Karski's reports
Karski's reports were a series of reports attributed to
For the 1942 report attributed to him, considered a cornerstone of his legacy, the attribution to Karski is unconfirmed. No reliable sources exist for the actual content of the information Karski carried with him to the West, and the information contained in the official reports may actually have come from other couriers.[1]
Reports
Karski, who fought as a non-commissioned officer during the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and subsequently escaped from a prisoner-of-war transport, wrote his first report on the situation in Poland in late 1939. Subsequently, he escaped from Poland to France, where he joined the recreated Polish Army, and after coming to the attention of the Polish government-in-exile due to qualities like his photographic memory, he became a courier and an investigator, travelling several times between occupied Poland and France (later, the United Kingdom).[2][3]
His reports contained information about various aspects of the situation in occupied Poland, including topics such as the extent of
Karski wrote several more reports in the following years.[3] His fourth report was also focused on the plight of the Jews.[7]
For the 1942 report attributed to him, considered a cornerstone of his legacy, the attribution to Karski is unconfirmed. No reliable sources exist for the actual content of the information Karski carried with him to the West, and the information contained in the official reports may actually have come from other couriers.[1]
Reception and significance
In 1942 Karski visited London, where he met with Polish and British officials, and other prominent people.[3] A year later he visited the United States.[3] Although information regarding the Holocaust constituted only a small part of the information he collected and delivered, it became one of the most influential parts of his reports.[3] The Polish government used Karski's reports to appeal to the Western Allies to interfere with the German atrocities against the Polish Jews, though by 1943 the appeals had not produced any results, as most Western leaders were not interested in or did not believe such revelations, and the Polish government officials themselves saw Jewish public opinion as unfavorable towards the Polish state.[3][8] The Western Allies' response was indeed lackluster.[9] Nechma Tec wrote that "Karski's reports about the Jewish plight and the messages from the Jewish leaders that inevitably pleaded for help fell on deaf ears".[10] Until the revelations late in the war, many Western politicians, and even some Jewish leaders, remained skeptical of Karski's reports, which were called "atrocity propaganda". Similarly, most newspapers treated Karski's revelations as "a minor story".[11]
In 2010 Claude Lanzmann, who interviewed Karski in 1978 and in 1985 used part of that interview in his film Shoah, released a documentary focused on Karski, titled The Karski Report .[12]
See also
Further reading
- Stanisław Jankowski (2009). Karski: raporty tajnego emisariusza. Rebis. ISBN 978-83-7510-395-3.
References
- ^ ISSN 1895-247X.
An essential part of the Karski story is an account of the 'report' which he brought to the West, the 'Karski report'. However, when we examine archival evidence and follow a chain of events in November 1942, we see that the report is a two-page summary in English which the Polish Government issued on November 24 when it made an official announcement about the Warsaw ghetto deportations. Over the years, historians began to refer to this as the 'Karski report', but on the day it was issued, Karski had not yet arrived in London. The materials which Karski took with him from Warsaw were passed to a Polish agent in Paris on October 4th who then placed them on a separate route to London where we think they arrived just before November 14th. We know which documents the 'Karski report' was based on so if these were among the materials which arrived by November 14th and if that was the 'post' which Karski delivered to Paris, then it would be correct to say that these documents were carried through occupied Europe by Karski. But there is no reliable list of the contents of this 'post' and since there were a number of couriers carrying materials which were duplicated in order to increase their chances of reaching London, it is possible that the documents on which the 'Karski report' was based were brought to London by a courier other than Karski.
- ^ "Jan Karski. Humanity's hero | The story of Poland war-time emissary". www.karski.muzhp.pl. Retrieved 17 June 2019.
- ^ ISSN 8756-6583.
- ^ (in Polish) Andrzej Żbikowski, Jan Karski – bohater polskiego podziemia, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringebluma w WarszawieStudium Europy Wschodniej, Uniwersytet Warszawski
- ^ JSTOR 4467201.
- ISBN 978-1-107-01426-8.
- ISBN 978-1-349-21789-2.
- ISBN 978-0-8108-7485-5.
- ISBN 978-0-19-933945-7.
- ^ Tec, Nechma. "A Glimmer of Light" (PDF). Yad Vashem: Shoah Resource Center.
- ^ The Journal of Intergroup Relations. National Association of Human Rights Workers. 1995. p. 56.
- ISSN 1270-9050.
External links
- Karski's raports, scanned, on the pages of the Museum of Polish History
- Report on the attacks on the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw scanned and transcript on "The National Archives (UK)"