Starting in 1940, Karski reported to the Polish, British, and U.S. Disguised as a guard, he saw thousands of Jews being crammed into cattle cars. Karski also went to Izbica, a transit ghetto for Jews being sent to the Belzec. Then my guide said: “We might be able to arrange your visit to a death camp. A voice: “Aaa!.” It was not part of this world. One of them took the gun from his pocket and started shooting. Two boys from Hitlerjugend were walking around, laughing joyfully. We were walking the streets and my guide kept repeating: “Look at it, remember, remember.” And I did remember. I asked the guide: what is he doing? The guide whispered: “He’s just dying.” I remember degradation, starvation and dead bodies lying on the street. Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto twice in 1942 by the Jewish underground to witness the horrendous conditions and report to the outside world. He was smuggled out of the infirmary and returned to his mission of smuggling information out of Poland to the Polish Government in Exile, first in France and later in England. He attempted suicide after being tortured and was transported to a hospital in Nowy S?cz. During a mission in July 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo in the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. As a member of the Polish underground resistance movement in World War II, Karski repeatedly crossed enemy lines to act as a courier between his occupied nation and the West. Two months later he escaped and returned to occupied Poland, joining the Underground Polish Army. He received a master’s degree in Law and Diplomatic Science at the University of Lwow in 1935 and then served in various diplomatic posts in Germany, Switzerland, and Great Britain between 19.Īt the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he became a POW of the Red Army. He was born on April 24, 1914, in Lodz, Poland, the youngest of eight children in a Roman Catholic family. Jan Karski was a Polish World War II resistance movement fighter and later a university professor.

Silence of the Wolves by Hannah Pole