Author: E Thomas Wood & Stanislaw M Jankowski
Published: 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Blurb: An instinctive survivor, a soldier driven by a single-minded focus on his mission, an extraordinary man in an extraordinary time, Jan Karski became a legend.
A young Polish diplomat turned cavalry officer at the outbreak of World War II, Karski joined the Polish underground movement in 1939 after ingeniously escaping from a Soviet detention camp. Most of the Polish officers held with him were later executed. Karski became a courier for the underground, crossing enemy lines to serve as liaison between occupied Poland and the free world. Captured by Gestapo in 1940, he was savagely tortured. Afraid that the Germans would extract secrets from him, he slashed his wrists. But after the suicide attempt failed, he escaped from a hospital with the help of an underground commando team. His work had just begun.
Karski, a Roman Catholic, developed a keen concern fo the plight of the Jews under Nazi domination. In 1942, Jewish leaders asked him to carry a desperate message to Allied leaders: the news of Hitler's effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. To be able to carry an authentic eyewitness report, Karski agreed to tour Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto in disguise. The suffering he saw there was only a prelude to the atrocities he witnessed when he later volunteered to be smuggled into a camp that was part of the Nazi murder machine.
Carrying searing tales of inhumanity, Karski reached London in late 1942 and set out to alert the world to the emerging Holocaust. He met secretly with top Allied officials, including British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and with intellectuals like HG Wells and Arthur Koestler. Some reacted viscerally to his message. Others responded with disbelief or indifference. In July 1943, Karski traveled secretly to Washington, where he briefed President Roosevelt in a dramatic meeting. This fully documented account of Karski's myriad encounters discloses new information about how leaders in the West reacted to the Holocaust.
Karski is the first definitive account of Jan Karski's mission, which was perhaps the most significant warning of the impending Holocaust to reach the free world. It is a compelling story of moral courage against all odds.
My two cents: An amazing book about an amazing man. Fighting through thick and thin to do what he felt was right, Jan Karski's story is inspirational and informative. The book manages to make the number of Jews who died in Poland in the Holocaust seem real, rather than just an unfathomable number. Karski's experiences introduced him to many people and, at the meeting of each new person, the authors of the book quickly outline what happened to them. It really brings it home when you realise that the vast majority of people that Karski met in Poland during the war were dead within a few years of the meeting. I didn't find the second half of the book as interesting as the first half, but that is mainly because I don't really find politics and political figures particularly interesting. I don't particularly enjoy non-fiction books, but the story is so amazing I'd certainly recommend reading this book if you can get your hands on it.
