The WW II hero - who notified the allies of the Holocaust being carried out in Poland and central Europe by the German Nazis - was described as the symbol of responsibility for others and a hero of three nations – Polish, Israeli and American, whose life and moral stand need to be promoted.
The senators and invited guests, who included the US Ambassador Lee Feinstein and former Polish foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld, were briefed on the programme of events commemorating Jan Karski’s birth centenary in 2014, which is sponsored by the Museum of Polish History.
Entitled ‘Jan Karski – a Mission Unfulfilled’, it includes an international conference on Karski’s activities, lectures and educational workshops.
A monument to Jan Karski is to be erected in Warsaw and one of the streets is to be named after him.
A Polish premiere of an animated film ‘Messenger from Hell’, co-produced by the Walt Disney Company, is scheduled for this year. Planes are also under way to establish the Jan Karski Grant and the Jan Karski Chair at Georgetown University in Washington, where he worked as a professor for forty years.
The senators were also briefed on the activities of the Jan Karski US Centennial Campaign in the United States. Its motion to the White House to bestow on Jan Karski the Presidential Medal of Freedom won the support of 68 members of US Congress and 11 US senators.
During World War Two, as a member of anti-Nazi resistance, Jan Karski took part in courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish Government-in-Exile, then based in France. During one such mission, in July 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia, tortured and transported to a hospital in Nowy Sącz, from where he was rescued by Polish resistance.
He soon resumed active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Home Army’s High Command, and in the summer of 1942 he was assigned to perform a secret mission to London on behalf of the Polish Government’s Delegate in Poland and several political parties. In order to gather evidence on the plight of Polish Jews, he was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto.
He met several Allied leaders, including Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, and US president Franklin Roosevelt, but failed to secure support for Polish Jews.
After the war, Karski settled in the United States, remaining an advocate of Holocaust memory until his death in 2000, aged 86.
His honours include Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of the White Eagle, and the Righteous among the Nations medal from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. (mk/pg)