Story of a Secret State

My Report to the World

Jan Karski

• Verlag: Georgetown University Press
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781589019843
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Intelligence & Espionage

Jan Karski's Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the Polish Underground, and as one of the first accounts of the systematic slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis, this volume is a remarkable testimony of one man's courage and a nation's struggle for resistance against overwhelming oppression.

Karski was a brilliant young diplomat when war broke out in 1939 with Hitler's invasion of Poland. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Red Army, which had simultaneously invaded from the East, Karski narrowly escaped the subsequent Katyn Forest Massacre. He became a member of the Polish Underground, the most significant resistance movement in occupied Europe, acting as a liaison and courier between the Underground and the Polish government-in-exile. He was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, and entered the Nazi's Izbica transit camp disguised as a guard, witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust.

Karski's courage and testimony, conveyed in a breathtaking manner in Story of a Secret State, offer the narrative of one of the world's greatest eyewitnesses and an inspiration for all of humanity, emboldening each of us to rise to the challenge of standing up against evil and for human rights. This definitive edition—which includes a foreword by Madeleine Albright, a biographical essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an afterword by Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously unpublished photos, notes, further reading, and a glossary—is an apt legacy for this hero of conscience during the most fraught and fragile moment in modern history.

1

Defeat

ON THE NIGHT of August 23, 1939, I attended a particularly gay party. It was given by the son of the Portuguese Minister in Warsaw, Mr. Susa de Mendes. He was about twenty-five, my age, and the two of us were good friends. He was the fortunate brother of five charming and beautiful sisters. I saw one of them frequently and was looking forward with keen anticipation to meeting her again that night.

I had not been back in Poland long. After my graduation from the University of Lwów in 1935 and the traditional year in the army, I went abroad, to Switzerland, Germany, and then to England, pursuing researches in the highly interesting and erudite subject of demography. After three years spent in the great libraries of Europe, working at my thesis, improving my knowledge of French, German, and English, and familiarizing myself with the customs of those nations, the death of my father recalled me to Warsaw.

Although demography—the science and statistics of populations—was, and has remained, my favorite subject, it was slowly becoming apparent that I had little or no aptitude for scientific writing. I dawdled and lingered in the completion of my doctor’s thesis and most of my work was rejected as unacceptable. This was the only cloud—and one that disturbed me little—in my otherwise clear and sunny prospect.

The atmosphere of the party was carefree, festive, and in some respects almost lyrical in mood. The huge drawing room of the Legation was adorned in elegant if somewhat romantic style. The wallpaper was a cool shade of blue and contrasted with the dark, severe Italian furniture. The lights were subdued and everywhere were ornate vases of long-stemmed flowers that added their scent to the perfumes of the gayly dressed women. The company was congenial and soon, cheerful and excited discussions spread about the room. I remember some of the topics: a heated defense of the beauties of the Warsaw botanical gardens against the alleged superiority of rival spots in Europe; exchanges of opinions on the merits of the revival of the famous play, Madame Sans-Gêne; bits of scandal and the usual sorties of wit when someone discovered that my good friends, Stefan Leczewski and Mlle. Marcelle Galopin, had vanished from the room—a custom of theirs. Politics were hardly touched.

We drank wine and danced interminably, mostly the airy, mobile European dances, first a waltz, then a tango, then a figured waltz. Later, Helene Susa de Mendes and her brother demonstrated the intricacies of the Portuguese tango.

During the course of the evening I made a number of appointments for the following week. I finally succeeded in convincing Miss de Mendes that I was indispensable as a guide to Warsaw. I made a luncheon and a dinner appointment with two friends, Mr. Leczewski and Mr. Mazur. I promised to meet Miss Obromska the next Sunday and later had to excuse myself when I recollected that it was my aunt’s birthday. I was to telephone Mlle. Galopin to arrange the time of our next riding hour.

The party ended late. The farewells were lengthy, and outside, various groups continued to take leave of each other and to make appointments and arrangements for the balance of the week. I came home tired but so full of intoxicating plans that it was difficult to fall asleep.

It seemed my eyes had hardly closed when there was a loud hammering at the front door. I dragged myself out of bed and began to walk down the steps, breaking into an angry run as the hammering increased in volume. I yanked open the door. An impatient, surly policeman standing on the steps handed me a slip of red paper, grunted unintelligibly, and turned away.

