Jan Karski and the "Story of a Secret State"

Jan Karski taught international politics at Georgetown for about 40 years. But before that, his life was something else.

A well to do, and well educated Pole, he was called up for military service just before the Nazis attacked Poland in 1939. He never saw action, because the Nazi conquest was so fast (so unbelievingly fast to a country which believed it could withstand the attack; but again, so did France). But no sooner did the Germans attack Poland from the west, but their allies the USSR attacked from the east, and Karski found himself a Soviet prisoner of war.

He was freed in a prisoner exchange with the Germans, and escaped from the westward bound train. He saw how devestated Poland was, even Warsaw. He joined the underground, went on a mission to Lvov, became involved in being a courier and an underground journalist, and was chosen, in part for his language ability, for a mission to London to meet with General Sikorski. Of course, a trip to London was not a walk in the park, it was a train ride to Germany pretending to be German, and to occupied France, and travel to Vichy France, and then a hike over the Pyranees, entrance into Spain pretending to be Canadian, finding one's way to Algiciras and onto a fishing boat which took him to an English boat, which finally got him to England. He never lived in Euorpe again, and became an American citizen in 1954.

The book was published in 1944, and apparently sold about 400,000 copies in the United States. The book has 33 chapters. It can be divided into parts. Part 2 starts at chapter 29.

The first 28 chapters, after describing the events I set forth above, talks about the extensive organization of the Polish underground, the people in the underground, the risks taken, and the often tragic results for participants. The words "Jew" or "Jewish" are hardly mentioned, leading the reader to think that the fate of the Jews was simply not within the amit of Karski's concern.

But then come his meeting with two Warsaw Jewish leaders as part of his preparation for the Sikorski meeting. And his two trips to the Warsaw ghetto and his trip (disguised as an Estonian guard: "No one will question you being Estonian, as long as you stay away from the Estonians.") to a concentration camp, where Jews are being liquidated. He identifies it at Belzec, but its description does not fit and he later agreed that he must have been taken somewhere else.

He is appalled by what he sees, which are conditions so much worse than the terrible conditions the Poles are facing. Apparently, he really did not know this. But shortly after his visits, the Warsaw ghetto uprising occurs, it is cleared out and burned, and everyone then knew what was going on. Beginning with chapter 29, this is a different book.

He tells what he has seen to exiled Polish Jewish leader Szmuel Zygelbojm (who commits suicide days later), to Polish prime ministor in exile Sikorski (who soon dies in a plane crash in Gibraltar), to Prime Minister Anthony Eden and to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Karski started out as a fairly normal guy (Karski was actually a nom de guerre), thrown into extraordinary circumstances, seeing his normal world destroyed as quickly as if an atomic bomb had been dropped, and seeing the absolute lack of humanity in the German invaders. Something he never could have imagined before.

On his way out, he visits an old "liberal" friend in Berlin. He is again appalled. His liberal friend and his friend's liberal family talk about "Hitler knows best", and how it's too bad when the Jews have to suffer as they are killed, but they won't infect Germany any more, and so forth.

You learn a lot about Poland during the war, and about the risks taken by the underground, and of course (in the second part) about the fate of the Polish Jews. But a warning: if you are squeamish, I would stay away from chapters 29 and 30.