Jan Karski warned the Allies about Nazi atrocities in Poland.
An exhibition about a man who warned Allied leaders and the world about the horrors of the Holocaust has come to the Canadian War Museum.
Jan Karski, an emissary of the Polish Underground State, personally delivered his eyewitness account of the atrocities committed against Polish Jews to several high-ranking officials in the West, including the Second World War-era British foreign secretary Anthony Eden and U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt.
“He loved his Jewish compatriots deeply and was willing to risk everything on their behalf,” says Wanda Urbanska, president of the Jan Karski Educational Foundation.
Karski infiltrated the Warsaw Ghetto twice and witnessed firsthand the conditions imposed on Polish Jews by the Nazis.
“He was very affected by what was happening to a minority group in his country and he was unique in the fact that he was willing to risk his life to bring the information about what was going on to the world,” says Mina Cohn, chair of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa’s Holocaust committee.
The exhibition, “The World Knew – Jan Karski’s Mission for Humanity,” was created by the Polish History Museum, Poland’s ministry of foreign affairs and the Jan Karski Educational Foundation. It debuted at the United Nations in New York in January.
War museum historian Jeff Noakes says the exhibition adds another dimension to the Second World War material already on display at the museum.
“It lets us look at broad themes or broader stories . . . that add on to and complement the stories we already tell and the subjects we already present in the permanent galleries,” he says.
The 22-panel exhibition includes photos and text that tell the story of Karski’s life, his mission to the West in 1942 and the fate of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Karski was born in 1914, the youngest of eight children in a Polish Catholic family. He was a Polish reserve officer and a junior diplomat before the war.
After making his way to the U.S. in 1943, Karski wrote his memoirs, Story of a Secret State and quickly became a bestseller.
Karski stayed in the U.S after the war, where he taught at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., for many years. He died in 2000 at the age of 86.
Urbanska says the exhibition brings Karski’s story to life.
While Karski worked to raise public awareness in the West of the situation in Nazi-occupied Poland and appealed to western leaders for intervention, his message was largely ignored.
“Nobody was willing to intervene on behalf of the Jewish people,” Cohn says. “They were willing to fight Hitler, but for their own reasons. Not for the Jews.”
November is Holocaust Education Month in Ottawa.
In addition to the exhibition, an international panel discussion titled “Karski – The World Knew/ What have we learned?” is scheduled for Nov. 17 at the museum. Liberal MP and human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler will moderate the discussion.
The exhibit runs until Nov. 29.