It was a secret mobilization order. It informed me that I was to leave Warsaw within four hours and to join my regiment. I was a second lieutenant in the artillery and my detachment was to be quartered at Oświȩcim,¹ directly on the Polish–German border. Something in the manner of the presentation of the order, or possibly the hour at which it arrived, or the fact that it threw so many of my plans into confusion, made me feel suddenly very serious and even grim.

I woke up my brother and sister-in-law. They were not at all impressed or alarmed and made me feel a little foolish because of the grave air I had assumed.

While I dressed and prepared myself we discussed the situation. It was obviously only a very limited mobilization, we concluded. A handful of us were being called to the colors simply to impress the country with the necessity of being prepared. They cautioned me against burdening myself with too many supplies. My sister-in-law protested when I wanted to include a few suits of winter underwear.

“You aren’t going to Siberia,” she said, looking at me as if I were a romantic schoolboy. “We’ll have you on our hands again within a month.”

I brightened up. It might even turn out to be fun. I remembered that Oświȩcim was situated in the middle of an expanse of fine, open country. I was an enthusiastic horseback rider and I relished the notion of galloping about in uniform on a superb army horse. I carefully packed away my best patent-leather shoes. I began to feel more and more as though I were going to a smart military parade. I completed my preparations in a mood that was almost hilarious. I remarked to my brother that it was too bad that they could not use any old men at the moment. He called me names and threatened to wrestle me and take some of the cockiness out of my hide. His wife had to admonish us both to stop behaving like children and I had to complete my preparations in a hurry because so much time had been wasted.

When I got to the railway depot it looked as though every man in Warsaw were there. I quickly realized that the mobilization was “secret” only in the sense that there were no public announcements or posters. Hundreds of thousands of men must have been called. I remembered a rumor I had heard about two or three days before to the effect that the government had wanted to order a complete mobilization in the face of the German threat but had been prevented by warnings from the representatives of France and England. Hitler was not to be “provoked.” At that time, Europe was still counting on appeasement and reconciliation. Permission for a “secret” mobilization was finally and reluctantly conceded to the Polish government in the face of the nearly naked German preparations for attack.

This I learned later. At the moment, the memory of the rumor disturbed me as little as when I first heard it. Everywhere about me thousands of civilians were swarming to the trains, each carrying an easily recognizable military “locker.” Among them were hundreds of spruce, animated reserve officers, some of whom waved to each other and called out to friends as they, too, hustled to the train. I gazed about for a familiar face and, seeing none, made my way to the train.

I had to almost force my way in. The cars were packed; every seat was occupied. The corridors were jammed with standing men and even the lavatories were crowded. Everyone looked full of energy, enthusiastic, and even exhilarated. The reserve officers were trim and confident, the mood of the civilians a trifle less exuberant as though many of them did not care to have their business or work interrupted by such an expedition, however painless it appeared. The engine chugged and the train began to crawl forward slowly to the usual comments of “We’re moving, we’re moving!” which finally rose to a full-throated exultant shout of pure, meaningless excitement as we cleared the station and sped onward.

During the journey, I became increasingly impressed with the seriousness of the occasion. I still did not have the remotest inkling of how close actual warfare was but I could see that this was obviously no pleasure jaunt but a full-dress mobilization. At each station new cars were added, which absorbed fresh crowds, now composed chiefly of peasants. They were a little more businesslike and seemed to consider the probability of actual warfare somewhat more realistically. The village boys in particular stepped into the cars with what seemed to us to amount to a parody of quiet, adult determination and steadfast enterprise. Everyone, however, still seemed eager and confident. Even if by now the tone was a more settled one of “there’s work to be done,” the mood was still far from dismal. Except, of course, for the women—wives, sisters, and mothers—who thronged every platform like so many wailing Niobes, wringing their hands, hugging their men, and trying to withhold the departure if it were only for another second. The boys, ashamed, would tear themselves firmly away from their mothers’ arms.

“Let me go, Mother,” I remember hearing a boy of about twenty call out loudly at one of the stations. “Soon you can come and visit me in Berlin.”

