Jan Karski Memorial

Jan Kozielewski was born the youngest of eight children to a Roman Catholic family in Łódź, Russia (now located in Poland) on April 24, 1914. A bright child, he excelled in school. In 1935, Kozielewski graduated from Lwow University and began a career as a civil servant working for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Four years later, with the invasion of Poland and the advent of the Second World War in September 1939, Kozielewski enlisted in the Polish army and served as a cavalry officer. Not long after, Soviet forces captured him and sent him to a detention camp in what is now Ukraine. Kozielewski managed to escape and shortly thereafter joined the Polish underground movement. With the resistance, he worked as a courier under the nom de guerre “Karski,” relaying messages from the underground to the Polish government-in-exile. In late 1940, the Gestapo captured and interrogated him. Fearing that he would give up valuable information, Kozielewski slashed his wrists and was sent to a hospital. While receiving treatment there, he escaped and rejoined the Polish resistance. 

A few years later, in late 1942, Kozielewski saw the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand when he secretly traveled in and out of the Warsaw ghetto and a transit camp at Izbica. Soon after, he journeyed to London, where he not only reported on what he witnessed to the Polish government-in-exile, but also high-ranking British officials. In July 1943, he traveled to the United States, where he met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and informed him of the mass extermination faced by European Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Allied leaders, however, were focused primarily on defeating Nazi Germany militarily and winning the war. Kozielewski’s plea for action to stop the systematic murder of Jews in Europe, consequently, went unanswered. Nevertheless, historians recognize him as one of the first individuals to provide eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West. 

After arriving in the summer of 1943, Kozielewski decided to remain in the United States. He settled around Washington, D.C. and formally adopted the nom de guerre that he used during his time with the Polish underground as his surname. After earning a Ph.D. from Georgetown University, Karski took a faculty position at the school. In 1954, he became a U.S. citizen and eleven years later, in 1965, he married Pola Nirenska, a Polish-born dancer and choreographer who lost all of her relatives in the Holocaust. In 1982, Yad Veshem bestowed upon him the designation “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honorific given to non-Jewish individuals who risked their lived to save Jews during the Holocaust. Two years later, Karski retired from teaching at Georgetown University and a decade later, in 1994, Israel awarded him honorary citizenship. On July 13, 2000, Karski died at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington D.C. He was eighty-six years old. 

On November 11, 2007, a memorial in honor of John Karski was unveiled in front of the Polish Consulate in Manhattan. Composed of a life-sized bronze statue of Karski sitting comfortably on a park bench, the memorial depicts him patiently waiting for something or someone while playing a game of chess. In attendance at the dedication ceremony was Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, several Polish dignitaries, and about 150 spectators.

"Jan Karski." The Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 19 November 2020 <https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jan-karski>.

"Jan Karski." Yad Vashem. Web. 19 November 2020 <https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/karski.html>.

Kaufman, Michael T. "Jan Karski Dies at 86; Warned West About Holocaust." The New York Times, July 15, 2000.

Trapasso, Claire. "Statue salutes man who warned FDR of Nazi camps." New York Daily News, November 12, 2007.