Jan Karski — The Real James Bond of World War II
One man’s heroic struggle to warn the world about the Holocaust
Were it not dealing with such a grim aspect of World War Two as the Holocaust, the story of Jan Karski might be more well known around the world. His was a true story of daring and espionage on par with anything ever cooked up by the best of fiction writers — a real-life James Bond.
The risks and actions he took to bear witness and warn the western powers of the full extent of the Nazis persecution of the Jews of Europe is nothing short of amazing.
He was born Jan Kozielewski in Lodz, Poland in 1914 — a Roman Catholic, not a Jew. At the outbreak of World War Two, he joined the Polish army, only to be captured by the Russians and sent to a prison camp in Ukraine. (At the beginning of the war Poland was invaded by Germany and Russia.) There he performed what would be the first of many perilous escapes from enemy hands and made his way out of prison to join the Polish Underground.
While on a mission carrying secret documents on microfilm for the Underground he was captured — this time by the Nazi Gestapo. The subsequent interrogation resulted in broken ribs and smashed out teeth. Fearing he might divulge secrets under torture he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists with a razor blade he had hidden in his shoe. He was sent to a nearby hospital where, in time, the Underground helped him escape again.
By now it was 1942 and the Nazis were at the height of their grip on Europe when a barely recovered Jan Karski was given his next assignment. Provided with some tattered clothes with a blue Star of David sewn on, he was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto to see for himself what was happening to so many of the displaced Polish Jews.
What he saw inside the walls was overcrowding, starvation, disease and murder on a nightmarish scale. Jews of all ages were dying openly on the streets every day.
More ominous were the train transports he saw taking people to unknown destinations further east and returning empty.
As soon as he was smuggled out of the ghetto he gave a full report to the Underground. But his work wasn’t done. Dressed next as an Estonian militiaman he was smuggled into a Nazi transit camp at Izbica, Poland where he watched Jews being outright murdered. Fluent in German, he started talking with other guards and learned even more about what was happening in a nearby death camp at Belzec.
The free world now had its first eyewitness to the full extent of the Holocaust.
Armed with a photographic memory and his written notes encrypted on microfilm, Karski was smuggled back to Warsaw, then Berlin, Paris, through Spain, and finally to London where he gave his first report to the Polish government-in-exile and senior British officials, including Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. Though shocked by what he had to say, the respective governments took no action.
In July of 1943 Karski was flown to Washington to tell Franklin Roosevelt all that he knew and all he had seen. As reported in historian Jay Winik’s book 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History, Karski said to Roosevelt:
“I am convinced that there is no exaggeration in the accounts of the plight of the Jews. Our underground authorities are absolutely sure that the Germans are out to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.”
What Roosevelt and the Allies did or didn’t do with this information remains a hotly debated historical topic to this day. Some say it was discreet anti-Semitism that prevented the Allies from bombing the train tracks to the camps. Others maintain that military and strategic necessities would have made any such actions totally unfeasible.
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was also briefed by Karski, later said, “I did not say that he was lying, I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference.”
For Jan Karski, the fact that his pleas for immediate efforts to rescue the Jews of Europe seemed to be all but disregarded, left him crushed and disheartened. But he would not stop telling his story.
In 1944 he wrote My Report to the World: Story of a Secret State, a memoir that read like a spy thriller and told in detail all that he had seen and done in defense of his native country and the oppressed people under Nazi occupation. It quickly became a bestseller in the United States, even a Book-of-the-Month selection. Ironically, while governments may not have taken serious notice of Karski’s message, literary critics certainly did.
Allied troops began liberating the concentration camps throughout Europe in the spring of ‘45, opening the gates and proving to the rest of the world that the horrors he had been describing all along were real.
After the War
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Jan Karski refused to return to what was then Communist Poland. Instead, he stayed here in the United States and earned a PhD from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. In 1954 his adopted country made him a naturalized citizen, and he remained a working professor in Washington D.C. for much of the rest of his life.
In 1965 he married a Polish choreographer and Holocaust survivor by the name of Pola Nirenska. She would take her own life in 1992.
In 1982 Israel bestowed upon him the distinction of being “Righteous Among the Nations,” making him an honorary citizen of Israel.
The remarkable and enduring life of Jan Karski came to a peaceful end in 2000 when he died at the age of 86. Twelve years later he was posthumously awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
