The decoration, a medal of the Polish resistance heroe and eyewitness of the Holocaust, Jan Karski (l9l4-2000), was presented to Mrs. Dylag by Mrs. Zosia Klawir, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Juana Dylag, along with her husband, was a member of the underground Polish army with the rank of Sergeant Major. Thanks to her actions, the lives of Felicia Erlich and her daughters, Danuta and Irena, were saved from Nazi persecution.

In l992 they received the honorary title of ”Righteous Among the Nations” , a distinction awarded to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Shoa.

Madam Dylag, who is Catholic, has lived in Argentina since l948, and was honored in her adopted country for the first time since her arrival almost 60 years ago.

The ceremony took place in the Chapel of the Virgin of Luján, next to the Mural remembering the victims of the Holocaust. The Memorial was inaugurated on 14 April l997 by the late Primate Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, and unveiled by former Polish President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lech Walesa along with IRWF founder Mr. Baruch Tenembaum.

Rabbi Abraham Skorka of the Latin-American Rabbinical Seminary; the Polish Ambassador to Argentina, Slawomir Ratawski; and the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation volunteer and expert on Polish issues, Dr. Marcos Resnizky, spoke on the occasion.

Around l50 persons attended the meeting. Among other personalities Holocaust survivors Laszlo Ladanyi, Tomas Kertesz, Charles Papiernik and Jack Fuchs; community and education authorities; diplomatic representatives; non-governmental organizations and students of the Fatima Institute.

Following the ceremony, Mrs. Dylag was saluted by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Primate of Argentina, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio.

As Tenembaum announced along with Archbishop Renato Martino, President of the Commission of Peace and Justice of the Holy See, the Wallenberg Foundation rendered tribute to another Catholic Savior on the same day. In Syracuse, Italy, former Chief of Police of the city of Fiume, Giovanni Palatucci, was honored. The ceremony was organized together with the Mediterranean Institute of University Studies of Syracuse in the framework of the ”Study Conference in Honor of Giovanni Palatucci”, at the Palace of the regional province, with the patronage of the President of the Republic of Italy.

Palatucci was murdered in February of l945 at the age of 36 in the Dachau concentration camp after saving the lives of thousands of Jews and other persecuted people. He did so disobeying the directives of the racial laws of the Fascist State. It is worth mentioning that Cardinal Camillo Ruini, Bishop of the diocese of Rome, opened a cause for the beatification of Palatucci.

LETTER OF IRENA ERLICH URDANG DE TOUR, SAVED BY JANINA DYLAG

29 April 2003
Saybrook Point, Connecticut
Mr. Baruch Tenembaum
The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation

I would like to address a few words to the illustrious gathering at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires in lieu of actually being there.

I can not think of anyone more deserving the honour of being bestowed Jan Karski’s Commemorative Medal for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of members of the Mosaic on the 60th anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto -in which my own father was murdered at the age of 39- than Mrs Janina Dylag.

Specifically hiding my mother in her apartment for a couple of years under the most daring circumstances, she endangered the life of her own mother, her brother and her sister, Halina Klein Tundak, as well as other relatives.

Several years ago, after presenting our testimonies, both the Klein sisters were bestowed the honorific title ”Righteous Gentiles”. Mrs Tundak, now deceased, also received a special recognition medal from the Polish Government.

It therefore gives me great pleasure to know that -even at this late stage when ”the survivors as well as their rescuers are becoming as extinct as bisons”- that Mrs Dylag will be officialy honoured for her heroism and ultimate sacrifice in the magnificent setting of that place of worship and symbol of Christianity, the religion she so warmly embraced and practices in her daily life.

I believe what it is written in the Talmud: ”Whoever saves a life saves the entire world”. It still rings true in the 21st century.

Congratulations, Janina, on this glorious day in your adopted country.

As I write this words, my heart swells with love and pride for having known you and your wonderful mother.

Irena Erlich Urdang de Tour

Her father, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a doctor whose patients were mostly poor Jews, was an activist of the Polish Socialist Party (PSP). His ideas were a great influence for the young Irena who studied Polish literature, she was part of the leftist Union of Democratic Youth, participated in protests against a ”desk ghetto” in lecture halls and finally she joined the PSP.

