Jan Karski meets Roosevelt

On 28 July 1943 at the White House, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt received the 29-year-old Jan Karski, a courier of the Polish Underground State. He was brought by the Polish ambassador in Washington, Jan Ciechanowski. The conversation, planned for about twenty minutes, lasted according to Karski’s notes about an hour and a quarter. Karski spoke of German terror in occupied Poland, of the building of the underground state and of what he had seen with his own eyes: of the Warsaw ghetto and of the camp through which Jews were sent to their deaths. He was one of the first eyewitnesses of the Holocaust to speak about it directly to the leader of one of the great powers of the coalition.

The meeting was the last and most important stage of the mission that Karski had begun in Warsaw in the summer of 1942. The President listened attentively and with interest. He made, however, no promise of help for the murdered Jews. He replied that the most effective help would be victory over Germany as soon as possible.

Courier of the underground

Jan Kozielewski, who used the pseudonym “Witold” in the conspiracy and appeared in the West as Jan Karski, was before the war a young official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In September 1939 he fell into Soviet captivity, escaped the fate of the officers later murdered at Katyn and made his way to Warsaw. From the beginning of 1940 he travelled as a courier to the Polish government in France. In June 1940, on his way through Slovakia, he fell into the hands of the Gestapo. Tortured, he tried to take his own life, and the underground freed him from a hospital in Nowy Sącz.

In the summer of 1942 the Government Delegate for Poland, Cyryl Ratajski, appointed him to a further mission to London. Karski was to convey to the government of Gen. Władysław Sikorski and to the Allies the positions of the underground’s political parties and information on the situation in the country. At the same time the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto was under way, in which the Germans took hundreds of thousands of people to the gas chambers of Treblinka. The leaders of the Jewish underground asked that the courier take their message as well, and that he first see for himself what was happening.

The ghetto and Izbica

In Warsaw Karski met Leon Feiner of the Bund and a representative of the Zionists. He heard from them that the Germans intended to murder all the Jews. They gave him demands he was to present in London, among them that the Allies respond with reprisals, for example by bombing targets in Germany, and drop leaflets over the Reich warning the Germans of punishment. Feiner and his companion twice led him into the Warsaw ghetto. Karski remembered exhausted, sick and begging people and a feverish haste in which he sensed the nearness of death.

Next, disguised as a guard, he entered a transit camp in the Lublin area. He saw thousands of Jews being pushed into goods wagons. He himself believed that he had been in the Bełżec extermination camp, and described the place so in a book published in 1944. Historians later established that it was the Izbica transit ghetto, from which transports went to Bełżec and Sobibór. Karski appeared there in the uniform of a Ukrainian guard. The exact dates of his visits are not certain; according to the commemorative plaque in Izbica he was there in early October 1942.

Across Europe to London

In the autumn of 1942 Karski left Warsaw as a French worker. He travelled by rail through Berlin and Brussels to Paris. There he handed a microfilm with documents, hidden in a key, to the underground activist Aleksander Kawałkowski (PL), who sent it to London. Once developed, the microfilm contained more than 30 pages of typescript. The onward journey led through Perpignan to Barcelona and Madrid, and from there, with the help of Allied intelligence services, to Gibraltar and by aeroplane to Britain. He reached London in the second half of November. The British held him for several days, until Sikorski demanded his release.

Together with materials from the Jewish department of the Home Army Headquarters and with the study “The Liquidation of Jewish Warsaw”, prepared by the Oneg Shabbat team, Karski’s account became the basis of a report on the situation of the Jews in occupied Poland. On 25 November Karski presented his information to the British, and the next day the deputy foreign secretary, Richard Law, looked through the documents. On 2 December he met the Jewish members of the Polish National Council, Szmul Zygielbojm of the Bund and Ignacy Schwarzbart. Around 9 December he spoke about the fate of the Jews with President Władysław Raczkiewicz. His account served Edward Raczyński in drafting the note of 10 December 1942 to the governments of the United Nations, and a week later the Allies issued a joint declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews.

