For many Poles and Jews it came as a pleasant surprise when the United States announced on April 23 that it was awarding Jan Karski (1914–2000) the Presidential Medal Of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. While Karski was indeed one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century, his accomplishment—risking his life to tell the world about the ongoing Holocaust in Europe, of which it still knew little at the time—is not all that well known even today.
The first and most important thing to say about this award is that it was the right thing to do and high time to do it. It comes just in time for the centennial of Karski’s birth, after a Polish and U.S. lobbying campaign by Ewa Wierzynska, who received strong support from the Polish Museum of History, and Wanda Urbanska, who set up the Jan Karski U.S. Centennial Committee. (Notable Americans, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, and U.S. Ambassador to Poland Lee Feinstein, also lent their support to the campaign, as well as 68 Congressmen and 11 Senators.) All that said, one can’t help but also note that the forthcoming presidential elections and the great number of potential voters in the Polish-American community must also have played a role in the Obama team’s decision.
Political calculations aside, however, this award is well deserved. Jan Karski was an extremely brave and intelligent individual who risked his life to make sure that the world could not turn a blind eye to Nazi atrocities in World War II. Karski became an officer of the Polish Underground after having escaped death at the hands of the Red Army in the Katyn Massacre, where more than 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals, representatives of the elite, were murdered. Risking his life again at the hands of Nazi Germany, Poland’s other occupiers, Karski managed twice to gain access to the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as to one of the German death camps established on Polish soil. He was thus a crucially important eyewitness of Nazi atrocities in his country, collecting information that, if acted upon, could have helped save millions of lives. With this information in hand, and yet again risking his life, he travelled from Warsaw to London, and from there to America, to tell the West about the Holocaust. It was thanks to him that American and British political leaders, as well as the media, gained a thorough understanding of what was going on in the Warsaw Ghetto and in German concentration camps.
Unfortunately, the United States did little as a direct result of Karski’s eyewitness accounts. President Roosevelt, for his part, did nothing, claiming that the best way to help the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was to win the war. In this, Karski’s experience mirrors that of another heroic Polish emissary, Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, who warned Winston Churchill and his advisers in advance of the Polish Underground’s plans for the Warsaw Uprising, to no effect. The uprising collapsed, Warsaw was burned to the ground, hundreds of thousands were killed, and the Red Army eventually occupied the city and all of Poland until the end of the Cold War.
Announcing Karski’s award at the Holocuast Museum, President Obama said:
We must tell our children about how this evil was allowed to happen—because so many people succumbed to their darkest instincts; because so many others stood silent. But let us also tell our children about the Righteous Among the Nations. Among them was Jan Karski—a young Polish Catholic—who witnessed Jews being put on cattle cars, who saw the killings, and who told the truth, all the way to President Roosevelt himself.Quite right, but one thing Obama failed to mention is that President Roosevelt himself stood silent, just as Churchill, too, stood silent. When we speak of lessons to be learned from that dark chapter of world history, one of them surely is that our leaders should not have stood silent then, nor should they today. It bears repeating that not only did the American President at the time not react; he didn’t even want to tell the American public what he had learned.
We should bear in mind the words of Jan Karski from his interview in 1995:
It was easy for the Nazis to kill Jews, because they did it. The allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue Jews, because they didn’t do it. The Jews were abandoned by all governments, church hierarchies and societies, but thousands of Jews survived because thousands of individuals in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland helped to save Jews. Now, every government and church says, ‘We tried to help the Jews’, because they are ashamed. They want to keep their reputations. They didn’t help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough.So many stood silent. Let us not forget this.