Irena worked as senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department that ran the canteens of the city, when Germany invaded the country in 1939. Due to Irena, the canteens not only provided food, financial aid and other services for orphans, elderly, and poor but also clothing, medicine and money for Jewish families. To avoid inspections, they were registered under fictitious Catholic names and they were reported as patients suffering highly contagious diseases such as typhus or tuberculosis.

But in 1942, with the designation of a closed area to herd Jews, known as the Warsaw Ghetto, the families could only wait for a certain death. Irena was so appalled by the conditions in which the Jews were living, that she joined the Council for Aid to Jews, Zegota, organized the Polish underground. The young women were one of the first recruits to rescue Jews. At that time, 5.000 people were dying a month from starvation and diseases.

Irena managed to get a pass from the Warsaw Epidemic Control Department to be able to enter the ghetto legally. She visited it daily with the aim of reestablishing contacts, bringing food, medicines and clothes. She wore a star armband as sign of her solidarity to Jews.

Persuading parents to separate from their children was a horrible task for Irena, a young mother herself. ”Can you guarantee that they will live?” Irena recalled the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee that they would die if they stayed. ”In my dreams, I can still hear them cry when they left their parents”, she said.

It was not easy to find families who wanted to shelter the Jewish children either because of the risk to their own lives.

She started to smuggle children in an ambulance as victims of typhus, but also in gunnysacks, garbage cans, toolboxes, loads of goods, potato sacks, coffins… any element transformed into a way of escape for Irena. Other methods included a church with two entrances, one opened into the ghetto and the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. Children entered the Church Jews and exited as Christians. Irena could recruit at least one person from each of the ten Centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures, giving the Jewish children temporary identities.

It was easier to escape the ghetto than to survive the Aryan side. The rescue of a child required at least the help of at least ten people. Children were the first taken to units of caring service (pogotowie opiekuncze) and later to a safe place.

Later they were led to houses, orphanages and convents. ”I sent most of the children to religious establishments,” she recalled. ”I knew that I could count on the Sisters.” Irena also had a great cooperation to locate the older ones: ”No one ever refused to take a child from me,” she said.

Irena kept record, in coded form, of the children and their true identities.

The only record of their true identities was kept in jars buried beneath an apple tree in the neighbor’s back yard, across the street from the German barracks. She hoped she could someday locate the children and inform them of their past.

In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children…

Finally, the Nazis became aware of her activities and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo. Though she was the only one who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish children, she withstood the torture and she refused to betray any of her associates or the children in hiding. Her feet and legs were broken but no one could break her spirit. Irena spent three months in the Pawiak prison were she was sentenced to death.

While she awaited execution a German soldier took her to an ”additional interrogation”. Once they were outside he shouted in Polish ”Run!” The next day she found her name on the list of the executed Poles. Zegota members had managed to stop the execution by bribing the Germans. Irena continued working under a false identity.

At the end of the war, Irena dug up the jars and used the notes to find the 2.500 children she had given to adoptive families. She reunited them with their relatives scattered across Europe, but most of them had lost their families in Nazi concentration camps.

The children only knew her by her code name Jolanta. But years later when her picture appeared in a newspaper after she was awarded for her humanitarian deeds during the war ”A man, a painter, telephoned me,” she said, ”I remember your face, it was you who took me out of the ghetto.” ”I had many calls like that”.

Irena Sendler does not consider herself as a hero. She never claimed any credit for her actions. ”I could have done more,” she said. ”This regret will follow me to my death.” In 1965 the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem awarded her with the title Righteous Among the Nations and she was made an honorary citizen of Israel.

After the war she worked for Social Welfare; she helped create houses for elderly people, orphanages and an emergency service for children.

Gustav Blajchman, his ten-year-old niece Irena Machenbaum and her mother Tova escaped from the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943 and joined Gustav’s wife Miriam and their two sons, Natan and Efraim, who were hiding in an attic apartment on the Aryan side of Warsaw. The attic apartment and its false wall, built by Antoni Wieczorek, was rented by Antoni’s sister Zofia to hide Jews. Zofia, Antoni, and their mother Aleksandra knew their guests prior to the war and, for more than one year afterward, looked after the needs of their hiding charges.

