Jan Karski is part of my very distant family. I would love to hear your story about your post:
I used to know Mr Karski’s mate in his WWII underground activities, professor (at the University of San Francisco) Jerzy Lerski, who like Karski parachuted into occupied Poland (more than once, I think) from England.
- Thank you -
Most people don’t know that Karski was a leader in the Polish underground in WW II. He fought against the Nazis, and he wrote the definitive book about hard-core resistance to tyrannical nazi occupation in “The Story of the Secret State.”
Lerski was a history professor at the University of San Francisco, when I met him. Before that he taught history in of all places Afghanistan, I believe. My ex helped him write his memoirs in English, while her Polish friend was helping him write them in Polish. He was, as I recall, not a very good writer, he had to list there and thank everyone he had run into. I don’t know if they were ever published. He was also very active in the Bay Area Polish community and once attempted a run at the U.S. Senate. He also wrote a book on Polish-Jewish history. Through him I met Jan Nowak, the ex (at the time) director on the Polish Section of Radio Free Europe, another war hero and accomplished Pole. These guys were really bigger than life. I remember attending a meeting with him in 1980 or 81, the height of the Solidarity movement. He was asked how as a historian he judged the period. He answered, and I’ll never forget it, that “this is like 1905!”. Was he right? Died in the early 1990s, after the fall of Communism.