Jan Karski’s Representations – Representing Jan Karski: From Poland’s Secret Messenger to Holocaust Witness

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the wide range of representations of the actions undertaken by Jan Karski. Karski was a courier for the wartime Polish government-in-exile, engaged to report on the situation in Poland, to Polish politicians in France in 1940, as well as to government leaders in London and Washington in 1942/3. Karski’s book about his diplomatic endeavors was published as early as 1944 (Story of a Secret State), but thereafter he maintained a long silence, one that was only broken in 1978 when he was interviewed for Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). From the 1980s onwards, Karski repeatedly testified to his wartime activities and experiences; he received numerous awards for his early warnings about the fate of the Polish Jews under the Nazis and became a celebrity among the ‘righteous’. Following his death in 2000, Karski’s mission has been reconsidered and subjected to wide-ranging interpretation. We take an arts and humanities approach to analyzing how far these shifting perspectives on Karski’s wartime undertakings respond to the different emphases in Karski’s postwar memoirs and his interviews in different media. The article therefore poses questions about narrative and aesthetic construction to compare Karski’s testimonies with the ways they have been represented in documentary film and fiction. We conclude that the idea of Karski’s mission has been adopted to diametrically opposed and polemical ends and attempt an adjudication between these often-incompatible representations.