Context
I recently saw a one act play about Jan Karski, a recipient of Yad Vashem’s designation as “Righteous Among the Nations.” After World War II, Karski spoke about the moral responsibility and failure of the world to respond adequately to genocide. He felt that it was a Christian duty to act in the face of evil.
In an interview that I saw on YouTube, he discussed a meeting he had with Franklin Roosevelt. Instead of Roosevelt focusing on the immediate horrors of the Jewish ghettos and the concentration camps, FDR highlighted the need to “win the war.” Karski responded to FDR that all the Jews will be killed by the time you win the war. Instead, there was a necessity to take immediate remedial action, including warnings to perpetrators of evil that they would be punished for their crimes.
It is my hope that the authors of the play, Clark Young and David Goldman, allow us to perform the play again in Sarasota before it goes on a nationwide tour.
The Courage of Jan Karski
Jan Karski stands as one of the most courageous witnesses of the Holocaust—a man who risked his life to reveal the truth of Nazi atrocities to the Western world. A devout Polish Catholic with deep empathy for Jews and a profound sense of moral duty, Karski has sometimes been described as embodying the spirit of a “Christian Jew”: a Christian who so fully identified with the suffering of the Jewish people that he made their fate his personal mission. His story is one of extraordinary bravery, tragic frustration, and enduring moral testimony. The President of Georgetown University labeled Karski “a Christian Jew” for his lifetime devotion to publicizing the indifference of Christians to the horrors of the holocaust.
Born Jan Kozielewski in 1914 in Łódź, Poland, Karski grew up in a multicultural environment where Jews formed a significant part of the population. This early exposure fostered a lifelong respect for Jewish neighbors and a sensitivity to injustice. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Karski joined the Polish underground resistance. His linguistic skills, photographic memory, and composure under pressure made him an ideal courier, entrusted with carrying secret reports between occupied Poland and the Polish government-in-exile in London.
In 1942, Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto and members of the Polish underground implored Karski to see firsthand the horrors unfolding so he could bear witness to the world. Disguised as a Ukrainian guard, he was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto. What he saw there haunted him forever: skeletal children begging in the streets, bodies lying unattended, and a population slowly dying from starvation, disease, and systematic cruelty. Determined to gather irrefutable evidence, he also entered a Nazi transit camp—often identified as Izbica—where Jews were being herded toward extermination centers. He watched as terrified families were beaten, crammed into railcars, and sent to their death. These experiences transformed his mission from political courier to moral messenger.
Karski then undertook a perilous journey across occupied Europe to deliver his eyewitness account to Allied leaders. In London, he briefed British officials, journalists, and Jewish representatives. He later traveled to the United States, where he met prominent figures including Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and, in July 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Karski described in precise detail the machinery of genocide: ghettos designed for slow death, deportations to killing centers, and the systematic annihilation of European Jewry.
His meeting with Justice Frankfurter became emblematic of the disbelief he encountered. After listening carefully, Frankfurter reportedly said, “I do not believe you.” When an aide protested that Karski was telling the truth, Frankfurter clarified, “I did not say he is lying. I said I do not believe him.” The scale of the atrocity defied comprehension even among sympathetic listeners.
Karski’s audience with Roosevelt was courteous but similarly frustrating. The president asked about conditions in Poland and the state of the resistance but did not press for details about the Jews or commit to specific rescue actions. Karski left with the painful realization that geopolitical priorities—winning the war, maintaining alliances, managing public opinion—overshadowed the urgency of Jewish suffering.
For the rest of his life, Karski lamented that he had failed to move Western leaders to stronger, more public action. He believed that louder condemnation, open acknowledgment of the extermination, and concrete rescue efforts might have saved lives or at least affirmed the moral standing of the Allied cause. His sense of failure was not rooted in self-reproach for lack of effort—he had risked torture and execution—but in anguish that the world did not respond with the force he believed the moment demanded.
After the war, Karski settled in the United States and became a professor at Georgetown University, teaching generations about diplomacy, ethics, and the responsibilities of witnesses. For decades, he spoke sparingly about his wartime mission, but later in life he emerged as a powerful voice of remembrance. Honored by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he came to symbolize the moral imperative to confront evil.
Jan Karski’s legacy endures as a challenge to complacency. He reminds us that seeing the truth is not enough; it must be believed, spoken, and acted upon. In a century marked by silence and indifference, Karski’s life testifies to the courage of one man who tried—against overwhelming odds—to awaken the conscience of the world.