With the long stops at every station to hook on cars and take on passengers, the journey to Oświȩcim took nearly twice as long as it should have. By the time we reached the camp it was well into the night and the heat, congestion, and fatigue from the long hours on our feet had wilted the fresh spirits with which we had begun. After a fairly good dinner, considering the hour at which we arrived, we revived somewhat and I went to the officers’ quarters in the company of a group of officers with whom I had become more or less familiar at the mess. I did not find all the officers of our division. Two batteries of the horse artillery had already been sent to the frontier. Only the third battery and a reserve were still in the camp.

As we strolled toward the barracks, we tended to avoid any weighty subjects and confined ourselves to topics of more immediate moment.

Second Lieutenant Pietrzak, a student at the Cracow University, remarked that he was half-dead from exhaustion. Like myself, he had been to a ball the previous night. It had been, he gave us to understand, a very magnificent and glamorous gathering. His success with the ladies had been unbelievable; he had actually had to resort to Machiavellian subterfuges to avoid becoming involved with a number of importunate belles. At any rate, he was a few doors away from the entrance to his house when he noticed a policeman ascending the steps. Terrified, he shrank back and wondered which event in his reckless existence had attracted the notice of the law. He then drew for our benefit a comic picture of the panicky interval he had spent waiting for the policeman to withdraw, his guilty tiptoed entrance into the house, and his mingled consternation and relief when he found that his presence was desired merely at an army camp and not in the court of law.

The entire story was promptly disbelieved and admired by everybody present. It gave rise to a similar series of anecdotes about the previous night, although of a more plausible variety. The remarks of relatives and wives were cited, we informed each other about our backgrounds and interests, and began to form bonds of friendships that were destined to last but a few short days.

Pietrzak, the young man who told the first story, became my constant companion. He came from an affluent family and his occupation, as nearly as I could discover, consisted of something nebulous in the world of finance. Like myself, he was extremely fond of horses and books and this, coupled with his inordinate urge to tell anecdotes, made him an ideal companion for me during the next few days. The anecdotes, I later discovered, were compounded from the same odd and invariant formula of a core of truth surrounded by comic exaggerations and downright inventions.

I had the opportunity of listening to many of them in the pleasant Officers’ Club at Oświȩcim. Army routine and drill were more than usually severe and caused considerable grumbling but did not exhaust us sufficiently to mar our leisurely evenings and even left enough free time for Pietrzak and myself to indulge our desire for excursions on horseback into the beautiful surrounding country, under the brilliant and cloudless sky of the Polish summer.

It is difficult to explain why, but, in the evenings at the club, by almost mutual consent, we tended to shy off any political topic that seemed likely to prove either too controversial or too weighty. When we did, at length, launch upon a consideration of the present position and the possibilities that were in store for us, our opinions tended to confirm each other and finally congealed into a uniform optimism that served admirably to protect us from doubt, fear, and the need to think clearly about the complex changes that were taking place in the structure of European politics with a rapidity that we could not and did not want to understand. I know that in myself there was an inertia of thought that simply would not let my mind make any effort to grasp at this frightful novelty. My whole past and present mode of existence would have been too deeply threatened.

There were, too, the remarks my brother had made during the hours immediately after the mobilization. My brother, who was my senior by nearly a score of years, held an important government position and had belonged, as far back as I could remember, to the “well-informed circles.”² The citations which Pietrzak made from his father, who had even more authoritative channels of information, amplified and confirmed the analysis given by my brother. Others joined in with gleanings from relatives, friends, and their personal deductions. The entire compilation, when sifted down, tended to leave us with the conclusion that our mobilization was simply the Polish riposte to the Nazi war of nerves. Germany was weak and Hitler was bluffing. When he saw that Poland was strong, united, and prepared, he would back down quickly and we should all go home. If not, the farcical little fanatic would be taught a severe lesson by Poland and, if necessary, by England and France.

One evening our Major said:

“England and France are not needed this time. We can finish this alone.”

Pietrzak remarked dryly:

“Yes, sir, we are strong, but … well, but … it is always nice to be in good company.”

On September 1, around 5:00 a.m., while the soldiers of our Mounted Artillery Division tranquilly slept, the Luftwaffe roared through the short distance to Oświȩcim undetected and, perched above our camp, proceeded to rain a blazing shower of incendiaries on the entire region. At the same hour, hundreds of the powerful and modern German tanks crossed the frontier and hurled a tremendous barrage of shells into the flaming ruins.