Other refugees, including Gustav’s ”sister-in-law and an escapee from the Pawiak prison in Warsaw, Lilian Stern” also found safe haven in the Wieczorek apartment. (Jews who entered Pawiak prison were not prisoners for long; for, ”as a rule, both Jews and Soviets” were shot soon after arrival. The prison itself did not last long either. It was blown up by the Germans on August 21, 1944.) The Jewish refugees (except young Efraim Blajchman who died while in hiding and whose body remained with his family until Aleksandra arranged to have him buried under a false name) stayed with the Wieczoreks until the Warsaw Uprising (a 63-day struggle, started on August 1, 1944 by the Polish Home Army to free Warsaw from German control and which, for various reasons, failed and left a great deal of Warsaw destroyed). After the war, the Wieczoreks’ charges moved to Israel, save Liliana Stern, who moved to Australia. When Malka Drucker, author of Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, spoke with Zofia years later in Israel (where she had moved after marrying a Jewish man who was rescued during the War), she ”calmly told how she and her mother took in six Jews…[and] how she tried to amuse the [little girl] with books and by knitting lessons.” (The ”little girl,” in her late 40s at the time of the meeting, attended the interview and, listening, began to cry).

On Christmas Day, 1984, Zofia Marta Avni-Wieczorek (whose name can also be found under the spelling ”Sofia Wieczorek-Awni”), and Aleksandra and Antoni Wieczorek were given the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Zofia passed away in 2006.

References

• Gutman, Israel, Sara Bender, Lucien Lazare, Jozeph Michman, Bert-Jan Flim, and Shmue Krakowski. ”Avni-Wieczorek, Zofia Marta – deceased 2006.” The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations; Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. Volume 3, Poland. Yad Vashem Publications, p. 62. 2003.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising
• http://www.malkadrucker.com/right.html
• http://www1.yadvashem.org
• Scheinerman, Rabbi Amy R. 2006. Temple Emanu-El of San Jose. Retrieved July 20, 2007
  from http://www.templesanjose.org/.

Katie Kellerman is a Volunteer for the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

Born in Poland in 1907, Mela was the daughter of a shoemaker. She lived in a small town named Bialystok, and married a neighborhood boy named Alex in 1928. They had two children in the early 30s.

Alex became a textile merchant, and developed many Jewish business contacts and friends. His prosperous business was affected when many of his customers were swept up and put in the ghetto. The Roslans moved to Warsaw with their two children, and there began their unforeseen rescue work.

There they took in three brothers from the Gutgelt family shortly before the Warsaw ghetto revolt in 1943. Jacob, Sholom, and David were ages three to eight. Mela tended to their feeding, clothing, and medical care. Although a gentile, she never let the boys forget that they were Jews.

Sholom later died as a result of a scarlet fever outbreak. After the liberation, Jacob and David made their way to Palestine. The Roslans eventually immigrated to the U.S.

In 1981, Alex and Mela traveled to Israel to visit David and Jacob and celebrate Passover together. During this visit they were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations.

Mela died in 1996 at the age of 87, and was survived by her husband Alex, who eventually returned to live in Poland.

Michael Halperin wrote a one-character play based upon the true story of Mela Roslan, entitled Mela. A special performance of the play was given in Jerusalem in August, 2004 for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Yad Vashem. This play became the basis for the best-selling children’s book entitled Jacob’s Rescue written by Halperin and Malka Drucker.

literary sources:

• http://www.malkadrucker.com/jacreprise.html
• http://www.ushmm.org/uia-cgi/uia_doc/query/50?uf=uia_JVYLNz
• http://www.humboldt.edu/~rescuers/book/album/roslan/roslan2.html

Recollections of the Holocaust are relatively frequent and sometimes even fashionable events but the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation’s tribute to Polish diplomat and resistance hero Jan Karski at the Polish Embassy last week was a rare occasion when more anger seemed to be directed at Allied apathy than at Nazi atrocities.

Polish Ambassador Eugeniusz Noworyta began the ceremony by presenting Karski as strongly Catholic like so many Poles. Born in the textile city of Lodz in central Poland in 1914, his real name was Jan Kozielewski. Jesuit-educated, he graduated in Law from the University of Lwow and embarked upon a diplomatic career.

When war came in 1939, Poland could only offer courage, Noworyta said – a courage fully reflected by Karski on the Eastern front in 1939 and even more by his later work for the Polish underground resistance. A polyglot with a photographic memory, he was a natural choice as a Resistance courier.

