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Jan Karski, From Hell on Earth to U.S. Presidential Honor
(JTA) Rafael Medoff - On May 29, Jan Karski, who served in the World War II-era Polish underground, was awarded, posthumously, a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his courage and sacrifice, and taking action when so many others stood silent. Karski, a Polish Catholic, was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, as the Nazis were deporting hundreds of thousands of Warsaw's Jews to the gas chambers of Treblinka. Karski, determined to alert the world to what he had witnessed, traveled by train across Germany, occupied Belgium, and France. He hiked across the Pyrenees mountains into Spain, and from there traveled to London. Karski was able to secure a meeting with British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, but Eden showed little interest in Karski's account of the slaughter of the Jews. On July 28, 1943, the Polish courier met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt where Karski related details of the mass killings of the Jews. Roosevelt seemed to view the suffering of the Jews as just another unfortunate aspect of what civilians suffer in every war. He did not believe it was justified for the U.S. to use its resources to rescue Jews from the Nazis. And he did not want hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees clamoring to be admitted to the U.S. The writer is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.