Resistance (32 page)

Karski believed that for the Jewish people, focusing exclusively on their wartime destruction would develop into a psychic wound that would never heal. He identified with Jewish suffering and with their apprehension that with time the Holocaust would become one of those forgotten historical events, lost among so many other human tragedies. He therefore understood Jewish fears of the Holocaust becoming trivialized and the resulting single-minded focus on Jewish destruction. Nevertheless, he felt that this emphasis on Jewish annihilation, while understandable, was ultimately counterproductive. First, because historically it was untrue; many people opposed Jewish annihilation. Second, because it perpetuated the notion that anti-Semitism was universal.

Karski's humanism extended to other oppressed groups and individuals as well. His identification with the downtrodden grew out of his moral convictions and having witnessed the suffering of various groups. Still, it was the Jewish annihilation that preoccupied him. His first report for the Polish government-in-exile, then in France, written in 1940, was filled with vivid examples of helplessness and humiliation. Karski reported:

One time I was at the Gestapo to obtain a pass of some sort. A Jewish woman came in, a member of the educated class, very frightened. She was expecting a child. She was requesting a pass for herself or for her doctor to be on the street after 8:00 pm should it be necessary to begin delivery then.

The female secretary, a Volksdeutsche, responded, “You don't need a pass. We are not going to facilitate the birth of a Jew. Dogs are dying from hunger and misery, and still you want to give birth to Jews?
Heraus! Heraus!
[Get out of here!]”
²³

In another part of this same report, Karski wrote:

I was in the Kercelak (a kiosk stand in Warsaw). A frozen Jew is the proprietor. A German soldier comes by. He takes socks, combs, soap—wants to walk off without paying. The Jew demands money. The soldier pays no attention. The old man raises his voice; his frightened neighbors hold him back and calm him; they are afraid for him. The old man shouts, or rather howls: “What will he do to
me? What will he do to me? He can only kill me. Let him kill me. Let him kill me. Enough of all this! I can't go on any more.”

The German walked away; he didn't pay. As he was leaving, he muttered, “
Verfluchte Juden
. [Damned Jews].”
²⁴

Karski was also sensitive to and identified with the dangerous and life-threatening conditions of low-ranking underground workers. In his book,
Story of a Secret State
, his reports are full of compassion. “Pitiful were the young girls who distributed the underground press. It was a thankless job—this was a simple mechanical task—men did not want it; men insisted on playing more important roles. The death rate among these girls was very high.”
²⁵
Couriers had a slightly higher status than those who distributed illegal literature. As we have seen, most were women. Karski was keenly aware of the special dangers that female couriers faced. A courier's job, he noted, required that many people “knew every detail of her life—and in clandestine work that was bad. . . . They were overloaded with work and doomed from the start.”
²⁶

Late in 1943, Karski's position in the Polish underground changed drastically. On the way to Poland, he stopped in London and was told that Germans were aware of his trip to the United States and were issuing broadcasts that Karski was a Bolshevik agent paid by American Jews to slander the Third Reich by spreading lies. The Polish prime minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk determined that Karski's return to Poland would be too risky. “I was marked by the scars on my wrists. Actually, the Polish government did not know what to do with me. I knew too many secrets.”
²⁷

Karski wound up working in Washington on the Polish Embassy staff. He remembered those years as the busiest of his life. He delivered some two hundred lectures, and in 1944 wrote
Story of a Secret State
. “In most of the lectures, interviews, articles, and in my book, I informed the public about what was happening to the Jews in Poland.”
²⁸
Karski was continuously frustrated by the Allies' refusal to do anything about the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people. The end of the war proved how right he had been, and, perhaps in a gesture of defiance and rage, Karski stopped talking about the Holocaust altogether.

The United States became Karski's permanent home. By 1952 he had earned a Ph.D. at Georgetown University, where he stayed on as a professor, teaching courses on Eastern Europe, government, and international affairs. Soon surrounded by a circle of devoted students, Karski became an admired figure on the Georgetown Campus. In 1962, he married Pola Nirenska, a distinguished dancer and choreographer, and a Polish Jew.

FIGURE 6.2
Jan Karski at Georgetown University in 1982. The same year, Karski was honored by Yad Vashem and designated as one of the Righteous among the Nations for his work as a resistance fighter. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Carol Harrison)

He revisited his past only at the insistent urgings of Claude Lanzmann, the director of the film
Shoah
. An admirer of Lanzmann's talents, Karski regretted that the film did not include the story of Christians who had risked their lives to save Jews. He thought there should be a special film focusing exclusively on the rescue of Jews by Christians, which he believed was necessary for those generations that had not witnessed the Holocaust, Jew and Gentile alike, “in order not to lose their faith in mankind.”
²⁹

Karski speculated that of the Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe, an estimated half a million had received some help from non-Jews. The rescuers came from every quarter—nuns, peasants, workers, and so on. “The organized structures fell short of
expectations, but not the ordinary people. And there were perhaps millions of such individuals. In this lies a hidden source of optimism, and this optimism should be passed on to those generations for whom the Holocaust is not more than a page from a history textbook.”
³⁰

