Raphael Lemkin and Janusz Kozielewski (Jan Karski) came from two different worlds, though in 1943 and 1944, respectively, they helped inform the world of the genocidal horrors that had been taking place in German-occupied Poland. Karski was born in Lodz in 1914 to a devout Catholic family, while Lemkin, whose parents managed a farm in northwestern Russia, was born in 1900. He was raised in a very observant Jewish family and received a rigorous Orthodox Jewish education. He was deeply affected by the tribulations of Jews during the Great War and in the civil wars afterwards, a topic that Annette Becker discusses in some depth.
Karski was trained as a diplomat, while Lemkin attended law school in Lwow. Both had highly successful careers prior to the outbreak of war in 1939. Lemkin fled Poland and settled in Sweden and later the U.S., while Karski remained in Poland and plied his diplomatic skills for the Polish underground. In 1942, he was sent into the Warsaw Ghetto and later Belzec's transit camp, Izbica. His observations became the basis of the report he later shared with Allied leaders in Europe and the U.S. Lemkin, a gifted scholar and linguist, took a different path and between 1941 and 1944 compiled a vast collection of German occupation documents that became the basis of his seminal work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). Becker notes that while Karski's reports did discuss the fate of Jews, they contained much more information about the plight of all Poles in occupied Poland. Lemkin did something similar in Axis Rule. His chapter 8, “The Legal Status of Jews,” was a prelude to chapter 9, “Genocide,” in which he coined and defined the term. But the general thrust of his lengthy study was on the impact of Nazi occupation policies on countries and their citizens throughout Europe. Though Becker writes that Lemkin's massive work is “difficult to follow,” (137) a patient study of it reveals a great deal not only about the evolution of his ideas about genocide but also its relationship to these policies throughout Europe. What makes Lemkin's work so remarkable is that even though he was deeply affected not least by the crimes of the Holocaust, particularly the murders of his beloved parents Jozef and Bella, he chose a “global” perspective when it came to Nazi crimes.
The centerpiece of Becker's study, at least when it comes to Karski, is his meeting with President Roosevelt on July 28, 1943. Accompanied by Poland's ambassador to the U.S., Jan Ciechanowski, who knew the president quite well (and discussed numerous meetings with Roosevelt in his memoir, Defeat in Victory [1947]), Karski found the president well informed about the plight of the Jews; Roosevelt asked Karski to “verify the stories” he had heard about their plight (Karski, Story of a Secret State [1944], 387–388). Karski's account of the meeting, which he included in two chapters of his Story of a Secret State, was brief, while Ciechanowski's discussion in his memoirs was much more in-depth. Becker notes that the principal reason for the meeting was not the question of the Jews but the overall situation in Poland and the fate of all its citizens.
One of the issues that the author does not adequately discuss is the impact of Karski's talks with Roosevelt and other prominent members of his administration. Rafael Medoff's The Jews Should be Quiet: Franklin D, Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and the Holocaust (2019) barely mentions Karski's meeting with the president and focuses principally on the steady flow of information about Nazi crimes against Jews in occupied Europe and the failure of the Roosevelt administration, at least until 1944, to act decisively to save Jews. The creation of the War Refugee Board that year, Medoff argues, was too little, too late because most of the six million murdered by the Nazis were already dead.
The Secret State and Axis Rule were published in 1944 and received considerable acclaim. Karski's star quickly faded, and after the war he settled in the U.S. and joined the faculty at Georgetown University. But in 1982, Yad Vashem named Jan Karski Righteous Among the Nations, and twelve years later he was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Lemkin became a member of Robert Jackson's prosecution team in Nuremberg and played an important role in getting the Allies to accept genocide as a sub-charge in the trial. Becker states that though Lemkin was disappointed about this decision, towards the end of the trial some of the prosecutors began to use the term “genocide” more frequently because it was the only term that could perfectly describe the heinous crimes described during the presentations by American and Soviet prosecutors, something Becker correctly notes.
But Lemkin was not satisfied by any of this and was able to convince the newly created U.N. to consider the adoption of a Genocide Convention, which it did in December 1948. Afterwards, he got caught up in the Convention's ratification struggles but spent the latter part of his life writing his memoirs and working on his multivolume global history of genocide. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ten times but died in relative obscurity in 1959. Since then, Becker concludes, Raphael Lemkin “has not yet found his place in the global consciousness” (195). This might be true in some parts of the world, but his ideas and concepts have taken root in regions and countries that value the importance of international legal protections and concepts for all people, whether in war or peace. These were values strongly voiced and supported by Raphael Lemkin and Jan Karski.
