Once, in Slovakia in June 1940, he is captured, then interrogated and tortured over five days by the Gestapo, who suspect that he is a courier for the Polish underground. He has several ribs broken, and loses many teeth; he describes the pain of the beatings he endures as being ‘something like the sensation produced when a dentist’s drill strikes a nerve, but infinitely multiplied and spread over the entire nervous system’. On his fifth evening in captivity, he’s reached a point of despair where he knows he will not be able to survive any more torture. As the thought of cracking and betraying his comrades is unbearable to him, he realises the only course of action left to him is to try to commit suicide, using a razor blade secreted in the sole of one of his boots. He feels overwhelmed by hatred and disgust for the world, which surpasses even the physical pain he is in. He describes thinking of ‘my mother, my childhood, my career, my hopes. I felt a bottomless sorrow that I had to die a wretched, inglorious death, like a crushed insect, miserable and anonymous.’ He realises that in all probability nobody will ever learn how he’s died or even where his body lies. And then, when the guards have finished their evening rounds, he draws a cross in soot on his cell wall, and writes with his finger ‘My beloved motherland … I love you’, and then he cuts his wrists, watching the blood forming in pools around his legs. Eventually, he loses consciousness.
He wakes in a Slovakian hospital, in Prešov, with guards in the ward. He’s told that he was found only moments from death, and is now to be given a blood transfusion – the Gestapo sense how important this member of the Polish underground could be. Karski understands they want to save him only so that the information he has can be extracted through further torture. But, before that can happen, he spends some days in the hospital slowly recovering. A Slovakian nurse smuggles in a newspaper, and Karski reads the headline ‘France Surrenders!’ and is filled with renewed despair. Only Britain now stands between Nazism’s domination of the whole of Europe. As a devout Catholic, all Karski can do is pray. He prays passionately that Churchill and his fighting men will be given strength and courage, that they will never admit defeat.
After eleven days, he is abruptly transferred under armed guard to another hospital in a town in southern Poland, which Karski recognises as Nowy Sącz – by coincidence, the place where Karski had stayed a month earlier, with comrades in the Polish underground, before crossing the border into Slovakia. He begins to think there might just possibly be a chance of escaping. But first he has to evade the attentions of the Gestapo guards stationed around the clock in his ward.
On the second day in hospital he starts to moan feverishly, whispering that he knows he’s close to death, and needs to see a priest urgently, so that he can receive absolution before he dies. The Gestapo guard grudgingly agrees, and follows Karski, in a wheelchair, helped by a doctor and a nurse, down to the hospital chapel. Here Karski enters the confessional, while the others wait outside, sitting on the chapel pews. And then, after his confession, an extraordinary exchange unfolds with the elderly priest, all in whispers, a conversation that will save Karski’s life and lead to the priest’s death. Jan hesitates, trying to work up the courage to ask the priest for help. The priest tells him again, ‘Go in peace,’ but Jan doesn’t move. Eventually he whispers, ‘Father, I want you to carry a message to someone for me … her name is Zofia Rysiowna. She lives at 2 Matejko Street.’ Eventually the priest replies, ‘And what is it that you want me to tell her?’ Karski gives his resistance code name, and asks the priest to tell her that he is being held at the hospital, it’s a matter of life and death. The priest hesitates again, telling Karski it’s an abuse of the confessional, but yes, on this occasion he will convey the message. A few days later, in one of the most remarkable operations of the Polish underground during the war, a team of resistance fighters, in co-operation with nurses, doctors and priests at the hospital, manage to spring Karski from his imprisonment.fn1
Over the next two years Jan, under his resistance name of Witold Kucharski, becomes an indispensable leader of the resistance in Poland, working underground in Krakow and Warsaw, helping the Polish Bureau of Information and Propaganda, establishing methods of gaining greater access to Allied radio broadcasts, and co-ordinating publications of Polish resistance books and leaflets.
In summer 1942 Karski is chosen to be the courier for one of the most vital missions of the entire war – to give the Polish government-in-exile, based in London, a complete overview of the political and military capacity of the resistance in Poland, and communicate exactly what is needed at this critical point in the conflict. This is the exact moment when the extermination of the Polish Jews is accelerating – the first waves of deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka begin on 22 July. Although the relationship between the Polish resistance and the Jewish underground is continually problematic – inevitably affected by historic antisemitism in Catholic Poland – Karski himself had always been strongly philosemitic. He had been influenced powerfully by growing up in Lodz (with its 40 per cent Jewish population in the 1920s and 30s), and by his mother’s insistence on respect and equality for all faiths and ethnicities; indeed many of his closest childhood friends were Jewish. So when it is suggested to Karski that he should meet with Jewish leaders before leaving Poland, he agrees enthusiastically. This meeting is to change Karski’s life for ever. It also proves to be of great historical significance.
‘There is nothing a man will not do to another; nothing a man will not do for another.’1
*
‘Listening to an Earthquake’
One day towards the end of August 1942, Karski is in Warsaw and receives a message that he is to meet two Jewish underground leaders in a bombed-out house in the suburbs of the city. By the time he has found the rendezvous, it’s close to dusk. Karski enters the building and meets the two men, senior representatives of the Jewish community in Poland. He never learns their real names (the entire underground worked on code names for reasons of security), but we now know they were Leon Feiner, the leader of the Jewish Socialist Alliance, known as the Bund, and Menachem Kirschenbaum, head of the main Zionist organisation in Poland. Karski immediately recognises the political significance of this – that these representatives, who before the war would have been bitter enemies, are now in the same room, united in the face of imminent annihilation. They converse in whispers, around a single candle, and what Karski learns appals him, as he later recounts, the memory seared in his mind for the rest of his life:
It was an evening of nightmare, but with a painful, oppressive kind of reality that no nightmare ever had. I sat in an old, rickety armchair … I didn’t move … perhaps because what I was hearing had frozen me to the spot in terror. [The two men] paced the floor violently, their shadows dancing weirdly in the dim light cast by the single candle … It was as though they were unable even to think of their dying people and remain seated.
Both men make it clear to Karski that the predicament of the Jews, and their own fate, is completely hopeless. They have already accepted the inevitability of death. Karski is struck by how Feiner carries himself – his stoicism, his air of refinement; he could easily have been passed ‘as a Polish nobleman’. Kirschenbaum is younger, far more nervous and emotional. He explains, with passionate force, the fundamental difference between Poland’s position and that of the Polish Jews: