A statue of Jan Karski erected in New York - News bulletin

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A statue of Jan Karski erected in New York
2007-11-22 15:24:29

An official unveiling of a statue of Jan Karski, the heroic Polish Home Army courier, who was the first to provide the Allies with a report of the extermination of Jews in German-occupied Poland, was held in New York. The statue, by Karol Badyna, represents Karski sitting on a bench. It is located on the corner of 37th Street and Madison Avenue, which will now be called "Jan Karski Corner".

Manhattan also has statues and squares belonging, among others, to Golda Meir – the former Israeli Prime Minister and the Swedish diplomat Raul Wallenberg (who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the war).

The ceremony was attended by the undersecretary of state of the President of the Republic of Poland’s chancery – Ewa Juńczyk-Ziomecka, the chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv – Meir Lau, the Republic of Poland’s attorney for contacts with the Jewish Diaspora – Maciej Kozłowski, the undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Andrzej Sadoś, the Consul General of the Republic of Poland in New York – Krzysztof Kasprzyk and the former mayor of New York – Edward Koch. Despite the cold, about 250 people attended the ceremony.

During the ceremony, letters from former US President Bill Clinton – a former student of Jan Karski at Georgetown University in Washington, and Władysław Bartoszewski, writer and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland, an activist in the underground Home Army during Nazi occupation and a Stalinist prisoner, were read.

Jan Karski (real name: Kozielewski) was born in 1914 into a Catholic family in Łódź. After graduating in law, he began work in diplomacy. During the Second World War, as an emissary of the Home Army to the Polish Government in Exile, he gave the Allies a detailed account of the extermination of Jews in Poland. In the US, he among others met with President F.D. Roosevelt, who did not, however, believe his reports on the Holocaust.

During a later courier mission, Karski (his wartime underground pseudonym) was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. So as not to breakdown – he tried to commit suicide by cutting his veins. Taken to hospital, he managed to escape with the aid of Poles working there.

To corroborate his reports on the Holocaust, Karski twice entered the Warsaw ghetto in disguise with the aid of “Żegota” (the Council of Aid for Jews) and Irena Sendlerowa, who saved 2,500 Jewish children by transporting them out of the ghetto.

In 1994, the 80th anniversary of Karski’s birthday, he was given honorary citizenship of Israel. He also received the Righteous Among the Nations title from the Yad Vashem Institute.

Jan Karski died in July 2000 in Washington. TZAL

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