In the list of righteous gentiles - the highest compliment Jews can bestow upon those of other faiths - the Polish Catholic, Jan Karski, who died on July 13th aged 86, stands alongside Oskar Schindler. It was Jan Karski, an eminent member of the wartime Polish resistance, who, on clandestine visits to the west, gave the Allies some of the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. Western leaders responded with disbelief and incredulity.
Born in Lodz, the youngest of eight children, he was the son of Stefan Kozielewski, the owner of a small tannery and leather goods factory. He was deeply influenced by his mother, Walentyna, a supporter of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the revolutionary leader who ruled Poland after the 1926 coup d'etat.
The fiercely Catholic Walentyna also imbued him with a tolerance for others, particularly for Lodz's large prewar Jewish population. After military service, in 1936 he was sent to the Polish mission in Geneva, where he perfected his French, before going to London in 1937.
He returned to Warsaw a year before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. A few weeks later, the Soviets invaded from the east, and Jan Karski, by then an artillery officer, was captured and sent to Kozelschina Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. He managed to escape, disguised as a private; his fellow Polish officers were massacred at Katyn by the Soviets.
His courage, linguistic skills and photographic memory made him a valuable courier in the Polish underground. But in Slovakia, in 1940, he was betrayed, arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Eventually, after a suicide attempt, he escaped, helped by Polish partisans.
Disguised as a Jew, in 1942 he entered the Warsaw ghetto to witness the horrors he had heard rumoured. Then, disguised as a Latvian guard, he was smuggled into Izbica Lubelska, a concentration camp between Lublin and Belzec, where Jews were robbed before transportation to a death camp. He saw Jews being burned alive in quicklime.
By this time he had become known as "Witold", Poland's most famous courier. Leaders of all political factions - from anti-semitic Polish fascists to those who represented the Polish Jews - trusted him with messages for the Allies.
In London in 1942, and in Washington the following year, Jan Karski briefed political and religious leaders, telling them of the extermination of Poland's Jews. But Allied leaders, including the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, reacted with indifference or disbelief. "Maybe they did not believe, maybe they thought I was exaggerating," he said in an interview in 1995.
Alongside Roosevelt at a meeting he attended in Washington were the president's top Jewish advisers, among them Justice Felix Frankfurter, of the US supreme court. Having heard Jan Karski's testimony, he said: "I am unable to believe you." Others, however, appeared to be more convinced. In London, he met the Polish emigre artist, Felix Topolski, and Arthur Koestler, then a refugee from Hungary, whose novel, Arrival and Departure, is partly based on Jan Karski's experiences.
He remained in America and, in 1944, his memoirs, Story of a Secret State, became a bestseller. After the war he became a US citizen and professor of international relations at Georgetown University. During the McCarthy period, he went on anti-communist lecture tours in Asia for the state department.
In 1994, he was made an honorary citizen of the state of Israel. On Jerusalem's Avenue of the Righteous, leading to the Holocaust musem, Yad Vashem, there is a tree planted with his name.
He married the Polish Jewish dancer, Pola Nirenska, in l956. She died in 1992.
Jan Karski: born 1914; died, July 2000