Enthusiastic student shows off "Story"
By Abby Swope
Staff and students at Canton Central Catholic High School would like to thank the Jan Karski Educational Foundation for donating Jan Karski’s book, Story of a Secret State, to the school’s Holocaust Literature class, making it one of the first high schools in the United States to adopt the new US edition of his 1944 book into its classroom curriculum. Karski is a great example of someone who chose to do extraordinary things because it was the right thing to do. Central Catholic is proud to read Karski’s book while studying the Righteous Among Nations. Hopefully the young people reading this book will take away from it the courage to do the right thing when faced with adversity.
Jan Karski grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Lodz, Poland. For his time period, Jan lived a normal childhood, in which his parents instilled the importance of God, honor; and homeland into all eight of their children. The Kozielewski family endured much but not without the support of each other and they even managed to send him to University. Karski, a very ambitious young man, went to the University of Lwow and graduated with a degree in Law and Diplomacy in 1935. A year after graduation, young Jan accepted a job offer as a civil servant for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Young Karski performed a plethora of different jobs such as visiting diplomatic posts in Germany, Switzerland, and Great Britain.
Karski’s final mission was to sneak into the Warsaw ghetto and Izibca camp, a Nazi transit camp for an eyewitness account of the inhumane acts the Nazis were preforming against the Jewish People. “This was not the world. This was not humanity. This was some hell.” Jan Karski said this 36 years later in an attempt to describe what he had seen in the Warsaw ghetto. Karski saw starvation and utter despair accepted as a daily part of life in the ghetto and transit camp. Karski also witnessed atrocities such as young Nazi soldiers hunting down 'Jewish children for sport and people being herded into train cars to their deaths. By the time Jan arrived at the Warsaw ghetto, nearly 300,000 people had already been deported to the Treblinka death camp. Not without many struggles and lies did Karski get to London by the end of November 1942 to inform the Polish Government-in-exile what he had seen.
After informing the British Foreign Secretary of his findings, he was sent to talk with the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Jan Karski pleaded to our nation’s leader and others for action against the Nazi regime but it seemed as if his words were falling on deaf ears. When the world eventually opened their eyes to the horrors of the Nazi regime, it was too late to save so many lives. Unable to return to Poland, Karski made a new life for himself in America. Karski began to work non-stop on a book called Story of a Secret State; the book became an overnight sensation. Then the book quickly became a bestseller and was translated into other languages.
Karski received his PhD. from Georgetown University in 1952. Then Karski was asked join the faculty of the School of Foreign Services at Georgetown University, a job he graciously accepted. He taught at Georgetown University for 40 years. In 1965 Karski married the love of his life, Pola Nirenska. For 30 years, Jan Karski stepped back and lived his life in solitude, until Claude Lanzmann, a French filmmaker, came along and convinced Jan to do an interview for his documentary on the Holocaust; Jan did an eight-hour interview with Lanzmann. Over his lifetime, Jan Karski has received numerous awards: the White Eagle and Virtuti Miliari medals, and an honorary citizenship of Israel. He was awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012.
After all Jan Karski has done for the world, he believed to the day he died, that he did not fulfill his wartime mission. “And thus I myself became a Jew. And just as my wife’s entire family was wiped out in the ghettos of Poland, in its concentration camps and crematoria so have all the Jews who were slaughtered become my family. But I am a Christian Jew. . . I am a practicing Catholic... My faith tells me the second original sin had been committed by humanity. This sin will haunt humanity to the end of time. And I want it to be so.” Jan Karski said this in 1981 at a meeting of American military officers who liberated the concentration camps.
BIO: Abby Swope is a senior at Canton Central Catholic High School in Canton, Ohio.
