Post by Bonobo on May 2, 2009 21:35:11 GMT 1
Manhattan corner to be named after Holocaust hero
April 16, 2009
NEW YORK (AP) - A Manhattan street corner is being named after a World War II hero who brought early eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West.
Madison Avenue at 37th Street will officially be designated Jan Karski (YAHN' KAHR'-skee) Corner on Thursday. A statue of him stands there, in front of the Polish Consulate.
When he died nine years ago in Washington, Karski was a history professor at Georgetown University. Bill Clinton had been 1 of his students.
During the war, Karski was a clandestine Polish government diplomat in exile in London.
On a secret mission to Nazi-occupied Poland, the Roman Catholic Karski met with leaders of the Jewish underground. They told him about what they called "Hitler's war against the Polish Jews."
************ ********* ********* ********* ********
Street corner named for courage
BY Sarah Armaghan and Rich Schapiro
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, April 17th 2009
A midtown corner was renamed Thursday after a daring Polish diplomat who infiltrated a Nazi concentration camp and tried in vain to convince the west of the Holocaust's horrors.
A slew of Polish dignitaries and relatives of Holocaust survivors packed the southeast corner of E. 37th St. and Madison Ave. as it was newly christened Jan Karski Corner.
Karski died in 2000 at the age of 86, nearly 60 years after he risked his life to warn the world about the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
"Jan Karski was a legendary Polish underground courier in World War II, the first person to tell the Allies about the Holocaust when there might have been time to stop it," Poland's Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk said. "He is a real hero of the Polish and Jewish people."
Minutes before the new street sign was unveiled, in the shadow of the Polish Consulate, former Mayor Ed Koch extolled Karski for his bravery.
"We are here to honor a hero, a saint," Koch said.
Barbara Gora, a 77-year-old Pole whose father and other family members survived the Holocaust, credited Karski with saving the lives of her relatives.
"If it weren't for people like Karski ... then my father and my family would not have been saved," Gora said.
Born Jan Kozielewski, Karski was a courier for the Polish underground army when he slipped into the Izbica concentration camp and the Warsaw Ghetto to get a firsthand account of the Nazi's brutality.
The young courier then traveled to London, where he begged the British to bomb the death camps. Later, he headed to Washington and warned President Franklin Roosevelt that the Nazis were annihilating Poland's Jews.
Karski eventually settled in Washington, where he became an influential history professor who taught the likes of Bill Clinton.
"He was a model for many different generations of students - a man of incredible resolve, integrity, humanity and courage," Georgetown President John DeGioia said.
www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/karski.html
Jan Karski was the non de plume of Jan Kozielewski, the youngest of eight children, born in a tenement house at 71 Kilinskiego Street on the 24 April 1914.
Following secondary school he went to Lvov in 1931 to study there. He was awarded with a Doctor of Law and Diplomacy title, and he later worked in the diplomatic corps, in pre-war Poland and secured coveted oversees postings in London and Paris.
Just prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland Jan Kozielewski enlisted in the army and served as a cavalry officer, when first the Germans then the Soviets invaded Poland in September 1939. He was captured by the Soviet forces and incarcerated in a detention camp. Jan Kozielewski escaped from the camp and joined the Polish underground, whilst most of his fellow captives were later executed by the Soviets.
Now Jan Karski, he became a skilled courier for the underground, working with the Allied forces in the West. Whilst employed on underground work he was arrested by the Gestapo in Preshov Slovakia in 1940, and he was brutally tortured.
Fearing that he might reveal secrets and betray his underground colleagues, he slashed his own wrists, and was put into a hospital, from where he was able to escape, with the help of the Underground.
In the third week of August 1942, in the midst of the Nazi mass deportation of the Jews of Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp, Jan Karski entered the Warsaw Ghetto, and met two Jewish leaders, Leon Feiner and Adolf Berman, this visit is reproduced in full- see Jan Karski inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
Photograph depicting segregated public transport for Warsaw Jews, Warsaw - from the Jan Karski papers, envelope D
www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/images/Photograph%20depicting%20segregated%20public%20transport%20for%20Jews,%20Warsaw,%20Poland,%20ca.%201940.%20Jan%20Karski%20papers,%20envelope%20D.jpg
They both urged Jan Karski to inform the Allied leaders about the mass extermination of Polish Jewry. They both urged Karski to take to the Allies the following proposal:
*
Preventing the extermination of the Jews should be declared an official goal of the Allies.
*
Allied propaganda should be used to inform the German people of the war crimes taking place and to publicise the names of the officials taking part.