The extent of the death, destruction, and disorganization this combined fire caused in three short hours was incredible. By the time our wits were sufficiently collected even to survey the situation, it was apparent that we were in no position to offer any serious resistance. Nevertheless, a few batteries, by some miracle, managed to hold together long enough to hurl some shots in the direction of the tanks. By noon, two batteries of our artillery had ceased to exist.

The barracks were almost completely in ruins and the railroad station had been leveled. When it became apparent that we were incapable of any serious resistance, the retreat, if such it could be called, began. Our reserve battery received orders to leave Oświȩcim in formation and to take our guns, supplies, and ammunition in the direction of Cracow. As we marched through the streets of Oświȩcim toward the railroad, to our complete astonishment and dismay, the inhabitants began firing at us from the windows. They were Polish citizens of German descent, the Nazi Fifth Column, who were, in this fashion, announcing their new allegiance. Most of our men instantly wanted to attack and set fire to every suspect house but were restrained by the superior officers. Such actions would have disrupted our march, which was exactly what the Fifth Column wanted. Moreover, loyal, patriotic Polish people also lived in these houses.³

When we reached the railroad, we were compelled to wait while the track was being repaired. We sat down under the blazing sun and gazed back at the burning buildings, the hysterical population, and the treacherous windows of Oświȩcim until the train was ready. We boarded it in weary, disgusted silence and began crawling eastward—toward Cracow.

During the night, the train was held up by innumerable delays. We slept fitfully, and in our waking moments cursed, speculated on what had happened, and expressed our unanimous desire for an early and more favorable opportunity to do battle. Early the next day a dozen or so Heinkels appeared to bomb and strafe the train for nearly an hour. More than half the cars were hit and most of their occupants were killed or wounded. My car was untouched. The survivors left the wreckage of the train and, without bothering to organize or form ranks, proceeded on foot in an easterly direction.

We were now no longer an army, a detachment, or a battery, but individuals wandering collectively toward some wholly indefinite goal. We found the highways jammed with hundreds of thousands of refugees, soldiers looking for their commands, and others just drifting with the tide. This mass of humanity continued to move slowly eastward for two weeks. I found myself with a group that still constituted a recognizable military fragment. We kept hoping to find a new base of resistance where we could stop and fight. Each time we found one that looked at all suitable, an order to continue marching would somehow filter through the mob to our captain, who would shrug his shoulders and point wearily to the east.

Bad news followed us like vultures feeding on the remnants of our confidence: the Germans had occupied Poznań, then Łódź, Kielce, Cracow. Frequent strafings reiterated that whatever planes or anti-aircraft had been ours had vanished. The smoking, abandoned ruins of towns, railroad junctions, villages, and cities added to our bitter knowledge.

After fifteen days of marching—fatigued, sweating, bewildered, and resentful—on September 18 we approached the city of Tarnopol.⁴

The road to Tarnopol was so hot and our feet and shoes were in such poor condition from nearly four days of continuous marching that the hard surface of the road caused too much pain to be borne for long. Most of us preferred to walk along the soft sides, even though it meant proceeding more slowly.

As w...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on the Text
• Publisher’s Note
• Preface
• Foreword
• Biographical Essay of Jan Karski xxv
• 1 Defeat
• 2 Prisoner in Russia
• 3 Exchange and Escape
• 4 Devastated Poland
• 5 The Beginning
• 6 Transformation
• 7 Initiation
• 8 Borecki
• 9 Contact between Cells
• 10 Mission to France
• 11 The Underground State
• 12 Caught by the Gestapo
• 13 Torture
• 14 The SS Hospital
• 15 Rescue
• 16 The “Gardener”
• 17 Propaganda from the Country
• 18 Execution of a Traitor
• 19 The Four Branches of the Underground
• 20 The Laskowa Apartment
• 21 Assignment in Lublin
• 22 Retribution
• 23 The Secret Press
• 24 My “Conspiratorial Apparatus”
• 25 The Liaison Women
• 26 Marriage per Procuram
• 27 School—Underground
• 28 Parliament in Poland
• 29 The Ghetto
• 30 “To Die in Agony . . .” 320
• 31 Unter den Linden Revisited
• 32 Journey through France and Spain
• 33 My Report to the World
• Notes
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Afterword
• Index