A new biography has just been released in Poland on the life of Jan Karski, the man who told the West during WW II what it didn’t want to hear.

“Jan Karski epitomizes a man of integrity. The defence of Polish Jews from the Holocaust became his personal mission’, said Polish historian Andrzej Żbikowski during a launch of his biography of Poland’s war-time hero this week.

Karski was a Polish resistance fighter against Nazi occupiers during WW II, who snuck out of Poland with a mission to inform the western allies of the German Nazi Holocaust that was sweeping central Europe.

In the book, Karski, Żbikowski claims that the Pole’s mission was rooted in this profound sensitivity to the plight of the Jewish nation on the one hand and on his sense of duty to oppose any forms of collaboration in Poland during Hitler’s crimes against Jews.

Karski’s mission in the West was, in the author’s view, a natural consequence of his activities in Poland.

Professor Żbikowski stressed during the book launch that the reactions of Western politicians, particularly in Britain, to Karski’s reports were characterized by a far-reaching indifference towards the Holocaust.

After the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, Karski was taken prisoner but, having successfully concealed his officer’s rank, he was handed over to the Germans during an exchange of Polish POWs as an ordinary soldier.

Thanks to this, he was spared the fate of Polish officers murdered in the Katyń forest. In November 1939, he escaped from a transport to a POW camp and reached Warsaw, where he joined anti-Nazi resistance.

From January 1940 he took part in courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish Government-in-Exile, then based in France.

During one such mission, in July 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia, tortured and transported to a hospital in Nowy Sącz, from where he was rescued by Polish resistance.

He soon resumed active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Home Army’s High Command, and in the summer of 1942 he was assigned to perform a secret mission to London on behalf of the Polish Government’s Delegate in Poland and several political parties.

He also served as an emissary of Jewish socialists and Zionists. In order to gather evidence on the plight of Polish Jews, he was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto.

In the autumn of 1942 Karski reported to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the situation in Poland, the Holocaust and the underground state structures in occupied Poland.

In July 1943 he was received by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He appealed to the Allies for help for the Jews.

Some of his interlocutors did not believe his accounts, treating them as propaganda of the Polish government-in-exile.

Karski’s book Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State, published in 1944, sold over 360, 000 copies in the United States until the end of the war.

Jan Karski died in 2000. (mk/pg)