Jan Karski birth centenary celebrations

Jan Karski Photo: PAP/Tomasz Gzell (archives)

Also coinciding with the centenary here in Poland is the publication of a new translation of Jan Karski’s ‘Story of a Secret State. My Report to the World’ from 1944.

As Elżbieta Krajewska reports, Jan Karski is actually a pseudonym. His real name was Jan Romuald Kozielewski, and he operated under a number of aliases.

He wrote the book in Washington between May and August 1944. It was published there the same year and sold over 360,000 copies in the US by the end of the war. Still, two years earlier, when Karski had brought his story to the Western world, appealing to the highest of state officials for actions to stop the Holocaust, his words had fallen on deaf ears.

Co-organizer of the commemorative events in Poland is the Marek Edelman Dialogue Centre in Łódź. Director Joanna Podolska highlights the importance of Jan Karski’s birthplace, saying “ he always underlined that he was who he was because he came from this multicultural city. [...] so when he came back after many years to Łódź, he said many times that he learned tolerance in our city”.

Maciej Wierzyński, an author of a book with conversations with Jan Karski, added that what is “important for us Poles is Karski as a historian, [a] witness of history and interpreter of Polish history”.

After the war, Karski settled in the United States and became a professor at Georgetown University in Washington. In 2012, Jan Karski was posthumously awarded the US Medal of Freedom, America’s top civilian honour, by President Barack Obama. Adam Daniel Rotfeld collected the medal.

Jan Karski died on July 13, 2000 at the age of 86.