An evening mass is to be celebrated at St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw and flowers are to be laid at a commemorative plaque dedicated to Karski. On Sunday, religious ceremonies were also held in the central city of Łódź, Karski’s birthplace.
Ewa Juńczyk-Ziomecka, chair of the Jan Karski Educational Foundation in Poland, has told the media that Karski’s death was lamented by Poles, Americans, Israelis, Christians and Jews.
“Even though 20 years have elapsed since that moment, the values that he championed are timeless and universal, and the world needs his legacy today more than ever before,” she said.
During World War II, as a member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Jan Karski took part in courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish government-in-exile, then based in France.
During one such mission, in July 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia, tortured and transported to a hospital in Nowy Sącz, from where he was rescued by the Polish resistance.
He soon resumed active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Polish Home Army’s High Command, and in the summer of 1942 he was assigned to perform a secret mission to London on behalf of the Polish Government’s Delegate in Poland and several political parties.
In order to gather evidence on the plight of Polish Jews, he was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto. He later met several Allied leaders, including Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, and US President Franklin Roosevelt, but failed to secure support for Polish Jews.
After the war, Karski settled in the United States. In 1954 he became a US citizen. He served for four decades as a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, remaining an advocate of Holocaust memory until his death.
Karski’s honours included the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish state distinction, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Righteous among the Nations Medal from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, and the honorary citizenship of Israel.
He is the author of Story of a Secret State and The Great Powers and Poland: 1919-1945, from Versailles to Yalta.
In an interview with the Catholic Information Agency, Waldemar Piasecki, the author of a three-volume biography of Jan Karski, described him as a devout Catholic who had close bonds with Georgetown University in Washington, the oldest Catholic University in the Western hemisphere.
He recalled that his funeral service at St Matthew Cathedral in New York brought together the highest representatives of US Catholic clergy.
Rabbi Michael Birnbaum, Karski’s former student, said a Kaddish, the first time a Jewish prayer was said in that cathedral, and special letters of tribute to Karski were written by US and Polish Presidents Bill Clinton, also a student of Karski, and Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who often referred to Karski as his mentor.
(mk/pk)