On this day in 2000, Polish resistance fighter and Righteous Among the Nations Jan Karski passed away at age 86. Born Jan Kozielewski in Łódź, Poland on June 24, 1914, he was raised Catholic and was one of several children; when he was still young, his father passed away. Although he was a lifelong Catholic, he grew up in a neighborhood that was mostly Jewish. After completing his military training, Karski entered into the diplomatic service and began work in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs upon receiving the title of First in Grand Diplomatic Practice on January 1st, 1939. In the weeks and months following the Polish September Campaign in which German forces invaded Poland, Karski found himself a prisoner-of-war (POW) aboard a train headed for a POW camp located within Poland’s general government zone, a reference to the portion of the country’s region that had yet to be absorbed by Hitler’s Third Reich. Karski managed to escape internment in the POW camp and find his way to Warsaw. There, Karski took part in “Służba Zwycięstwu Polski”, which served as the first formal movement of resistance in German-occupied Europe. It was around this time that his name changed from Kozielewski to Jan Karski. In January 1940, Karski started to lead courier missions that carried out dispatches coming from the Polish underground to the exiled Polish government, which was stationed in Paris. During the beginning of 1940, Karski began reporting to the governments in Britain, Poland, and the United States of what was happening both in and to the Warsaw Ghetto and to the Jews of Poland. He began to acquire extensive information about the Jewish underground. Karski was selected in 1942 to embark on a secretive mission to speak with Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski, by Cyryl Ratajski of the Polish Government Delegate’s Office. Karski was tasked with briefing high-level officials about Nazi crimes in Poland and met with Leon Feiner of the Bund to acquire evidence. Karski was secretly taken into the Warsaw Ghetto twice by the Jewish underground so he could see the atrocities with his own eyes. He managed to get hold of Polish microfilm which, through evidence provided by the underground, documented the destruction of Polish Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. Through his research, Karski formed the basis for the earliest and equally accurate account of the Holocaust. It was Edward Raczyński, Polish Foreign Minister who transmitted this information in a note to Allied forces. The note, originally addressed to the participatory governments of the United Nations on December 10, 1942, was included in a leaflet entitled “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland”. Karski traveled to the United States and met with U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt on July 28, 1943. He was the first eyewitness to communicate word of the Holocaust playing out in Poland. Karski’s accounts helped lead to the formation of the War Refugee Board and, following the war’s end, to the existence of The Office of High Commissioner for Refugees. Karski published a book recounting his experiences in Poland during World War II, entitled Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State in 1944. After the war, Karski stayed in the United States where he earned a PhD from Georgetown University in 1952. He would go on to teach at Georgetown for 40 years.Karski married Pola Nireńska in 1965. A trained dancer and choreographer, her entire family, with the exception of her parents, who emigrated to Israel in 1939 prior to the German invasion, was killed in the Holocaust. Nireńska committed suicide on July 25, 1992.Karski did not speak about his wartime experience until 1981 when, upon invitation from Elie Wiesel, he went to Washington D.C. to serve as keynote speaker for the International Liberators Conference. The following year, Karski was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among The Nations. He died on July 13, 2000.