|
Who Were the 5 Million Non-Jewish Victims? Holocaust Books Videos, Tapes and DVDs Your Letters: Read personal thoughts and stories of other visitors. |
Mr. Karski heard keening cries of men and women and thought he smelled burning flesh.There, his Jewish guide turned him over to the owner of a hardware store who was a member of the Polish underground. Mr. Karski was given the uniform of a Ukrainian militiaman working under the German command who had been bribed to take the day off. Another Ukrainian guard who had also been bribed then led him to a large area encircled by barbed wire. Mr. Karski heard keening cries of men and women and thought he smelled burning flesh. Soon he witnessed the arrival of several thousand starving and frightened Jews who had been brought to the camp from Czechoslovakia. He watched as their bags were taken away from them. Then he saw Jews being beaten and stabbed. Ranks of uniformed men pressed the crowd onto waiting box cars that had been coated with quicklime. Those who fell or fainted or who could not move were thrown into the cars. When no more bodies could fit inside, the doors were shut. Mr. Karski was told that the trains were heading for a camp not far away where their human cargo would be led into gas chambers. But he was also told that sometimes the trains were just left on sidings until those inside starved or suffocated. After the war, scholars were able to pinpoint the place described by Mr. Karski as a transit depot in Izbica Lubelska where Jews where robbed of their possessions before being sent on to an extermination camp at Belzec 40 miles away. He was given a key whose soldered shaft contained microfilm of hundreds of documentsMr. Karski returned to Warsaw to prepare himself for his dangerous journey to London. He was given a key whose soldered shaft contained microfilm of hundreds of documents. He went to a dentist and had several teeth pulled so that the resultant swelling could provide him with a reason for not speaking if he was stopped by Germans; he was certain his Polish-accented German would give him away. He also kept his hands out of sight, hiding the wrists that were scarred when he had tried to kill himself. Using local trains, he went to Berlin, the capital of the Reich, then through Vichy France to Spain, where after a prearranged rendezvous, he was taken to Gibraltar and then to London. He turned over the key containing the microfilm, described resistance activity, and assessed as bleak the prospects of cooperation between the anti-Communist Polish underground and the partisans sponsored by the same Soviets who in 1939 had joined Hitler in invading and dividing Poland. He spoke of the Jews, saying that their fate was far more desperate and perilous than that of non-Jewish Poles. For many of his Polish superiors, the plight of the Jews, remained an issue that was marginal to Poland's struggle to regain it's conquered land. Some even feared that any emphasis on the victimization of the Jews might detract attention from Poland's tragedy and diminish their own appeals for help. ...he was met by even greater reluctance to act.And when Mr. Karski carried his information about the destruction of the Jews to higher authorities in London, he was met by even greater reluctance to act. "In February 1943, I reported to Anthony Eden," he would later write about his secret meeting with the British Foreign Secretary. "He said that Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees." Mr. Zygelboym listened in pain then said, "It's impossible, utterly impossible.In London, Mr. Karski told his story to Szmuel Zygelboym, who represented the Jewish Socialist Bund in the National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile. Mr. Zygelboym listened in pain then said, "It's impossible, utterly impossible." If he went on a hunger strike, he said, the authorities would send the police and drag him away to an institution. But, he said, "I'll do everything I can do to help them. I'll do everything they ask." A few months later, on May 12, 1943, just after the Germans defeated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mr. Zygelboym sent a letter to the president and prime minister of Poland in exile and took his own life. Zygelboym wrote: "By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the annihilation of the Jewish people."In July 1943, Mr. Karski arrived in the United States. Two months earlier, attempts by the Germans to liquidate those Jews still remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto was met with armed resistance. In a desperate, uneven struggle over three weeks known to history as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, more than 10,000 Jews were killed in the fighting or in fires set by the Germans to destroy the Ghetto, and 56,000 Jews remaining were taken to the Treblinka death camp. "Almost every individual was sympathetic to my reports concerning the Jews," Mr. Karski said. "But when I reported to the leaders of governments they discarded their