Jan Karski, the Herald of the Holocaust
Is the Ordinary Man responsible for heeding the warnings of history?
[This post contains graphic language describing the Warsaw Ghetto.]
In biography, supporting characters do triple duty. On the material level, they arrive at critical junctures in the life of the subject, dramatizing the events of the subject’s life. They play an especially critical role for a subject, like Assistant Secretary of State Wilbur J. Carr, who mostly participated in the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century from the confines of a cramped office building in Washington. No one ever described Carr as swashbuckling, but as the administrative head of the U.S. Foreign Service, he received more than a few visits from the swashbuckling heroes of the front lines.
On the level of story, however, supporting characters do an entirely different job. In the moral drama that I’m recreating, Carr is the hero (or possibly antihero, depending on your response to his choices). Every hero has a journey, and along the way he meets people who define and shape both him and his path: mentors, heralds, threshold guardians, allies, tricksters, shapeshifters, shadows. The appearance of these archetypal figures helps the audience recognize and experience the stakes the hero faces.
Supporting characters operate on a third and related level, the psychological. Viewed in the orbit of the biographical subject, the characteristics of people they encounter shed light on what the subject is and what he isn’t. Noble supporting characters interrogate the subject’s nobility. Shapeshifting or disingenuous supporting characters interrogate the subject’s discernment and courage. Swashbuckling characters may interrogate a hero like Carr’s natural equanimity and caution.
The Intersectionality of Felix Frankfurter
Now that I’ve finished the draft of Carr’s “ordinary world,” the Ohio of 1870 to 1889, I’ve started exploring and organizing material for the longest part of the narrative of Carr’s journey, his years at the State Department from 1892 to 1937.
That’s a lot of years; in that time, Carr did many things and met many people. The biographer faces a tension between two responsibilities: a responsibility to the subject to treat the events and people in his life objectively and proportionally, and a responsibility to the audience to use the authorial prerogative to craft a narrative that is more than “just one damned thing after another.”
Carr and the State Department he represented in the early twentieth century famously closed doors, first to would-be immigrants fleeing instability and poverty in Eastern Europe and, a decade later, to Jews fleeing Nazism in Western Europe. As I read his papers, I’m looking for supporting characters who may signal the stages of Carr’s journey and interrogate his character traits and decisions.
In tracing the political ideology of the early twentieth century, all roads seem to lead through Felix Frankfurter. Later an associate justice of the Supreme Court, Frankfurter the public statesman sympathized with labor demands, socialism, Zionism, and civil liberties. He advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt and, perhaps just as important, mentored and advanced the careers of numerous influential government operators, including Dean Acheson, Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, James M. Landis, Alger Hiss, Paul Freund, Jerome Frank, and Gardner Jackson.
I haven’t yet found evidence that Carr and Frankfurter crossed paths, but they probably did, at least on paper, because Frankfurter actively urged the Roosevelt administration to increase immigration to admit more Jews during the 1930s. While researching my last book about the immigration courts, I encountered many examples of Frankfurter’s activism on that subject in the files of then-Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, whose department at the time administered the immigration laws and often butted heads with State over it.
My exploration of Frankfurter’s pro-immigration activism led me to a figure I had never before encountered: Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski.
Jan Karski: The Herald of the Holocaust
On September 1, 1939, Jan Karski was a young Polish military reserve officer and diplomat. On September 17, everything changed. Arrested by invading Soviet forces, Karski managed to escape custody and certain death in the Katyn Massacre, posing as an enlisted man and returning to Nazi-occupied western Poland. After begin tortured by the Nazis and escaping again, he became a messenger between the Polish Underground resistance movement and the Polish government-in-exile in France and later Great Britain.
Karski spoke fluent German and French. He had a photographic memory. He became a witness to the Holocaust, smuggled twice into the Warsaw Ghetto and once into a transit camp in Izbica Lubelska.
In the 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah, Karski recounted his experiences. In the Warsaw Ghetto, he saw, and he smelled, horrors he would not speak of publicly for decades: dirty children, people starving to death. Seeing a man in the street staring vacantly ahead, Karski asked the guide, “what is he doing? The guide whispered, ‘He’s just dying.’” The guide just kept telling Karski, “‘Look at it, remember, remember’.”
Eventually, Karski inherited the job of informing western leaders about the Nazi atrocities and trying to convince them to intervene. On July 28, 1943, he met with FDR and told his story about the Nazis, the occupation of Poland, and the extermination of the Jews. According to Karski, the president asked no questions about the Holocaust that Karsi had described.
When Karski Met Frankfurter
Karksi also met with Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1943. In this video clip, Karski describes his meeting at the Polish Embassy in Washington with Frankfurter and the Polish ambassador.
After Karski gave witness for fifteen or twenty minutes to all that he had seen, Justice Frankfurter, he said, rose, saying, “I do not believe you.” When the ambassador insisted that Karski had been thoroughly vetted and was not lying, Frankfurter responded, “I did not say that he is lying. I said that I don’t believe him. These are different things.”
Karski did not blame Frankfurter. He thought the justice did, in fact, believe him, but was warning him that the world was unprepared for what he was saying. This type of reaction Karski could well understand. He later told a biographer, “I spent about an hour in that camp. I came out sick, seized by fits of nausea. I vomited blood. I had seen horrifying things there. Disbelief? You would not believe it yourself, if you saw it.”
The Herald in the Journey of the Ordinary Man
Karski may not make it into Carr’s narrative, for one simple reason: Carr died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in June 1942, a year before these interviews in Washington took place.
Carr had left the State Department in 1937, mandatorily retired two years belatedly and pastured in what he was told would be the quiet post of ambassador to Czechoslovakia. That job, of course, abruptly ended when the Nazis occupied the country in 1938.
Yet the moral drama of the Ordinary Man has to ask the hard questions that never confront the subject directly. Most of us never receive a visit from the Jan Karsis of the world; we are too remote in one way or another. Does that absolve the Ordinary Man from responsibility for world events? If not, how did Carr fare? In his place, how would we?
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