In 1942 Karski ran the enormous risk of twice entering the Warsaw ghetto disguised as a Jew and also secretly penetrated Belzec death camp for an hour, becoming probably the first non-Jewish and hence entirely objective eyewitness of the Holocaust to tell the tale. As soon as his work took him to London, he recounted the Jewish tragedy to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the leading Conservative Lord Cranborne and the Labour politicians Hugh Dalton and Arthur Greenwood.

But his graphic account of Holocaust atrocities fell on deaf ears. He was told that if the Germans were so foolish as to lose sight of military strategy with such ’secondary’ objectives as the extermination of the Jews, the Allies had no intention of repeating the error.

‘If Hitler wants to waste his trains transporting Jews to concentration camps, let him!’ and ‘What do you expect us to do? Bomb the camps so that they die quicker?’ were among the responses he received. The writer H.G. Wells a lifelong socialist, told Karski: ‘You’ve got to look at the reasons why anti-Semitism has emerged in all the countries where Jews live.’

It was no better in the United States where President Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York Cardinal-Archbishop Francis Spellman and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter were among those whom Karski met in mid-1943. FDR pumped Karski for four hours for information on Europe behind the lines but showed zero interest in the plight of the Jews. Frankfurter, a Jew himself, simply refused to believe his story, as did other US Jewish leaders.

Karski’s 1944 book The Secret State places on record that Western leaders were well aware of the Nazi genocide for years before the end of the war.

After the war Karski was a professor of law philosophy and political science in the USA, often visiting his native Poland in the last 10 years of his life before his death last July. He was made an illustrious citizen of the State of Israel and also received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration.

The occasion was also addresed by writer Marcos Aguinis, Father Horacio Moreno and Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz survivor Jack Fuchs while the Foundation’s Executive Director Gustavo Jalife read out endorsements of the event from all over the world including United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, Czech President Vaclav Havel and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Aguinis, who together with Swedish Ambassador Peter Landelius presented the Polish Embassy with a sculpture honoring Karski, underlined world responsibility for the Holocaust, pointing out the failure of a 1938 internatinal conference on the Jewish refugee question to offer any alternative to the ‘final solution.’

The ceremony took place on June 20 at the embassy of Poland in Buenos Aires. Writer Marcos Aguinis, Holocaust survivor Jack Fuchs, Father Horacio Moreno and the ambassador of Sweden, Peter Landelius made a speech.

The ambassador of Poland, Eugeniusz Noworyta, received the sculpture “Homage to Raoul Wallenberg”, an exclusive piece of the IRWF made by the Argentine artist Norma D’Ippolito.

During the ceremony Karski’s testimony to the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann for the movie ‘SHOA’ was projected.

Among the people present was the Chief Rabbi Salomón Ben Hamú, survivors of the Holocaust, as well as ambassadors and numerous diplomatic delegations and communities.

The adhesions included greetings from Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic; Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican’s State Secretary; Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General; Anibal Ibarra, Mayor of the city of Buenos Aires and Andrés Delich, the Argentine Secretary of Education.

In his letter, President Havel, honorary member of the IRWF points out:

‘Allow me join you in remembering Jan Karski. The memory of the victims of the Holocaust and all those who tried to prevent its horrors, reminds us that every expression of hatred towards minorities tends to be the beginning of an attack on the fundamentals of basic humanity itself.’

Minister Delich wrote:

‘The stories of life of Jan Karski and Jack Fuchs allow us to remember not only tragedy but also heroism and dignity. This memory must turn itself into a daily commitment and a critic to prejudices, stereotypes and fallacies. To remember means to understand the present in the light of what has happened and thus, to prevent and to prepare us for the future.’

Dr. Ibarra, Mayor of the city of Buenos Aires, pointed out in his adhesion that

”We are aware of the great historical and educational importance in paying tribute and remembering those who resisted and condemned the terrible crimes committed by Nazism, as a way of preventing its repetition in the present and in the future.”

Buenos Aires Herald – Holocaust blindness exposed

Raoul Wallenberg was the young Swedish diplomat who risked his life to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews when Nazis started deporting them in mass. Jan Karski was also a diplomat, but in this case of Polish nationality, who also risked his life to condemn the murderous machinery of the Third Reich.

Karski was born shortly before the Fist World War in the city of Lodz, Poland, in a Catholic family. He was raised by Jesuits and studied Law. He spoke many languages, traveled throughout almost all Europe and entered the diplomatic career. He was refined, elegant and very devoted.