When asked to comment about the postwar reaction to the Holocaust, Karski's consistent answer was that while he read about how Western leaders—“statesmen and generals, church hierarchies, civic leaders” –claimed that they had no knowledge about the Nazi genocide, they knew. “According to them, the murder of six million Jews was a well-guarded secret. This version of wartime events persists in many quarters even today. This version is no more than a myth. They knew.”
³¹
In Karski's estimation,

Anybody who wanted to know about German crimes against the Jews could have known, and not only through me. There were many other sources. But this truth could not get through. This was not only due to ill will. The Holocaust, this systematic extermination of an entire nation, happened for the first time in the history of mankind. People were not prepared for such a truth. And that is why these truths were rejected, even subconsciously. The most trustworthy witnesses were rejected. There are things which minds and hearts refuse to accept.
³²

Jan Karski's death in 2000 deprived the world of a humanitarian whose courage and selfless dedication gave hope to many.
³³
He proved that Christian and Jewish passivity during the Holocaust was a myth. In most wartime settings—ghettos, forests, concentration camps—conditions were not conducive to resistance, and yet, in myriad shapes and guises, both Jews and Christians found the strength to stand up to German oppression. They found a way to cooperate, and to oppose the enemy.

W
artime cooperation against the Germans was expressed in a wide range of efforts that frequently moved beyond the expected and often took the form of acts of kindness. The Holocaust offers many examples of such acts.

Self-preservation, autonomy, and actual survival are intricately connected in ways that are often unclear. I have asked many survivors what
they
thought was responsible for their survival. Almost without exception their initial answers were luck, chance, and fate. They wished to convey the idea that their survival was not contingent on their talent or intelligence.

When I continued to probe, however, they offered additional reasons. Most agreed that central among these secondary reasons was cooperation with others. Most of these prisoners were at one time or other part of a group—whether formal or informal—that involved mutual support. For most of them, being a part of these groups translated into being alive.
¹

The final liquidation of the Vilna ghetto began on September 23, 1943. What happened on that day followed an established pattern. First, the population was divided by age and sex. Older men were thrown into a group with older women and women with children. Dina Abramovicz, a teenager at the time, watched from afar as her elderly mother struggled with her oversized bundles. Then Dina spotted a teacher whom she and her mother knew. He was crippled
from the waist down and walking on crutches. Because he was an invalid, the Nazis pushed him into the group of older women and children. Dina realized that he would be expected to climb a hill along with the crowd. He looked around imploringly, as if asking for help. Dina tells what happened next:

Someone responded to his pleading and it was my mother. She put down all her bundles and took the arm of the crippled man, who leaned heavily on her. As they moved toward the steep hill together, the tall, crippled man, and the elderly, frail woman, their faces glowed with a sublime light—the light of compassion and humanity that overcame the horror of their destiny. This is the light in which I remember my mother and which will not disappear from my memory as long as I live.

On the way to the concentration camp, Dina and a group of young people jumped off the moving freight train that was transporting them. Miraculously, they landed near a forest and survived the war as partisans.
²
After the war Dina became a respected librarian at YIVO, now the Institute for Jewish Research in New York. She helped me and many others with finding materials for research.

Arieh Eitani was a teenager in wartime Poland brought to the Kaufering work camp. Like most other victims, he was preoccupied with finding food. Here and there he came upon some additional food, which he occasionally shared with others. Although resourceful and self-reliant, one day he was overcome by circumstances that were stronger than his ability to deal with them. He recalls:

I had diarrhea and couldn't stop running to the bathroom. My clothes would not dry from the previous night. I had no shoes. . . . I knew of a shoemaker in the camp that had extra shoes, but he would not give me any. . . . It was raining, it was cold. I had enough. I thought that I was finished. I wanted to die and stopped working . . . just stood there. A kapo saw this and started beating me. Blood was streaming down my head.

A German guard, a soldier, came over, and asked the kapo, “Why are you hitting him? What's going on?”

The kapo said, “He doesn't want to live; he wants to give up. He doesn't want to work or do anything. He wants to die.”

The German ordered, “Release him to me.”

I thought to myself, “Well, at least the end will come soon.”

The soldier took me to his place. He put me next to the stove so my clothes would dry. He gave me his sandwich and he asked, “Tell me, what is the problem?” I told him. I told him everything, everything, explaining that I just didn't want to live any more. He said, “All this will be over soon.” [This was the winter of 1944.] Then he talked about himself. “Look, when I was in Russia at the Front, it was also very difficult. I also had diarrhea, and we as soldiers would cut our pants in the back and wore them like this.” I can't remember all he said . . . he talked about himself a lot . . . what was important to me was the heat, the sandwich, the fact that I wasn't working . . . Who knows? . . . all this did something to me. Next day, after work, this German came over, took me to his barrack. He gave me food and let me sit near the stove. But then, after the second day, I never saw him again. I don't know what happened. I looked for him, hoping for a sandwich and some warmth but never saw him.

This German offered help and a glimmer of compassion in a chain of humiliations and depravations that had pushed Arieh to the brink of suicide.
³
Perhaps the rarity of these incidents increased their effectiveness.

Tonia Rotkopf tells about a similar experience. After the 1944 liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, she was first transferred to Auschwitz and from there with a group of Jewish women to a work camp in Freiburg. In this place food was distributed once a day; bread and soup. The portions of the bread kept shrinking.