*
The Allies should appeal to the German people to bring pressure on Hitler’s regime to stop the slaughter.
*
The Allies should declare that if the genocide continued and the German masses did nothing to stop it, the German people would be held collectively responsible.
* Finally if nothing else worked, the Allies should carry out reprisals by bombing German cultural sites and executing Germans in Allied hands who still professed loyalty to Hitler.
Jan Karski knew that the proposals were bitter and unrealistic and beyond international law , and told them so, but sought advice from the two Jewish Bund leaders as to what he should say to Jewish leaders who lived abroad.
Leon Feiner invited Karski to go on another fact finding mission to witness at first hand how the Nazis were rounding up Jews for extermination. A few days after this meeting Karski and a member of the Jewish underground left Warsaw for Izbica.
Izbica was a transit ghetto where some Jews from the town itself, plus the adjacent communities as well as Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were sent, prior to their final journey to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps.
The account of Karski’s visit to Izbica, where he saw with his own eyes, the terrible conditions the Jews experienced, is reproduced separately – see Jan Karski – Visit to Izbica.
Returning to Warsaw, Jan Karski was given a microfilm of hundreds of documents and he made his way by train to Berlin, onto Vichy France, then crossed into Spain, reaching London, via Gibraltar.
In February 1943 Jan Karski met with the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, later he recalled what Anthony Eden said, “That Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees.”
In London he also met with Szmuel Zygelboym who represented the Jewish Socialist Bund in the National Council of the Polish government in exile, to inform him of what he had witnessed and to inform him of the desperate need for urgent action and what the Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto had told him.
Szmuel Zygelboym said he would do all he could to help them but a few months later on the 12 May 1943, just after the Germans crushed the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, he committed suicide.
In July 1943 Jan Karski travelled to the United States of America, where he met President Roosevelt. Whilst Jan Karski felt he failed to convince Roosevelt of the plight of the Jews, but it was not so, Roosevelt changed American policy by establishing the War Refugee Board, to help settle surviving Jews in America.
Jan Karski wanted to return to Poland to continue his work for the underground but he was ordered to remain in the USA, as the Germans now knew his identity. During his time in America he gave interviews and wrote articles, he wrote a book “Story of a Secret State,” which was published at the end of 1944.
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany Jan Karski decided not to return to Poland as it was now under the heel of the Soviets, and he abhorred Communism.
April 16, 2009
NEW YORK (AP) - A Manhattan street corner is being named after a World War II hero who brought early eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West.
Madison Avenue at 37th Street will officially be designated Jan Karski (YAHN' KAHR'-skee) Corner on Thursday. A statue of him stands there, in front of the Polish Consulate.
When he died nine years ago in Washington, Karski was a history professor at Georgetown University. Bill Clinton had been 1 of his students.
During the war, Karski was a clandestine Polish government diplomat in exile in London.
On a secret mission to Nazi-occupied Poland, the Roman Catholic Karski met with leaders of the Jewish underground. They told him about what they called "Hitler's war against the Polish Jews."
************ ********* ********* ********* ********
Street corner named for courage
BY Sarah Armaghan and Rich Schapiro
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, April 17th 2009
A midtown corner was renamed Thursday after a daring Polish diplomat who infiltrated a Nazi concentration camp and tried in vain to convince the west of the Holocaust's horrors.
A slew of Polish dignitaries and relatives of Holocaust survivors packed the southeast corner of E. 37th St. and Madison Ave. as it was newly christened Jan Karski Corner.
Karski died in 2000 at the age of 86, nearly 60 years after he risked his life to warn the world about the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
"Jan Karski was a legendary Polish underground courier in World War II, the first person to tell the Allies about the Holocaust when there might have been time to stop it," Poland's Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk said. "He is a real hero of the Polish and Jewish people."
Minutes before the new street sign was unveiled, in the shadow of the Polish Consulate, former Mayor Ed Koch extolled Karski for his bravery.
"We are here to honor a hero, a saint," Koch said.
Barbara Gora, a 77-year-old Pole whose father and other family members survived the Holocaust, credited Karski with saving the lives of her relatives.
"If it weren't for people like Karski ... then my father and my family would not have been saved," Gora said.
Born Jan Kozielewski, Karski was a courier for the Polish underground army when he slipped into the Izbica concentration camp and the Warsaw Ghetto to get a firsthand account of the Nazi's brutality.
The young courier then traveled to London, where he begged the British to bomb the death camps. Later, he headed to Washington and warned President Franklin Roosevelt that the Nazis were annihilating Poland's Jews.
