Story of a Secret State. My Report to the World

Karski, Jan. Story of a Secret State. My Report to the World. Jan Karski Institute and Robert Laffontt, S. A. Paris, 2010.

Keywords: Poland | Polish Underground | Polish Government | eyewitness | resistance

Concepts: resistance | Jewish annihilation | victimization | witness | non-collaboration

Jan Karski trained in Poland as a diplomat before the start of WWII. When Poland was occupied, he was 25 years old. His diplomatic skills and extraordinary photographic memory did not go unnoticed in the Polish Underground for long… Karski became a high-level missionary and courier for the Polish Underground’s four main political parties and the Polish Government in Exile. In 1944, he decided to record everything that he did and witnessed.

The ‘secret state’ refers to the network of clandestine institutions that continued the work of the Polish Republic after the invasion of the Nazis and the Russians in 1939 (as they battled for the domination and elimination of Poland). This secret state refused to recognize Nazi authority, and had an underground parliament, courts, administration, and the Home Army, all linked to the government‑in‑exile in London and operating illegally under German occupation. At the same time, it incorporated a huge country-wide network of resistance fighters.

Karski was commissioned to prepare analytical reports on occupied Poland for the Polish government‑in‑exile. This role involved many perilous routes across multiple country borders at great personal risk of being captured by the Gestapo. In 1942–43, his role expanded to eyewitness emissary: after clandestine visits to the Warsaw ghetto and a transit ‘death’ camp, he brought detailed reports on German policies toward Jews and on the overall situation in occupied Poland directly to Sikorski, the head of the Polish Government in exile, to British officials, and ultimately Roosevelt.

Through Karski’s personal narrative of all he did and witnessed in and outside of Poland during the WWII, helps the uninformed to find out about a fundamental piece of world history… through his narrative where the reader sees him as the window onto and into ‘the system’ in Poland….His book helps to reframe the truth about Poland’s unique level of resistance to the Nazis.  He made clear:

• that Poland’s resistance was not just partisan bands, but most importantly a hidden state.
• Why so many Poles (Jews and non‑Jews) were targeted—because Poland was both the center of Nazi genocidal policy against Jews and the site of extraordinarily large, organized resistance.

But most importantly of all, Karski’s narrative highlights a gap in current memory: this “heroic achievement” of maintaining a clandestine state tied to London has become completely overshadowed by later Cold War politics and by narratives that flatten “resistance” into generic European patterns – where Poland was uniquely different and uniquely heroic  - because as Karski explains, its goal was to maintain the continuity of the Polish State…..

The horror in the whole story is that Karski’s delivery of his firsthand witness account of both being in the Warsaw Ghetto and witnessing the horrific process and murder of 1,000 prisoners at a transit camp where over 500,000 were murdered in the same manner between 1941 and 1943…  fell on deaf ears both in the highest echelons of both the UK and the US Governments. Karski viewed his mission as a failure.  After the delivery of his reports in 1942-1943 in Britain and 1943 to Roosevelt – certainly it was not possible to deny that the Western Governments did not know of the catastrophe of the unfolding Holocaust. 

This work should be mandatory reading in all Undergraduate and post graduate classes taught about the Holocaust and about the history of World War II. I only came across it by accident as I searched for new efforts at interfaith dialog into day’s ever more fractured world.

Monuments to Darkness

Boltanski, Christian. “Monuments to Darkness.” Aperture, no. 142, 1996, pp. 56–59. JSTOR, www .jstor.org/stable/24471802.

• DeRoo, Rebecca J. “Christian Boltanski's Memory Images: Remaking French Museums
• Bergman-Carton, Janis. “Christian Boltanski's: Dernières Années: The History of Violence and the Violence of History.” History and Memory, vol. 13, no. 1, 2001, pp. 3–18. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/his.2001.13.1.3.

‘Shaking The Dust Off’: The Story Of The Warsaw Ghetto's Forgotten Chronicler, Ruben Feldschu (Ben Shem)

Weinbaum, Laurence. “‘Shaking The Dust Off’: The Story Of The Warsaw Ghetto's Forgotten Chronicler, Ruben Feldschu (Ben Shem).” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 22, no. 3/4, 2010, pp. 7-44. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25834896.

The Deputy

Rolf Hochhuth. The Deputy. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston, New York: Grove Press, 1964.  

• Rosenfeld, Alvin H. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Pages 139-152

(Page 140. Rosenfeld)  Hochhuth intended to write a an historical drama based on documentary sources.

The chief characters in the play are: The Pope, (representing Cain – See Rosenfeld P. 147)). The Doctor (based partially on Mengele), Kirt Gerstein and Ricardo, the young priest.

(Page 139. Rosenfeld)  This is a play that focuses not on the tortures of Auschwitz –“ BUT on the torturers – and on criminality of reticence. – “the intentional playing down of the event of Hitler’s war, by ‘palliating and adjusting events to fit the human capacity for imagination…”

(Page 140 Rosenfeld) There is a focus on the SILENCE OF THE CHURCH…who allowed the tortures to happen. “The Church’s silence in the face of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ not only undermined the office of “the highest spiritual authority of the century” but, as a consequence, fundamentally undermined the major moral support structures of European civilization.”

Page 142. Commentary on Kurt Gerstein – Description of who he was and what he did to work against Hitler from the ‘inside’….

Page 148-149. Commentary on bystanders. 

The central didactic point of The Deputy, then, is ringingly clear: far from being “blameless of the blood being spilled,” the bystanders to genocide, and especially those in positions of authority, rare as guilty as the perpetrators….In Hochhuth’s moral reading of history, the Pope’s professed “neutrality” implicated him directly in the Final Solution, for to remain silent before that event was effectively to condone it. 

(Page 149. Rosenfeld) Ignatius Loyola – author of ‘Spiritual Exercises’ Hochhuth cites Loyola’s words in act five as “the natural text for “crematorium reading” and quoted as a kind of prototype of the extermination camps….linking the Church to the Holocaust, not only through the pope but through one of its greatest saints..

Hochhuth. The Deputy, Page 309. Detailed description of how Himmler owned a large extensive library on the Jewsuit Order…. He built up the SS organization according to the principals of the Jesuits, with the Spirtual Exercies of Ignatius of Loyola serving as the foundation…….the supreme law was absolute obedience, and the executions of any order without question.

Billiards at Half Past Nine

Boll, Heinrich. Billiards at Half Past Nine.

Boll's story does not focus on the victim of the Holocaust – but on the ‘civilized German’ who sifts “through the debris of the past in search of usable attitudes towards guilt.”(Langer Page 266.)

• Reference Chapter 7 Of Time and Atrocity – in Langer, “Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.” Pages 266-284.