Jan Karski, 1944
Posted on 04/19/2009 2:24:08 PM PDT by lizol
Manhattan corner named for Holocaust hero
Associated Press 2009-04-17 05:28 AM
A Manhattan street corner has been named after a Polish World War II hero who brought early eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West.
Madison Avenue at 37th Street was designated Jan Karski Corner on Thursday. A statue of him stands there, in front of the Polish Consulate.
When he died nine years ago in Washington, Karski was a history professor at Georgetown University. Bill Clinton had been one of his students.
During the war, Karski was a clandestine Polish government diplomat in exile in London.
On a secret mission to Nazi-occupied Poland, the Roman Catholic Karski met with leaders of the Jewish underground. They told him about what they called "Hitler's war against the Polish Jews."
Jan Karski, 1944
A book was published about his exploits titled:
“Karski- How One Man Tried To Stop the Holocaust”
by E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright 1994
An excellent book about a man of uncommon valor. God rest his soul.
Thanks, lizaol.
ping
Thanks. Karski is an oft-forgotten hero.
Let us not forget what this man was to the rulers of Communist Poland, whom we recognized in the betrayal of Yalta. He was “a running dog of imperialism”, a “CIA lackey”, etc, etc, to the Americans we still revere in this country, like, oh, Pete Seeger,John Steinbeck (on another thread), many others. We are slow in making connections in this country. Do not forget as you listen to the characterizations of their enemies by the current administration.
Thanks for the title. I’ll definately check it out.
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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After the war Karski was unable to return to communist-ruled Poland and made his home in the United States and began his studies at Georgetown University, where he received a PhD in 1952[3]. He taught at Georgetown for 40 years in the areas of East European affairs, comparative government and international affairs, rising to become one of the most celebrated and notable members of its faculty. In 1954, he became a citizen of the United States. In 1985, he published the academic study The Great Powers and Poland.
His attempts at stopping the Holocaust were forgotten. It was not until 1985 that Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah re-discovered Karski's wartime service. According to the book of Wood and Jankowski Karski has written an article on the film Shoah -being published in English, French and Polish- where he asked Lanzmann to produce another documentary showing what Karski had to tell about his task towards "the West", though praising the quality of Lanzmann's Shoah despite of that omission. In 1994, E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski published Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. After the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, Karski's wartime role was officially acknowledged there. He received the Order of the White Eagle (the highest Polish civil decoration) and the Order Virtuti Militari (the highest military decoration awarded for bravery in combat). He was married in 1965 to Pola Nirenska, a Polish Jew whose family perished in the Holocaust. She committed suicide in 1992. Karski died in Washington, D.C. in 2000. They had no children.
During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995 Karski said about the failure of most of the Jews' rescue from mass murder:
| “ | It was easy for the Nazis to kill Jews, because they did it. The allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it. The Jews were abandoned by all governments, church hierarchies and societies, but thousands of Jews survived because thousands of individuals in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland helped to save Jews. Now, every government and church says, "We tried to help the Jews," because they are ashamed, they want to keep their reputations. They didn't help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough. [4] |
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