘We didn’t know that such things were possible. We were not aware of it.’ (Gen. Dwight D.) Eisenhower visited a concentration camp, and the press reported that Eisenhower was so moved that he ‘lost power of speech’ for a few moments. Reading what those leaders were saying--that it was a secret, they didn’t know--I was disgusted. Disgusted. And I don’t hesitate to use this word. It was then I got out of this business of the war.

“I wanted to be integrated into American life as soon as possible,” Karski says. “The same with my wife, Pola Nirenska. She is Jewish. All of her family left in Poland perished. In the ghettos, in the concentration camps, in gas chambers. We never discuss the war at home.”

Later, however, deeper into the interview, he will explain his need to distance himself from the past in a more emotional way: “I wanted to run away after the war,” he will say in a halting voice. “I saw too much. I saw too much misery, hatred, ruthlessness, human losses.” He will stop, search for the words. “I . . . saw . . . horrible . . . things. What I learned from the war made me silent for 30 years. I buried myself in the anonymous academic community.”

In 1980, a phone call from a concentration camp survivor persuaded Jan Karski to break his silence.

The caller was Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, an author and professor at Boston University, who would be awarded in 1986 the Nobel Prize for Peace.

In 1980, Elie Wiesel, then the chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Committee, was organizing a unique international conference to be held in Washington.

“I wanted to bring together people from all over the world who had liberated the (concentration) camps,” says Wiesel. “Not the survivors, but the people who had liberated us. The first people to have seen us, to have seen hell, were in a very special category. So I brought to Washington liberators and also people who tried to prevent the tragedy.”

Karski was invited to speak at the International Conference of Liberators in Washington in October, 1981.

“At first, I said I would not do it,” Karski says, recalling his telephone conversation with Wiesel.

“I am telling you that you will come,” was Wiesel’s response.

“And so I did go,” says Karski now, imitating with affection Wiesel’s insistent tone. “I gave my report, it lasted 35 minutes, and they filmed it. Then came the publicity.”

“No speaker affected the audience as much as Karski,” recalls Wiesel, “He received an ovation.”

At about the same time that the conference took place, Karski received a letter from filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who was working on “Shoah,” a monumental documentary of the Holocaust. After some reluctance, Karski agreed to be interviewed. “It was my duty to do it,” he says simply.

From eight hours of taped interviews with Karski, about 40 minutes were used in the 9 1/2-hour film.

It was a very difficult experience for Karski. “A few times I broke down,” he recalls. “My wife could not stand it. She left the house.” The end result, he feels, “is the greatest film ever made on the Jewish Holocaust.”

Wiesel makes an observation about Karski: “He is a man of absolute integrity, of extraordinary force of character. But I had the feeling from the moment I met him that he was a wounded person, that he carried secret, invisible wounds in him. The moment we touched on a certain area, I saw he was fighting the memories. I saw the tears in his eyes. I was very moved by the man.”

There’s a pause. Then: “But I think he feels that he failed,” Wiesel says. “He tried to speak and people didn’t want to hear.”

The past, someone observed, is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

“I will tell you this--Jan Karski is not my family name; it is an assumed name,” says the man sitting opposite you. He says his real name is Kozielewski, and he grew up in a large, devout Catholic family. From his youth, he planned to enter the diplomatic life. He smiles. “But then, most of my life turned out to be not planned. Once the war started . . . “ and here he searches for a word, “accidents took over.”

In Karski’s home there is a room filled with awards, medals, plaques and scrolls, each honoring one deed or another performed by the young underground courier who, you might say, lived only in those few years between 1939 and 1945. There is a tree bearing the name of Jan Karski in the Garden of the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. A poem appeared in 1988 in The Nation magazine, written by Paul Genega and titled “The Courier.” It was about Karski.

Now, strolling with his 80-year-old wife in the bright sunlight of his garden, Karski is asked about his connection with the past, with the man who was captured and tortured and smuggled into the ghetto and met with the great leaders of the Western world. Is he still that Jan Karski?

“Now, I will tell you,” he says, blinking in the sun. “Who is Karski for me? I know thousands of people, and I will tell you frankly that the man who interests me the least is Jan Karski.” He laughs. “I don’t have an attachment to Jan Karski. I don’t take him too seriously. I know him too well. What can I say? Jan Karski did what he had to do.”