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JAN KARSKI, A Hero for Catholics and Jews

It is said of the Poles that they are among the few people who would send out cavalry to fight tanks but they are the only people who would expect to win. By their refusal to give way to Hitler over Danzig, they did as much a any nation to start the destruction of German Nazism. Through their defiance of a regime imposed on them by the Kremlin, they did more than any nation to bring down Soviet communism.

Jan Kozielewski-he took de nom de guerre Karski when Poland was invaded jointly by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in September 1939-was a Polish hero of the resistance to both Nazi and communist tyranny, but he will be remembered, above all, as a courageous witness to the Holocaust. He was the first person to inform Anthony Eden, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other allied leaders, in 1942, of the Nazi extermination camps and to give them a detailed account of the genocide of the Jews.

Mr. Karski was born into a Catholic family in Lodz and educated by the Jesuits. Poland’s grimy second city was a haunted feel today. Its giant textile mills are broken down; its alleys daubed with slogans that mindlessly defame rival football teams. But before the second world war it was the “Manchester Poland.”

The princess of Lodtz, industrialists like Izrael Poznanski, were Jews. Future prominent Israelis grew up beside Mr. Karski. But when papers and memorabilia associated with Mr. Karski were returned to his home town last year, to be displayed in the city museum, the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe was just about the only remaining sing that Lodz once housed a large Jewish population.

The eyes, ears and voice of the Polish underground Mr. Karski served as a Polish diplomat in Bucharest, Berlin, Geneva and London until, on the outbreak of war, he joined the Polish army as lieutenant. He was wise enough to pass as a private when he was captured by the Red Army and so escaped the Katyn massacre of Polish officers that took place on Stalin’s orders.

On his release by the Russians, Mr. Karski joined the Polish resistance. His photographic memory and fluency in several languages persuade its leaders to entrust him with two courier missions to Paris. On his return from the second of these, he was captured by the Germans. The Gestapo tortured him so mercilessly that he was set on committing suicide before he was sprung by a resistance cell of the Polish Socialist Party. As a devout Catholic and a fervent anti-communist, Mr. Karkski was ever afterwards to savor the irony that his life had been saved by Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a future communist prime minister of Poland.

After his recuperation in Warsaw, Mr. Karski was given the mission that made him famous: to find out all he could about the extermination of the Jews. He crawled into the Warsaw ghetto through a tunnel and witnessed summary executions, naked corpses choking the streets and other gruesome sights. Disguised as a Ukranian guard, he then smuggled himself into the extermination camp at Izbica Lubelska in eastern Poland and gathered facts on its mass executions.

Yet few were ready to believe him when he escaped from occupied Poland to inform influential people in the West about what he had seen and heard. They remembered how during the first world war Britain had accused the Germans of making soap from the dead, and suspected the Polish resistance of similarly crude propaganda.

Even Felis Frankfurter was skeptical. Mr. Karsky recalled that at a meeting he had with Frankfurter in 1943, the American Supreme Court Justice, who was a Jew, said: “A man like me, talking to man like you, must be totally frank. So I say, I am unable to believe what you told me.”

With his alleged Holocaust fantasies finally confirmed as facts, Mr. Karski got a far better hearing after the war as a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His courses in comparative government and theory of communism were always over-subscribed. He continue to have a grudging respect for some Polish communists, including his liberator Cyrankiewicz, but he was flattered rather than abashed when his accounts of the evils of Soviet communism persuaded his students to dub him “McCarthyski.”

As an academic, Mr. Karski wrote a lot on the treatment of Poland during and after the war. His bitterness over the policies of the western allied powers was only partly assuaged by the liberation of Poland from Soviet rule a decade ago.

Free Poland heaped awards on him. Lech Walesa presented him with the Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest honour. He returned home for the last time this spring to celebrate the publication, at last, of a Polish edition of his 1944 American bestseller, “Story of a Secret State”, about the Polish underground.

He was even prouder to be created in 1994 an honorary citizen of the state of Israel and to be nominated in 1998 for the Nobel peace prize by the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The anti-Semitism of so many Poles made him feel ashamed and he liked to describe himself as a Catholic-Jew. The comparisons drawn between Jan Karski and Oscar Schindler are not faciful. Mr. Karski died on July 13th, aged 86.