Few Words about Jan Karski
A tribute by Michael Szporer
How to write of a man whose heroic stature far exceeds his modest frame, one of the larger than life figures of the last century? I do not know why Jan Karski befriended me, but I certainly feel privileged to have known him. In his impish way, he loved to chide me, nicknaming me "Endek" [from Endecja] once, meaning "zealot," because of my association with Solidarity. It was the Professor's way to make me own up to myself. Karski did that to people and nations. I would return his banter, say I was really more like him with Josef Pilsudski, having left my heart in Vilnius in more ways than one. Jan Karski was fond of Josef Pilsudski, the Lithuanian founder of modern Poland. We debated much, over wine at diner in an Irish pub he found pleasant near his modest apartment in Chevy Chase filled with photos by his beloved wife Paula, a dancer, and quite an avid photographer.
Quite unabashedly, I am a Jan Karski zealot! Karski explained to me better than I could myself why I felt close to Solidarity. It had to do with my private war and exile, he said. I tried to grasp how he, so articulate and astute observer of human behavior and deeds, could have been so misunderstood by some, as had happened in his later years..
To hear, as some wrote of him in homages, that he was the precursor of our age dedicated to the spirit of human rights, would have probably embarrassed him. Karski was extraordinarily modest, dislocated by an incredible chain of events of his life, which he might have felt diminished anyone in their grandeur, and certainly overwhelmed him. They would have anyone but he lived them as Karski, as the man who tried to stop the killing of a people..
Karski believed in the great solidarity of humankind. It is what he most loved about America, and its triumph in this modern, post-ideological age, when ideologies became just ideas, and heroes like him people leading ordinary lives. It would be like Karski to believe that he retired from history after the war and became a Georgetown University professor, that when he returned to communist Poland as a Fulbrighter, he returned as a forgotten man. He was not forgotten, I am sure, but he must have been holy even to the communists..
Karski was a living legend, and living legends never die--ought not. The Professor would chastise me for that line, if only because what makes us what we are is what we do, how we live. Karski lived honestly. He wished for Poland, really for that sad part of the world from which he came and which has seen so much chaos and human suffering, to grow past its divisions. He wished for the world to mature to decency..
Like Czeslaw Milosz, Tomas Venclova, and Josif Brodsky, the great witness to the Holocaust thought that the ethos of his homeland was overwrought, at times hysterical and wallowing in past woes. Central Europe was still clinging to past formalities, without sense or honest appraisal of itself, and had to heal after years of wars, devastation, ethnic animosities and the terrible atrocities of Hitler and Stalin..
Always the cavalry officer to the core, who escaped Katyn fate by sheer chance of his boots, who later leaped out of a Gestapo window, Karski was no wallower; and he had little use for self-aggrandizement and arrogant banality. He was a keen observer of his time, a visionary until the end. I would add in his later years, he became a healer of souls, not only of nations, but of individuals. It was not only his tolerance, or Caritas, but an understanding that witnessing life meant commitment..
How Jan Karski loved life, how he relished in its nuances! His penetrating eye saw through events and people. Simply knowing him made us better, perhaps a touch truer to ourselves. He was the gentlest, and most compassionate individual, I had ever known. Sometimes simple words ring true, sometimes heroes are for real..
From Siec Info, Internet Issue 51 (4), July 2000; reprinted with permission