Admirer pats hand of Jan Karski statue at its unveiling in front of Polish Consulate Sunday.
Posted on 11/12/2007 2:57:21 PM PST by lizol
Statue salutes Polish man who warned FDR of Nazi camps
BY CLARE TRAPASSO DAILY NEWS WRITER
Monday, November 12th 2007, 4:00 AM
A statue of the Polish hero who warned President Roosevelt in vain of the existence of Nazi concentration camps was unveiled Sunday in front of the Polish Consulate in Manhattan.
Former Mayor Ed Koch and Polish dignitaries honored the life of Jan Karski before a crowd of about 150 who gathered on Poland's Independence Day.
Karski, a Catholic member of the Polish Underground, repeatedly risked his life and was imprisoned and tortured as he tried to inform the world about the Jewish genocide occurring in the Nazi concentration camps.
"He tried desperately to save the Jews in Europe, and, unfortunately, FDR didn't listen," said Koch. "It was sad because we're reflecting on the deaths of about 6million Jews, and joyous because we're reflecting on the glory of a hero."
After World War II, Karski studied at Georgetown University and became a professor of European Studies there. One of his favorite students, former President Bill Clinton, wrote a letter about the professor, which was read at the ceremony.
In a fitting tribute, Karski's life-size statute depicts him sitting at a bench playing chess. Karski, an accomplished chess player, died in 2000 at the age of 86 while playing a match against a young Polish diplomat.
In about two weeks, consulate members said, the street signs at 37th St. and Madison Ave. will be changed to read "Jan Karski Corner."
"It was very touching," said Izabela Gorska, a Polish-American teacher from Queens. "I'm very happy that Jan Karski was finally acknowledged in New York City."
Admirer pats hand of Jan Karski statue at its unveiling in front of Polish Consulate Sunday.
ping...
A shame that will haunt Eden, FDR and other Western leaders throughout eternity: that they knew explicitly about the Holocaust, yet did not even publically acknowledge it.
That's complete and utter garbage, Mayor Koch. Karski was a hero, but the US did an enormous amount to rescue the Jews and the Karski report was extremely influential. This is revisionist nonsense.
I’m a day late but I’d still like to say...
Happy Independence Day, Poland!
I'm not sure what your point is. The Allies put the Germans responsible for the Holocaust on public trial -- televised around the world -- for War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, etc.
I wonder how he felt when revisionists began trying to blame the holocaust on his religion.
Ping
Thanks for posting. Talk about a story that needs to be a movie.
The USA was kind of busy preparing for the world’s largest invasion, by way of Normandy France to save ALL of Europe.
” “He tried desperately to save the Jews in Europe, and, unfortunately,
FDR didn’t listen,” said Koch. “
It’s refreshing to hear a Democratic politician that does occassionally
speak the historical truth.
But, that’s not the whole story. Damaging the rail lines to the camps
would have been a very temporary fix because the Germans had a huge
“army” of slave labor to get bombed lines up and running in a couple of
hours or at most a day or so. And trying to take down a rail bridge was
no mean feat until the development of the “earthquake” bombs by the
Brits and controllable bombs used by the Americans in the later stages
of the war in the Pacific.
But...I think one of the major reasons little was done during the war
was mental: FDR, Churchill, Bomber Harris and Spaatz couldn’t wrap
their brains around the concept that slave laborers would be giddy with
joy as bombs rained down on their camps, even killing substantial numbers
of the inmates. (Yet that is what I’ve some work-camp survivor say
had happened while they were in those hell-camps; one of them was
at the V-2 factory at Nordhausen [sp?])
“It was sad because we’re reflecting on the deaths of about 6 million Jews,
and joyous because we’re reflecting on the glory of a hero.”
Well, the fellow sure deserved as much or more respect/publicity
than Oskar Schindler.
But Hollyweird is a fickle beast...and I won’t expect them to do
a good bio-pic on Karski.
More’s the pity.
As for "not listening," FDR immediately set up the War Refugee Board, a top level independent government agency that existed for the sole purpose of rescuing Jews from occupied Europe. Given that the US was then at war with the Nazis, rescuing anybody from behind enemy lines was rather difficult. Nevertheless, the WRB saved tens of thousands of lives despite extremely trying circumstances.
You should know that the decision to focus on defeating the German Army was endorsed by virtually the entire American Jewish community at the time. Koch is being a revisionist.
Jan Karski was one of my professors at Georgetown in the 1970s. He was quite striking and engaging.
Hard to believe, but among his WWII exploits were breaking INTO a concentration camp in order to see firsthand what was going on, and then breaking out again and travelling to London to report.
There’s a statue of him now on the Georgetown campus. God bless his spirit.
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