Citation

Brenner RF. Polish Review 2020; 65(3): 30-41.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020)

DOI

10.5406/polishreview.65.3.0030

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This examination of the life story of Jan Karski, "the one man who tried to stop the Holocaust" explores Karski's failure to do so through an examination of his experience as witness and testifier of the Jewish mass murder. Karski's recollections of his encounters with two prominent Jewish individuals in Washington D. C. and London delineate polarized emotional responses of disbelief and identification with the Jewish victims. Whereas Justice Felix Frankfurter refused to believe in the inhumanity of the world as it emerged in Karski's testimony of the Jewish suffering, the exiled leader of Bund, Shmul Zygelbojm's despair at the world's failure to respond humanely to the Jewish tragedy, as told by Karski, caused him to commit suicide. These contrasting responses, which, each in its own way signified the world's inadvertent collusion with the Nazi extermination of the Jews, confronted Karski with his own resistance to engage emotionally in the suffering of the Jewish Other. Having assumed the self-image of a detached messenger of the horrible news, he managed an emotional escape from the horror of the Jewish dehumanization and mass murder that he witnessed and reported. Karski's unsparingly critical and uncompromising moral self-scrutiny reveals a difficult truth: the unopposed process of the Jewish annihilation attested to the impotence of the humanistic value system. © The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Language: en