Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World by Jan Karski

The Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World is a nonfiction work by Jan Karski. This is a remarkable WWII story about the Polish Underground, and it was actually first published before the end of the war, in 1944. Karski was a courier, both within Poland among various ranking members of the Underground, and outside the country, culminating in meetings with both Churchill and FDR. Mostly, this was a story about the remarkable organization and functioning of the Underground in defiance of Hitler. Every mission was done at the risk of torture and death. Surely, Karski’s real work as a courier was the template for subsequent novels about the clandestine activities during the Cold War by some of our favorite authors.

Karski wrote, “The German Occupation, contrary to the general belief, was not successful, at least not in it’s policing aspect. The experience of the Underground movements, not only in Poland but in all of the occupied countries, has shown that the machine of repression was powerless against a clandestine body that was well-organized and that benefited from the strong support of the people…. The average German police officer was most often a totally ignorant, uneducated sadist, as well as a criminal. In 1982, the Gestapo, the Underground estimated, had more than 60,000 agents in Poland alone, backed by a huge army. Yet they were never able to crush the elaborate organism of resistance we offered them and almost never broke through to its central agencies.”

In the course of his missions for the Underground, Karski who was a lifelong practicing Catholic, came in contact with ranking Polish Jews who told him that the Polish Jews were not just being contained in the ghettos or transferred to labor camps, but they were being murdered. Once he believed the wholesale slaughter was actually true, he knew he had to see it for himself if he was to provide believable accounts to the outside world. He was smuggled in and out of the Warsaw ghetto and then one death camp where he saw the unspeakable horrors as they were being committed. Then, he was the first to report to the outside world on the extermination of the Polish Jews by the Third Reich. While he gave a description of FDR’s heartfelt response to this startling information, it was clear that neither FDR or Churchill were willing to change their tactics or the course of the war in order to save the Jews who continued to be slaughtered until the war’s end.

The writing was dramatic and detailed the death of many of the Underground participants with whom Karski interacted. The lifespan of any person working for the organization was quite short, and Karski’s survival through the war was evidence of his skill and, often, good luck. After the war, Karski moved to the U.S. and got his Ph.D. at Georgetown where he became a professor for the next 40 years. He became a U.S. citizen in 1954, and he lived until the age of 86 and died in 2000.

According to Wikipedia, “During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995 Karski said about the failure to rescue most of the Jews from mass murder;

It was easy for the Nazis to kill Jews, because they did it. The Allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it. The Jews were abandoned by all governments, church hierarchies and societies, but thousands of Jews survived because thousands of individuals in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland helped to save Jews. Now, every government and church says, ‘We tried to help the Jews’, because they are ashamed, they want to keep their reputations. They didn't help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough.”