Le rapport Karski

Jan Karski (1914–2000) was a Polish Catholic resistance fighter who worked as a courier for the Polish government-in-exile during World War II. He was its contact to the Home Army resistance movement. To bear witness, the resistance smuggled Karski into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 and arranged a clandestine look at a concentration camp near Lublin. Karski then reported on the Nazi extermination of European Jews to the British government in London and the American president in Washington, where he would settle after the war. Karski detailed his courier activities as well as his 1943 meeting with US president Franklin D. Roosevelt in his book, "Story of a Secret State", published in 1944. Claude Lanzmann interviewed Karski for two days in 1978 and used some of that footage in Shoah (1985), where Karski says, "I reported what I saw". THE KARSKI REPORT gives us the rest of Lanzmann’s interview with Karski. He describes in detail his meetings – with Roosevelt and subsequently with supreme court justice Felix Frankfurter, who was active in the Jewish community. Both men responded guardedly to Karski’s description of the atrocities taking place in Europe.