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Vilnius hosts tribute to WWII courier Karski

PR dla Zagranicy
Nick Hodge 17.11.2014 10:30
An exhibition on the life of the Polish wartime hero Jan Karski is on at the State Jewish Museum in Vilnius.

Exhibition
Exhibition poster, detail.

Born 100 years ago, Karski took part in courier missions to France and Britain with dispatches from the Polish underground.

In order to gather evidence on the plight of Jews, he was smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto.

Karski met several Allied leaders, including Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, and US president Franklin Roosevelt, but he failed to inspire an attempt to intervene directly on behalf of Europe's Jews.

The exhibition in Vilnius is part of the Days of Karski organized in Lithuania to mark the Karski Centenary Year and the International Day of Tolerance which is observed on 14 November.

During the opening ceremony, Lena Dabkowski-Cichocka of the Warsaw-based Museum of Polish History described Jan Karski as ‘the symbol of tolerance, in all its aspects’.

After the war, Jan Karski settled in the United States and became a professor at Georgetown University in Washington. He remained an advocate of Holocaust memory until his death in 2000, aged 86. (mk)

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