The documentary Karski & the Lords of Humanity shown in Polish cinemas

Alan Lockwood

The film about wartime courier Jan Karski (1914–2000) received its Warsaw premiere at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and in 25 cinemas around the nation.

Karski & the Lords of Humanity by Sławomir Grünberg utilizes filmed and archival interviews with Karski, who was born Jan Kozielewski in Łódź, then adopted an underground code name by 1944 when the wartime memoir Story of a Secret State was published in the U.S. and became a best-selling Book of the Month Club selection. Director Sławomir Grünberg combines excerpts from the acclaimed 1985 documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann and other footage with contemporary animation techniques, to focus on efforts by Karski, the Polish Underground State and Jewish leaders in 1942 to get information to the West about conditions in occupied Poland and the Holocaust.

The film’s materials center on that covert mission – Karski’s recollections from decades later, observations by experts including biographer E. Thomas Wood and the former U.S. national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, animated re-enactments including his incursions into the Warsaw Ghetto and a satellite site near the German extermination camp at Bełżec – and comprise a contemporary, populist investigation. Archival footage includes clips that had been staged in the Warsaw Ghetto for German propaganda. A subtle element of the filmmaking is revealed in its sound design – noise occurs when a corpse falls from a cart, as transport trains are sealed from the outside, and as a woman sobs over her bundled child. The source footage is silent, of course.
It is also terrible, and somewhat familiar. The few enhancements are effective, adding an element to the viewer’s experience beyond what dramatic or plaintive music alone could provide. The broad work of history is to discover means of opening accepted narratives to present understanding. Careful sound effects are fitting – while graphic animation has had telling impact since Maus was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

One sequence shows the massive Houses of Parliament in London. Narration speaks of a minute of silence there in late 1942, when that elected assembly stood to commemorate Jews already dead in German camps. It’s gauged as an uplifting moment, to stir the audience. But the Parliament’s gesture, or protest, rings hollow given diplomatic failures such as the Evian Conference in 1938, to discuss forced emigration of Jews from Germany. Before the Evian meetings, British and U.S. delegates had agreed to not discuss immigration to Palestine, which the British opposed – future Israeli PM Golda Meir was present, only as an observer – or U.S. failure to fill its restrictive quotas for European Jews. Australia claimed not to have or want to import racial problems (while legally treating its Aboriginal people with brutal disregard). Only the Dominican Republic increased quotas – yet the next year, when the liner St. Louis was turned away from Havana harbor with over 900 German Jews bearing Cuban visas, it sailed instead for Florida, futilely. Karski & the Lords of Humanity doesn’t take up those themes in its historical background, but its frank assessment of President Roosevelt’s decisions is in keeping with recent scholarship in FDR and the Jews, by historians Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman.

In his public life after the war, Jan Karski maintained silence about his mission, while teaching diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., through the Cold War’s long decades. Stephen Mull, the current U.S. Ambassador to Poland, studied with him at Georgetown, and during Karski commemorations in 2013 Mull spoke of knowing nothing of his professor’s wartime experience. The new film considers this reticence in light of his sense of failure, after Western leaders’ response to the Holocaust, or lack of response. In one interview passage with the late Władysław Bartoszewski – an Auschwitz survivor, resistance fighter and former Foreign Minister – Bartoszewski recalls Karski saying: “You Mr. Władyslaw, at least tried to save concrete people, you even managed to save some. Myself, I wanted to save millions, but could not save anybody at all.” The film proceeds to rationalize about the influence Karski’s report may have had on negotiations for tens of thousands of Romanian and Hungarian Jews, near the war’s end. Details are elaborated; the result doesn’t dimish Karski’s self-evaluation.

Red more: The documentary Karski..