Karski birth centenary marked with new book release

Photo: cc/wikipedia

The book tells of Karski’s war-time plight, his time in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he was smuggled by Jewish underground leaders to learn about the conditions there, his arrest and torture by the Gestapo and his missions to London and Washington on behalf of the Polish Government’s Delegate in Poland to inform Allied leaders about the Holocaust.

Karski wrote the book in Washington between May and August 1944. It was published there the same year and sold over 360,000 copies in the US by the end of the war.

The first Polish edition of ‘Story of a Secret State’ was published in 1999. Several years ago, the book was published by Penguin in the UK.

The new publication coincides with the centenary of Karski’s birth on 24 April. It is marked with a wide range of events in Poland, the United States, Israel and several other countries.

After the war, Karski settled in the United States and became a professor at Georgetown University in Washington. He remained an advocate of Holocaust memory until his death in 2000, aged 86.

In 2012, Jan Karski was posthumously awarded the US Medal of Freedom, America’s top civilian honour, by President Barack Obama. (mk/jb)