He was called to arms in 1939, when the world was going up in flames due to Hitler’s warmongering. Shortly afterwards, when Poland had been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, he was taken as a prisoner by the Red Army and put into a concentration camp. He was able to escape and headed for the region occupied by the Nazis, where underground groups of resistance had started.

”An anonymous messenger”

His knowledge of languages and countries determined his bold mission as a courier. His heroic deeds achieved legendary proportions.

With an outstanding memory, not only visual but of texts as well, he crossed enemy lines to transmit secret information to the different groups of the Polish resistance and from them to the government agents in exile. In June of the year 1940 he fell into a trap, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia and he was subjected to many humiliations. He was afraid that torture would make him confess things that endangered others, and, in spite of his Catholicism, he tried to slash his wrists with a razor he had hidden in the sole of a shoe. But he was rescued in time in an action worthy of a movie and taken into a safe place where he could recover from his poor health condition, broken by sadistic beatings. A few months of recovering allowed him to resume his job, which grew in importance and consequences.

With modesty, in the books and statements Jan Karski made after the war, he said he had barely been an ”anonymous messenger”. But that function forced him to cross barriers behind which death was waiting. In spite of his lonely performance, he reached the most important leaders of Europe and the United States, as well as vast numbers of writers and journalists. ”My credentials were my scars and some military medals.” Because of him, it was known about the structure of the Polish underground movement, the relationships between political and military organizations, the resistance methods, the underground press, the characteristics of the Nazi oppression. Finally, he added the slaughter of Jews to his reports, which was unprecedented not only due to its systematization but also due to its effectiveness.

”I saw Belzec”

He got used to set out clearly for not more than twenty minutes and he only dedicated the final minutes to the Jews’ tragedy. However, this last part became what he proudly called ”my Jewish mission”. His unexpected mission appeared shortly before he slipped away to London. He was dedicated to collecting messages and false documentation when he was told that the representatives of two Jewish underground organizations wanted to see him. Karski asked for authorization to the chief of the Polish resistance, the fat and old Cyril Ratajski, who answered: ”Jan, you must help them”.

He kept dramatic meetings with both leaders. ”They gave me their messages, terrible messages! What was happening was unparallel. Nazis had decided to murder all the Jewish population in the world.”

He understood that it was not enough with transmitting reports from other people, so before abandoning his land, he decided to see reality with his own eyes. He knitted the star of David on his worn-out jacket and infiltrated twice into the Warsaw ghetto. It was October 1942. Of the original 600 thousand victims the Nazis had gathered at the beginning, only 50 thousand remained, the rest had been sent to the gas chambers. The terrible scenes he saw there not only confirmed the reports, but also forced him to visit an extermination camp. He did not pay attention to the risk and entered Belzec. In his memories he remembers: ”I saw Belzec. I stayed for less than an hour and it was enough. I could not take it. I suffered some kind of nervous collapse. After I left the camp I vomited blood.”

He secretly got to London and had a meeting with Polish, British and American officials. After talking with the president of the Polish government in exile, in December 1942, the latter, moved by what he had heard turned to the allies so that they warn Germans about their responsibility for the crimes. The president also sent a letter to the Pope Pious XII, from whom he never had a reply. ”At your feet, Holy Father, I implore you for intervention on behalf of the Polish citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish.”

The British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, replied each and everyone of Karki’s demands with a categorical ”no”; he did not even allow the entry in Palestine of the refugees who could barely run away from hell. Karski could not either move the Cabinet of War. In his meetings with writers and journalists, he got different results, that varied from tears to skeptical expressions: H. G. Wells, for example, preferred to digress about the causes of anti-Semitism instead of joining into rescue measures.

In 1943, after the amazing uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, Jan Karski was sent to the United States. There he initiated a tremendous activity, which took him to the Oval Room. President Franklin D. Roosevelt held him for four hours, interested in the political problems on the other side of the border. Though he worried about the Jews’ tragedy, Roosevelt was not willing to distract efforts: he would not destroy trains taking crowds to the slaughterhouse, and he would not bomb the extermination camps. Then, Karski turned to leaders, officials, bishops and journalists who expressed their sympathy but chose to suppose that the report was exaggerating.

”After the war – he wrote – the Western leaders manifested their horror for what had happened. These personalities insisted that they ignored the genocide policies of the Third Reich, because they were kept in secret. Such opinion, however, is false. They knew it!”

