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Colleen Yerger, Pearce Quesenberry, and Tori West, students at Padua Academy High School in Wilmington, Delaware, have selected the legacy of Jan Karski as the topic for their National History Day Project. An annual academic competition, National History Day encourages elementary and secondary students from across the United States to conduct extended research projects that require intensive primary and secondary research. Young scholars submit work at the regional level and, if selected, progress to the state and national levels of competition. Each June, winners from each state convene in College Park, Maryland for the national competition. This year’s national competition will be held from June 15-19, 2014. Students are able to submit their research in the form of a research paper, documentary, exhibit, performance, or web site. Ms. Yerger, Ms. Quesenberry, and Ms. West are currently researching and preparing an exhibit and short paper on the work of Jan Karski for the competition.

Ms. Yerger, Ms. Quesenberry, and Ms. West got the idea of focusing on Jan Karski from their history teacher, Dan Mahler. The students determined that Karski’s work for the Polish Underground and his eyewitness exposure to the Holocaust in occupied Poland presented a well-suited topic, representative of the 2014 National History Day theme, “Rights and Responsibilities.” The students fell in love with Karski and his heroic mission after watching several of Karski’s interviews. 

During their research, the students concluded that the most impactful moment of Karski’s career was when he entered the Warsaw Ghetto and witnessed suffering first hand, thereafter resolving to get aid from other nations. While heartbreaking that Karski’s plea for help went unanswered, his sense of moral conviction and duty is what empowered the students to select Karski as the research topic for their project. The students noted that Karski is a “great fit” for the National History Day theme of “Rights and Responsibilities.”  “Jan Karski took on the responsibility to save the Jewish people and put a stop to the Holocaust," Ms. Yerger responded via email as to why Karski was so inspiring. "He unselfishly risked his life for the justice of other’s human rights,” she wrote.

Through their research, the students were led to the Jan Karski Educational Foundation and reached out to Foundation President Wanda Urbanska. The students posed a series of questions to Ms. Urbanska via email. Drawing a distinction between Karski’s self-perception of his work and that of the modern world, the students quoted Urbanska as saying that while Karski, sadly, “could only see failure” in his work, the world today inherits his legacy of “broader courage -- of speaking truth to power; of putting one’s life on the line for what is right.”

This is witnessed in the Polish Parliament’s decision to name 2014, the centennial of Karski’s birth, the Year of Karski. The poignance and significance of Ms. Yerger, Ms. Quesenberry, and Ms. West’s National History Day project is only augmented in light of this celebration. In discussing how they, personally, witness Karski’s legacy in the world today, the students noted that they experience Karski’s courage and selflessness in “those who stand up for others, even when they know that doing this could cause themselves harm.”

Calling on their peers and our society to “take action and stand up against things we don’t believe to be right,” the students’ research and resulting National History Day exhibit embodies the spirit of the Year of Karski in its embrace of Karski’s compassionate empathy. Through their research into the life and lessons of Jan Karski and the preparation of their National History Day exhibit, Ms. Yerger, Ms. Quesenberry, and Ms. West have carried forward Karski’s model of moral duty and engagement.

To enter the essay contest or for more information, visit National History Day.

Story by Frances Cayton, a senior at St. Mary's School in Raleigh, who is an intern at the Jan Karski Educational Foundation.