Karski is astonished at the transformation Feiner undergoes at this point, moving instantly from being a tall ‘nobleman’ to shuffling like a bent old man, waiting for death. Karski tries to disguise himself in the same way, stooping and hiding his face under a tattered cap. We have to remember here that Feiner is by now accustomed to the terrifying reality of ghetto existence – because he, as one of the Jewish leaders, is ‘privileged’ to be able to move in and out of the ghetto regularly, using this secret passage. Indeed, Karski realises that Feiner and Kirschenbaum have become adept at blending in to living in Aryan Warsaw, and then transforming themselves when they visit the ghetto, like skilled actors. We can only try to imagine what is going through Karski’s mind in the seconds before the three men emerge from the basement into the daylight of the ghetto.
He describes the forty yards of earth which they have crawled through as connecting ‘the world of the living to the world of the dead’, and, despite the vivid descriptions of what had been happening in the ghetto that he’d heard from Feiner and Kirschenbaum, Karski is totally unprepared psychologically for what he now sees:
To pass that wall was to enter into a new world utterly unlike anything that had ever been imagined. The entire population of the ghetto seemed to be living in the street. There was hardly a square yard of empty space. As we picked our way across the mud and the rubble, the shadows of what had been men or women flitted by us in pursuit of someone or something, their eyes blazing with insane hunger … apart from their skin, eyes and voice there was nothing human left in these palpitating figures. Everywhere there was hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children, the desperate cries and gasps of a people struggling for life against impossible odds.
Karski sees people holding on to walls for support, barely breathing. He hears their cries offering to barter rags of clothing for morsels of food. He smells, and then sees, naked corpses left in the street. He finds out from his guide that the Germans have instituted a burial tax that nobody can afford to pay. From an upstairs window of one of the houses, he witnesses a ‘game’ that two teenage boys, with pistols, are ‘playing’ in the street below. They are members of the Hitler Youth, and they are, quite literally, hunting Jews. The pavement below has emptied now, but Karski sees one of the boys taking aim at a spot just outside his line of vision. Then a shot rings out, followed by the sound of breaking glass and the terrible cries of a man in agony. The boys walk off, towards the ghetto exit, smiling at each other, and ‘chatting cheerfully as if they were returning from a sporting event’. Karski is in shock now. He cannot move or speak for several minutes. Eventually the guide takes him and Feiner out of the ghetto and back to the land of the living.
Two days later Karski makes another, longer, visit to the ghetto so that he can memorise even more of this apocalyptic desolation to take with him on his mission to London – to shake the conscience of the world. After this, Feiner asks him to do one further act of witnessing, this one even more dangerous – to go into an extermination camp and see the Nazis’ ‘final solution’ in action. And so, in early September 1942, Karski and a guide take a train to Lublin, and then a car further east to the village of Izbica Lubelska.fn2
How is it possible for us to understand the impact of these three episodes on him? The word traumatic – if we use it in its original Greek sense of trauma meaning ‘wound’, and not today’s overused synonym for disturbing or upsetting – perhaps gets us close to what Karski experienced. It’s clear that he never truly recovered from what he saw. I feel that his decision – to risk his life to witness these atrocities, and then to attempt to tell the world what was happening – puts him in a category of moral courage and fierce altruism almost without parallel. He knew that he probably would not come out of this alive; and, even if he survived, he knew that he would be emotionally and psychically wounded for the rest of his life.
Reading, or hearing, Karski’s words will almost certainly affect your way of looking at the world too. His testimony at the end of Shoah is astounding. It overwhelms us, takes us into territory beyond the human capacity to process; it is also mesmerising. In the end, though, we realise that Karski’s act of witnessing is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of humanity. Each word of his, however terrifying, paradoxically takes us further away from the annihilation that Nazism attempted. As Hannah Arendt later wrote, ‘holes of oblivion’ (which totalitarian regimes attempt to create) ‘do not exist … there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.’ This was why Lanzmann pursued Karski for years when he was making Shoah, trying to persuade him to be interviewed, and it’s why he gives him more time than any other witness who appears in the course of those nine and a half hours of film.
You will never be able to forget his face. The astonishing dignity of this man as he speaks. You can see the physical manifestation of complete trauma in Karski’s body, as he begins to give his testimony. His body is fighting with his memory. His eyes dart as he travels back thirty-five years in his mind to that August afternoon in Warsaw. His voice attempting to be calm but trembling: ‘Now … now I go back thirty-five years. No! I don’t go back!’ He fights the panic that comes with memory, knowing that he is about to open the wounds again, seeing the days of barbarism again in his mind. The act of remembering tortures him, and yet he then says, ‘I understand this film is for historical record, so I will try to do it.’ The staggering personal cost of bearing witness. The weight on his shoulders as he begins to speak. And then the vivid clarity of these words, emerging in a flow of total intensity, as if he cannot operate any of the usual filters we use when describing terrible events. He simply describes the reality of what he saw with his own eyes. Though he repeatedly emphasises the limitations of words and our human imagination when faced with such an apocalypse.
There is a passage towards the end of Story of a Secret State in which he attempts to describe his physical and mental state having just returned to the village of Izbica Lubelska, having seen the extermination of Jewish men, women and children at the camp. I have never heard anyone refer to this moment in Karski’s life, but it demonstrates graphically the impact this act of witnessing had on him. When he gets back to the little shop where the Polish resistance man is sheltering him, he immediately strips off the uniform he’s been wearing and washes himself obsessively in the kitchen behind the shop, flooding it in the process. Then he goes outside, at the back of the shop:
I wrapped my coat around me and went out into a tiny vegetable garden. I lay down under a tree and with the promptness of utter exhaustion, fell asleep. I awoke with a start, from some nightmare, I think. It was dark, except for a large, brilliant moon. I was stiff with cold and for a moment I could not remember where I was and how I had got there. When I did, I dashed inside the house and found an empty bed. My host was asleep. It was not long before I was too.
I awoke in the morning. The sunlight, though not strong, was giving me a painful headache. My host stood over me asking if I was ill. I had been talking and twisting restlessly in my sleep. As soon as I got out of bed I was seized with a violent fit of nausea. I rushed outside and began to vomit. Throughout that day and during the next day I continued to vomit at intervals. When all the food had been emptied from my stomach, I threw up a red liquid … I slept brokenly for the balance of the day and throughout the following night …