They knew it due to this unforgettable Pole, catholic, brave and good-hearted, who was included in Jerusalem among the Righteous who fill the world with dignity and whom the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation have just paid homage to from Buenos Aires.

* Marcos Aguinis‘ most recent book is The cruel charm of being Argentine

In 1940 he was captured by the Gestapo in Slovakia. After he was savagely tortured he tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, but the underground resistance could rescue him avoiding that any of the secrets he knew were revealed to the enemy. Between 1942 and 1943 he was the protagonist of a story that would mark him for the rest of his life: what he called ‘my secret Jewish mission’. Karski was one of the first ones to transmit a detailed narration of the Nazi atrocities.

In October 1942 Karski, whose real name was Jan Kozielewsky, contacted two Jewish organizations: the Bund (Jewish socialist party) and a Zionist organization. Both of them asked him to inform the allies about what was going on with the Jewish communities in Poland.

Pretending to be a Jew, he got into the Warsaw ghetto twice in October 1942. And afterwards, to the extermination camp of Belzec. Karski´s secret visit to the camp only lasted for an hour, which was more than enough for what he had seen to remain in his memory forever.

In London he had a meeting with the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden; with Lord Cranbone, of the conservative party as well as with Hugh Dalton and Arthur Greenwood of the Labour party. They were all part of the British cabinet of war that in that moment was the political center of power in England. Eden answered that they could not do anything of what the Jewish leaders proposed because the allied strategy consisted in defeating Germany militarily, and that no ‘secondary issue’ had to interfere with the objective. Lord Cranborne, apparently a nice man, told him:

‘Mr. Karski, you are a very bright man. Do you realize that the message you are giving us is untenable?’

Arthur Koestler, Jewish, passionate anti fascist and anti-Soviet whom Karski visited in London, is not favored in the messenger’s narration. He describes him as a man so tied down to his personal interests, to his vanity of man of arts. Another writer, H.G. Wells, when he received his chronicle answered:

‘there should be a study of what causes anti-Semitism to arise in every country where Jews live’.

The situation is not better in the USA. In the summer of 1943 he has a meeting with President Roosevelt, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, Cardinal Cicognani, Archbishop Spellman, the President of the Jewish-American Congress, Nahum Goldman, the Judge of the Supreme Court of Justice, Felix Frankfurter and with the director of the Herald Tribune, Ogden Reed. Roosevelt listened to him for four hours. He was especially interested in political issues and told him that Poland would receive a territorial compensation. Not a single comment about the Jews´ situation, not a single question that showed his worry about the ghetto chronicle and the extermination camps.

The dialogue with Felix Frankfurter, member of the Supreme Court, is equally clarifying. Frankfurter asked him: ‘Mr. Karski, do you know who I am? ¿Do you know that I am Jewish?‘ After Karski´s narration of the facts, Frankfurter walks a few steps, thinks for a while and answers him categorically: ‘A man like me has to be completely honest, so I tell you that I cannot believe what you are telling me’. Other Jewish leaders did not believe him either.

In 1944, a year before the war was over, Karski published the book The Secret State, that in a very short time sold 400 thousand copies, and he started lecturing in the USA, where he took as a Professor in Political theory at Georgetown University.

‘After the war -he wrote in 1987- I read how leaders from the west, State men, militaries, intelligence services, ecclesiastical authorities and civil leaders were horrified by what had happened to the Jews. They declared not to know anything about the Holocaust because the genocide had been kept in secret. This version of facts still remains but it is just a myth. The extermination was not a secret to them.’

The State of Israel named him honorable citizen. This time he gave a thank you speech where he defined himself: ‘I am Polish, American, Catholic and now I can also say that I am Jewish’. His testimony is probably one of the most touching registered on the movie Shoah by Claude Lanzmann.

For me, also born in Lodz, Jewish Polish, Jan Karski´s story is a reason of shudder and anguish: Why that man, that maybe I bumped into in the streets of my city, was not listened to? Why the testimony of an ordinary man had no effect, why that unbearable indifference?

On June 20, 2001 the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Argentina will remember the figure of Karski at the Embassy of Poland in Buenos Aires.

* By Jack Fuchs, Deported from the Lodzs ghetto to Auschwitz. He was found by the allies in Dachau at the end of the war. Member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.