Karski eventually settled in Washington, where he became an influential history professor who taught the likes of Bill Clinton.
"He was a model for many different generations of students - a man of incredible resolve, integrity, humanity and courage," Georgetown President John DeGioia said.
www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/karski.html
Jan Karski was the non de plume of Jan Kozielewski, the youngest of eight children, born in a tenement house at 71 Kilinskiego Street on the 24 April 1914.
Following secondary school he went to Lvov in 1931 to study there. He was awarded with a Doctor of Law and Diplomacy title, and he later worked in the diplomatic corps, in pre-war Poland and secured coveted oversees postings in London and Paris.
Just prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland Jan Kozielewski enlisted in the army and served as a cavalry officer, when first the Germans then the Soviets invaded Poland in September 1939. He was captured by the Soviet forces and incarcerated in a detention camp. Jan Kozielewski escaped from the camp and joined the Polish underground, whilst most of his fellow captives were later executed by the Soviets.
Now Jan Karski, he became a skilled courier for the underground, working with the Allied forces in the West. Whilst employed on underground work he was arrested by the Gestapo in Preshov Slovakia in 1940, and he was brutally tortured.
Fearing that he might reveal secrets and betray his underground colleagues, he slashed his own wrists, and was put into a hospital, from where he was able to escape, with the help of the Underground.
In the third week of August 1942, in the midst of the Nazi mass deportation of the Jews of Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp, Jan Karski entered the Warsaw Ghetto, and met two Jewish leaders, Leon Feiner and Adolf Berman, this visit is reproduced in full- see Jan Karski inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
Photograph depicting segregated public transport for Warsaw Jews, Warsaw - from the Jan Karski papers, envelope D
www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/images/Photograph%20depicting%20segregated%20public%20transport%20for%20Jews,%20Warsaw,%20Poland,%20ca.%201940.%20Jan%20Karski%20papers,%20envelope%20D.jpg
They both urged Jan Karski to inform the Allied leaders about the mass extermination of Polish Jewry. They both urged Karski to take to the Allies the following proposal:
*
Preventing the extermination of the Jews should be declared an official goal of the Allies.
*
Allied propaganda should be used to inform the German people of the war crimes taking place and to publicise the names of the officials taking part.
*
The Allies should appeal to the German people to bring pressure on Hitler’s regime to stop the slaughter.
*
The Allies should declare that if the genocide continued and the German masses did nothing to stop it, the German people would be held collectively responsible.
* Finally if nothing else worked, the Allies should carry out reprisals by bombing German cultural sites and executing Germans in Allied hands who still professed loyalty to Hitler.
Jan Karski knew that the proposals were bitter and unrealistic and beyond international law , and told them so, but sought advice from the two Jewish Bund leaders as to what he should say to Jewish leaders who lived abroad.
Leon Feiner invited Karski to go on another fact finding mission to witness at first hand how the Nazis were rounding up Jews for extermination. A few days after this meeting Karski and a member of the Jewish underground left Warsaw for Izbica.
Izbica was a transit ghetto where some Jews from the town itself, plus the adjacent communities as well as Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were sent, prior to their final journey to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps.
The account of Karski’s visit to Izbica, where he saw with his own eyes, the terrible conditions the Jews experienced, is reproduced separately – see Jan Karski – Visit to Izbica.
Returning to Warsaw, Jan Karski was given a microfilm of hundreds of documents and he made his way by train to Berlin, onto Vichy France, then crossed into Spain, reaching London, via Gibraltar.
In February 1943 Jan Karski met with the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, later he recalled what Anthony Eden said, “That Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees.”
In London he also met with Szmuel Zygelboym who represented the Jewish Socialist Bund in the National Council of the Polish government in exile, to inform him of what he had witnessed and to inform him of the desperate need for urgent action and what the Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto had told him.
Szmuel Zygelboym said he would do all he could to help them but a few months later on the 12 May 1943, just after the Germans crushed the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, he committed suicide.
In July 1943 Jan Karski travelled to the United States of America, where he met President Roosevelt. Whilst Jan Karski felt he failed to convince Roosevelt of the plight of the Jews, but it was not so, Roosevelt changed American policy by establishing the War Refugee Board, to help settle surviving Jews in America.
Jan Karski wanted to return to Poland to continue his work for the underground but he was ordered to remain in the USA, as the Germans now knew his identity. During his time in America he gave interviews and wrote articles, he wrote a book “Story of a Secret State,” which was published at the end of 1944.
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany Jan Karski decided not to return to Poland as it was now under the heel of the Soviets, and he abhorred Communism.