Over several months in Britain Karski spoke with Conservative and Labour politicians, with the minister responsible for cooperation with the resistance movement, Lord Selborne, with writers, among them Herbert George Wells, and with journalists. He met the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, according to some studies, only in February 1943. Eden promised to pass the information to the war cabinet. Karski was not admitted to the prime minister, Winston Churchill. Everywhere he heard expressions of sympathy, but the demands of the Jewish underground were not accepted. In April 1943, on the day the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto broke out, the Bermuda Conference began, and it produced no decisions on rescue. On 12 May Zygielbojm took his own life in London in protest at the world’s indifference.

In America

In early June 1943 Karski received an American diplomatic visa, and in the middle of the month he sailed to New York. He was received by Ambassador Ciechanowski, with whom Karski stayed in Washington. A few weeks after his arrival, on 4 July, General Sikorski was killed in an aircraft crash near Gibraltar.

The embassy prepared a list of several dozen influential people with whom the courier was to speak. On it were, among others, the Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the Secretary of War Henry Stimson (PL), the head of the OSS intelligence service William Donovan, the Archbishop of Chicago Samuel Stritch (PL), and the Jewish leaders Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann (PL). Best known became the conversation with the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, a friend of the President and a Jew. After listening to the account, Frankfurter said that he was unable to believe it. When Ciechanowski protested, the justice explained that he was not accusing Karski of lying – simply that his mind and heart were unable to accept it.

At the White House

Ciechanowski prepared the courier carefully. He told him to speak precisely and exaggerate nothing. He also indicated topics for discussion: the Poles’ attitude to the President, the activity of communist agents, the reach and authority of the underground authorities, communication with the government, preparations for an uprising, German terror and Polish losses, and the extermination of the Jews. The same day Roosevelt was to give a radio address in which he discussed, among other things, the overthrow of Mussolini three days earlier.

According to Karski’s notes the conversation took place in the private part of the White House. The courier began by thanking him: for those fighting in the Homeland it was of enormous importance that the President took an interest in them and wanted to be informed. Then he spoke about the organisation of the underground, communication with London, terror and executions. According to Karski’s account, what surprised him most was that Poland, alone among the occupied countries, had not produced its Quisling, that is a collaborationist government. The conversation also turned to post-war borders. The President said that Poland’s borders would change in the east and in the west, that in the east the changes would be small and that Stalin must be helped to “save face”, while Poland would receive valuable lands in the west in exchange.

On the Jews Karski said the same as in London: about the ghetto, about Izbica, about the plan to murder an entire people and about the requests of the Jewish leaders. Roosevelt replied, as the courier recorded: “We shall settle accounts with the Germans after the war for everything they have done.” He added that the greatest real help would be defeating Hitler as quickly as possible. According to some studies Karski also presented concrete proposals: warning Germany of responsibility, bombing the railway lines leading to the extermination camps, supplying arms and documents to the resistance and to fleeing Jews. Some authors stress that the President did not ask about the Jews at all. Karski himself wrote later that his listeners, even the most influential, were unable to believe the scale of the crime. At the end Roosevelt is said to have remarked that he was already half an hour late for his next meeting.

The date of the meeting, 28 July 1943, is confirmed by Karski’s notes and by most studies. Some publications, including biographical pages devoted to the courier, give other July dates (5 or 18 July).

What came next

The visit to the White House did not change American policy and brought no particular action to rescue Jews. The War Refugee Board, which undertook real rescue operations, was established by Roosevelt only in January 1944. Karski came to a conclusion that he repeated for the rest of his life: that the Jewish tragedy and efforts to counter it “did not fit into Allied strategy”, which was aimed at winning the war as quickly as possible and at not irritating the Soviet Union.

In September 1943 Karski was back in London. He asked to be assigned to the Polish Armed Forces in the West, but the government did not agree. In February 1944 the government sent him once more to the United States, this time on a propaganda mission. Karski gave lectures, wrote articles and appeared on the radio, and in November 1944 he published in Boston the book “Story of a Secret State” (Polish edition “Tajne państwo” (PL)). In it he described the underground state and what he had seen in the ghetto and in the camp. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

After the war Karski remained in the United States, taught at Georgetown University and for more than thirty years kept silent about his mission. He broke his silence in 1978 in an interview for Claude Lanzmann. Excerpts from the conversation went into the 1985 film Shoah (PL), and Karski’s testimony became one of the most important proofs that Western leaders knew of the Holocaust before it ended. Asked about this years later, he replied that no one had done enough.