1.  How did you become interested in writing a book about Jan Karski?
      In November 1986, as a young journalist, I was assigned to cover a speech he gave at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, my alma mater. Although I had an interest in World War II history and in military affairs that dated from childhood, I knew very little about Poland, the Holocaust or Jewish life in general. I had grown up in Nashville, where I never knew anyone of Polish descent as a child and had very few Jewish friends. For whatever reason, Karski's story immediately captivated me. For the next several years, I occasionally checked to see whether it had been told in a book. When there was still no definitive history by 1991, I wrote him a letter asking permission to meet. He refused. I conducted some research anyway, finding many recently declassified reports from American secret authorities (Office of Strategic Service, etc.). In the spring of 1992, I approached him again with these documents in hand. At this time our relationship began in earnest. Eventually, I learned Polish, spent many days interviewing him, and located documents about him in archives around the world.

2.  What was it about Karski that captivated your interest?
      One reason is that I am fascinated by the possibility of heroism in a dark and cynical time. A reason only slightly less important is that I believe nobody should confine himself or herself to a narrow range of intellectual interests defined by his or her own ethnicity. Growing up in the American South, I was disappointed to see white and black people my age segregating their ranges of interest according to their own inherited experience. I believe the history itself belongs to everyone.

3.  What were Karski's apparent emotions about finding out the truth of the Jewish situation in Poland?
      One anecdote ought to suffice. In 1996, I asked him to sit for an extended interview that would be videotaped -- a final effort to put his full story on the record.

      On camera, I handed him a copy of the "Protest" by the Front Odrodzenia Polski, or Front for the Rebirth of Poland, an underground Catholic group headed by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka. He had been a member of the FOP, and this was a document he had carried in microfilm form to the West in 1942. Fifty-four years later, he read the text aloud:

      "We have no means of actively opposing the German murders. We cannot overcome them or save anybody. But we protest, from the bottom of our hearts, which are filled... [Prof. Karski began to choke up.] ...with compassion, loathing and horror. That protest is demanded of us by God, who has forbidden us to kill. It is demanded by the Christian conscience. Every creature calling itself a man has the right to the love of his neighbor. The blood of the helpless calls to the heavens for vengeance."

      His voice broke at the word "heavens," and tears rolled down his face.
 
4.  How did Jan Karski see himself changed by the events of his life and knowledge gained in his emissary missions ( particularly the awarness of the destruction of Jewish nation)?
This quote says it all:
     
    "The Lord assigned me a role to speak and write during the war, when - as it seemed to me - it might help. It did not. Furthermore, when the war came to its end, I learned that the governments, the leaders, the scholars, the writers did not know what had been happening to the Jews. They were taken by surprise. The murder of six million innocents was a secret.

      "Then I became a Jew, like the family of my wife. All of them perished in the ghettos, in the concentration camps, in the gas chambers - so all murdered Jews became my family.

      "But I am a Christian Jew. I am a practicing Catholic. Although I am not a heretic, still my faith tells me the second Original Sin has been committed by humanity: through commission, or omission, or self-imposed ignorance, or insensitivity, or self-interest, or hypocrisy, or heartless rationalization.

     "This sin will haunt humanity to the end of time.
    
     "It does haunt me. And I want it to be so."
     
    Professor Karski spoke these words at the International Liberators' Conference in 1981.

5.  Serving Poland loyally during the war, did Prof. Karski feel a longing to return to native land, to family he might have left behind? What were his feelings about living in a diaspora?
      Like so many immigrants of his generation, Prof. Karski sought to become even more American than the Americans around him. Unlike some other Polish intellectual immigrants, he chose to live in the present rather than the past. He did not allow bitterness over Poland's hard fate to consume him.  Though he had no close relatives left in the country, he did return to Poland numerous times, though only once before 1989 (in 1974, as a Fulbright scholar). He took great joy in seeing Poland become ever stronger and more democratic after 1989.

6. Jan Karski appears to be a very religious man.  How much influence do You think religion had on his view of the world?
      Christianity in general, and the particular influences of a deeply pious mother and the intellectually rigorous Jesuit educational system, clearly had much to do with the choices Karski made during the war. In my view, he drew on the very best in Christian tradition -- Christ's admonition to love neighbor as brother -- and he rose above other influences prevalent in the Christianity of his time and place, such as anti-Semitism.

7. What type of person did Mr. Karski strike you as, what was the immediate impression he made on You in your first meeting?
      As mentioned above, I was utterly captivated. He had an air of moral aristocracy about him.

8. What is the characteristic that You admire in Karski the most?
      Courage. Not simply the courage to defy death, but the courage to defy despair.

9. Why is Prof. Karski sometimes regarded as controversial in Poland?  Why is he criticized in Poland?
      As mentioned above, he cast his lot with the people of today's Poland. People of prior generations, especially other exiles who had suffered the betrayal and loss of their country, could not overcome their bitterness and so could not truly celebrate the good things happening in Poland over the past decade. Some of them lashed out at him for taking part in that celebration. A few younger Poles have criticized him on grounds that usually seem to reek of anti-Semitism. I believe those people represent only a small, if vocal, minority in the new Poland.
 
10. Are there other works about Karski?  What perspectives do they have and what light do they shed on Prof. Karski?
      My co-author, Stanislaw M. Jankowski, wrote a book called Emisariusz Witold in 1986. It is not widely available. In 1999, a Warsaw publishing house issued a translation of Karski's 1944 book Story of a Secret State. It was a best-seller in Poland, but its publication was unfortunate from an historical point of view. Prof. Karski had long resisted having the book published in Polish because he knew that both his wartime publisher and the wartime Polish authorities had added and changed many details of his true experiences. They did this for reasons of both propaganda and security. I was surprised when Prof. Karski agreed to the republication of the book, and I believe he did so under the influence of certain people who sought to use his name to turn a profit for themselves.

Jan Karski interviewed by E. Thomas Wood - click here to read more

To learn more about the Karski film project currently in pre-production click here