Polish Hero Who Sought To Save Jews Is Honored

A Polish resistance fighter during World War II who elected to visit Jewish ghettos and labor camps in order to bear witness to the war's atrocities was honored yesterday in Manhattan.

During a ceremony on a brisk afternoon, a statue in Jan Karski's likeness was unveiled in front of the De Lamar Mansion, the Polish Consulate's residence on East 37th Street. Karski, who died in 2000, was an underground courier during the war who has been credited with relaying information to Allied leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

"He saw, he knew, and he reacted," a special envoy for the president of Poland, Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, said yesterday. "He was a man of action."

Yesterday's ceremony coincided with the Polish Independence Day and Veterans Day, when thousands of American veterans marked the day by marching up Fifth Avenue in a parade.

"November 11th is an important date for Poland, for America, and for the world," Poland's consul general, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, said. "It is fitting that we should honor Jan Karski at this time."

Other dignitaries offered similar praise. "He did something that few people — heroic or otherwise — would do," Mayor Koch said. "He reached outside his nation and he sought to save the Jewish people."

Mr. Koch added that Karski's testimony fell on deaf ears. "If they had believed him, they could have saved millions of people," he said. Born Jan Kozielewski in Poland in 1914, Karski was a Catholic diplomat who joined the Polish army in 1939 at the start of World War II. In September of that year, the Russian army captured his unit, and Karski — his underground pseudonym — became a prisoner of war.

After managing to escape, Karski joined a developing underground movement in Warsaw. He subsequently went on several missions to relay information to France and other Allied countries about the war. During that time, he was captured several times but managed to escape.

Notably, Karski elected to visit the Warsaw ghetto, where thousands of Polish Jews had been sent. He also chose to infiltrate a labor camp, becoming a witness to the killing of Jews and other Nazi prisoners.

In 1943, Karski secured an audience with Roosevelt, and he used the opportunity to tell the American president about what he saw. He would later meet with the likes of Churchill.

"People didn't believe the message that Jan Karski brought from Poland," the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, Israel, Yisrael Meir Lau, said yesterday.

"He just said he did what had to be done," a former ambassador of Poland to Israel, Maciej Kozlowski, said.

Karski became an American citizen in 1954, and for four decades was a professor of European studies at Georgetown University, where President Clinton was one of his students.

Yesterday, Mr. Kasprzyk read a statement from Mr. Clinton: "The life of Jan Karski is an inspirational story of one man with the courage to speak with truth … even in the face of unimaginable danger."