‘I told them’

No messenger bearing bad news can expect to be popular. But to be dis- believed as well adds a particularly bitter twist, since the messenger’s character can only be vindicated by proving the truth of his horrific message. That was Jan Karski’s fate. He was the Polish resistance fighter sent to London in 1942 to tell the world that the Jews in Poland were being exterminated. Not in their hundreds, not in their thousands, but in their millions.There would be none left, Karski reported, unless the Allies publicly promised a retaliation sufficiently terrible to halt the Nazis in their tracks. ‘I had this feeling’, Karski confessed after giving his information to a member of Churchill’s war cabinet, ‘he thinks I am spreading exaggerated anti-German propaganda.’

He passed on his message to Franklin D. Roosevelt in person, but to no greater effect. Yet, when Allied leaders saw the death camps for themselves, their excuse for inaction was always the same: they could do nothing because they had not been told. To which Karski bleakly remarked, ‘I told them.’

Had this memoir, written in 1944, been available to his indifferent audience, it would surely have made them listen more intently. It tells with great passion, fluency and the pace of an adventure story how Karski became qualified to be not just a messenger, but one of utter integrity.

His formal war began and ended within a few days, bombed by the Germans and captured by the Russians. For modern Poland, which had only existed since 1918 after disappearing from the map in 1795, defeat brought the prospect of ‘total annihilation’ as the invaders divided up its territory between them once again. What Karski conveys incomparably well, because it was integral to his own character, is the iron determination of the Poles.