page_title: Jan Karski
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Karski
caption_attribution_description: Otwarcie Interaktywnego gabinetu prof. Jana Karskiego w Rudzie Śląskiej, 10.11.2011.
context_page_description: Jan Karski was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940-1943 to the Polish Government-in-Exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He was reporting about the state of Poland, in which there were many competing factions in the resistance, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.
  After emigration to the United States after the war, Karski completed a doctorate and taught for decades at Georgetown University in international relations and Polish history. He lived in Washington, DC to the end of his life. He did not speak publicly about his mission during the war until 1981, when he was invited as a speaker to a conference on the liberation of the camps. Karski was featured in Claude Lanzmann's 9-hour Shoah, about the Holocaust and based on numerous oral interviews with Jewish and Polish survivors.
context_section_description: Jan Karski (24 June 1914 – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940-1943 to the Polish Government-in-Exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He was reporting about the state of Poland, in which there were many competing factions in the resistance, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.
  After emigration to the United States after the war, Karski completed a doctorate and taught for decades at Georgetown University in international relations and Polish history. He lived in Washington, DC to the end of his life. He did not speak publicly about his mission during the war until 1981, when he was invited as a speaker to a conference on the liberation of the camps. Karski was featured in Claude Lanzmann's 9-hour Shoah (1985), about the Holocaust and based on numerous oral interviews with Jewish and Polish survivors. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Karski was awarded high honors by the new Polish government, as well as being honored in the US and European nations for his wartime role. In 2010 Lanzmann released a short documentary, The Karski Report, which contained more about Karski's meetings with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other American leaders in 1943.
caption: Jan Karski photo portrait
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