conscience, their personal feeling. They provided a rationale which seemed valid. What was the situation? The Jews were totally helpless. The war strategy was the military defeat of Germany and the defeat of Germany's war potential for all eternity. Nothing could interfere with the military crushing of the Third Reich. The Jews had no country, no government. They were fighting but they had no identity." Secret Meeting Between Mr. Karski and President Franklin D. RosseveltHe kept telling what he knew, honoring the promise he had given to the two men in the Ghetto. A secret meeting was arranged between Mr. Karski and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was awed by the president and kept his report concise. He told Roosevelt about Auschwitz and said that 1.8. million Jews had already been killed in Poland. He said that commanders of the underground Home Army were estimating that if there were no Allied intervention in the next year and a half, the Jews of Poland would "cease to exist." He did not tell the President of his own experiences or observations. Mr. Karski believed that he failed to move Roosevelt to any real action but John Pehle, who became the head of the War Refugee Board, a Federal agency that helped settle surviving Jews, said that Roosevelt decided to establish the board as a consequence of his talks with his Polish visitor. The Karski mission, said Mr. Pehle, "changed U.S. policy overnight from indifference to affirmative action." Mr. Karski did mention his personal experiences to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court, a former presidential adviser and a Jew. Justice Frankfurter replied, "Mr. Karski, I am unable to believe you." A Polish diplomat who was present interjected and asked whether Mr. Frankfurter was calling Mr. Karski a liar. Justice Frankfurter answered, "I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference." Mr. Karski was planning to return to Warsaw and resume his clandestine work, but his superiors told him that his identity had become known to the Germans and ordered him to remain in the United States. His mission then was to promote the cause of a Poland, which, once freed of German occupation, would have to contend with Stalin's designs. He gave newspaper and radio interviews, wrote magazine articles and drew on his own experiences to write a book, "Story of a Secret State," which was published at the end of 1944 by Houghton Mifflin and which became a Book of the Month Club selection. Within a year the war came to an end and so did the government in exile that Mr. Karski had served. The Yalta agreement had consigned postwar Poland to the Soviet sphere and Mr. Karski, who knew and scorned Communism, did not return to his native land. Instead, at the age of 39 he enrolled at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. He received his doctorate in two and a half years, and stayed on, teaching at Georgetown until his retirement in 1984. He became a naturalized citizen in 1954. "This sin will haunt humanity to the end of time. "It does haunt me. And I want it to be so." He continued to write and speak out against Communism and on behalf of a free and independent Poland, traveling and lecturing widely. He spent more than a decade on a historical work, "The Great Powers and Poland: 1919-1945," published in 1985 by University Press of America. During much of his teaching life, many of his students never knew of his role in the Polish underground or of the terrible message he had carried to the West. He would not speak of it publicly until he agreed to be interviewed for "Shoah." The film gave him a renewed celebrity on the campus and beyond it. In 1965 he married Pola Nirenska, a dancer and choreographer, who had been born Pola Nirensztajn in Poland, the daughter of an observant Jewish father. All her many relatives had been killed in the Holocaust, but she had survived the war in London and had become a major force in dance in Washington, teaching, choreographing her own work, and leading her own company, when they met. They were a very devoted couple. In 1981, a year before the Israeli government recognized him as one of "the righteous among nations," Mr. Karski attended a conference organized by Elie Wiesel in Washington, where he reflected on the links between his life and his marriage. He said: "The Lord assigned me a role to speak and write during the war when -- as it seemed to me -- it might help. It did not ... . Then I became a Jew. Like the family of my wife -- all of them perished in the ghettos, in the concentration camps, in the gas chambers -- so all murdered Jews became my family. But I am a Christian Jew. I am a practicing Catholic. Although I am not a heretic, still my faith tells me the second Original Sin has been committed by humanity: through commission, or omission, or self-imposed ignorance, or insensitivity, or self-interest, or hypocrisy, or heartless rationalization. ---------------------------------------- Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company |