page_title: Jan Karski
section_title: Life in the United States
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Karski / Life in the United States
caption_attribution_description: English: Jan Karski with General Colin Powell at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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: After the war ended, Karski remained in the United States in Washington, DC. He began graduate studies at Georgetown University, receiving a PhD from the institution in 1952. In 1954, Karski became a naturalized citizen of the United States. 
  He taught at Georgetown University for 40 years in the areas of East European affairs, comparative government and international affairs. Among his students was Bill Clinton (Class of 1968). In 1985, he published the academic study The Great Powers and Poland, based on research during a Fulbright fellowship in 1974 to his native Poland.
  Karski's 1942 report on the Holocaust and the London Polish government's appeal to the United Nations were briefly recounted by Walter Laqueur in his history The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's Final Solution (1980). 
  Karski did not speak publicly about his wartime mission until 1981, when he was invited by activist Elie Wiesel as a keynote speaker at the International Liberators Conference in Washington, DC. 
  French film-maker Claude Lanzmann had interviewed him at length in 1978, as part of his preparation for his documentary Shoah,, but it was not released until 1985. Lanzmann had asked participants not to make other public statements during that time, but Karski got a release for the conference. The 9-hour film included a total of 40 minutes of testimony by Karski. This section was from the first of two days when Lanzmann had interviewed Karski. It ends with Karski saying that he made his report to leaders. 
  Lanzman later said that, on the second day of interviews, Karski recounted in precise detail his meetings with Roosevelt and other high American officials. Lanzman said that the tone and style of Karski's second interview was so different, and the interview so long, that it did not fit his vision for the film and he did not use it. 
  Unhappy with how he was presented in the film, Karski published an article,  book, Shoah, a Biased Vision of the Holocaust (1987), in the French journal Kultura. He argued for another documentary to include his missing testimony and also to show more of the help given to Jews by many Poles (some are now recognized by Israel as the Polish Righteous among the Nations). (The book was published in English, French and Polish.) 
  Following the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, Karski's wartime role was officially acknowledged by the new government. He was awarded 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).
  In 1994, E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski published a biography, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. They noted that Karski had urged production of another documentary to correct what he thought was the bias in Lanzmann's Shoah.
  During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995, Karski discussed the Allies' failure to rescue most of the Jews 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.
  The documentary film My Mission (1997), directed by Waldemar Piasecki and Michal Fajbusiewicz, presented the full details of Karski's war mission. In 1999, Piasecki published Tajne Panstwo ("Secret State", edited and adapted from Karski's wartime book), which became a bestseller. In the same year, the Museum of Lodz City opened "Jan Karski's Room", devoted to the most valuable memorabilia, documents and decorations, and  organized under Karski's supervision.
caption: Jan Karski with General Colin Powell at the 1993 opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2018:02:25 13:51:21", "Image ExifOffset": "156", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5437", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "444", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "424"}