Karski’s Book Donated
To Ocean County Library
- PostEagle
- August 6, 2014
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NEW JERSEY – With near unanimity, only one Deputy abstained, Poland’s Sejm, the lower House of Poland’s National Assembly, voted to proclaim 2014, the centennial of his birth anniversary, “THE YEAR OF JAN KARSKI”.
The best source of information about the life and legacy of Jan Karski (1914-2000) is the web site (www.jankarski.net) of the JAN KARSKI EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION. The president of this foundation is the well known lecturer, author, and television personality, Wanda Urbanska, who manages its operations in the United States. The Jan Karski Educational Foundation also is active in Poland.
In Photo: The Supervisor of Reference at New Jersey’s Brick Township Branch Ocean County Library, Ms. Taya Petino, accepts donation of STORY OF A SECRET STATE from PAC, NJD National Director Mr. Maurycy Leszkiewicz.
On the Foundation’s web site, Wanda Urbanska writes that: “The mission of the Jan Karski Educational Foundation is to instill in people–especially the youth–the values of leadership, courage and integrity, as exemplified by the life of Jan Karski Humanity’s Hero.” Urbanska then puts Karski’s historic significance into a nutshell: “In the midst of World War II, Jan Karski was dispatched by the Polish Underground to inform Western Allies about the reign of terror in German Nazi-occupied Poland and to seek intervention. Karski’s courageous mission, against all odds in the darkest of hours, qualifies him as Humanity’s Hero.”
At their Spring 2013 meeting, the Council of National Directors (CND), which is the governing body of the Polish American Congress (PAC), America’s kin country lobby for a strong and sovereign Poland as the key country in East Central Europe, or the Intermarium, the lands between the Baltic and the Black Seas, voted-up a resolution calling on all PAC state divisions to hold events over 2014 to commemorate the life and legacy of Jan Karski.
The New Jersey Division decided to implement this resolution by buying – for donation – to New Jersey’s County Library Systems, and to the other libraries based in the Garden State, fifty hardcover copies of the new edition of Jan Karski’s STORY OF A SECRET STATE: My Report to the World (Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC: 2014), which includes a Foreword by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and an Afterword by Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who met Jan Karski in 1944 when he came to dinner at the Brzezinski’s residence in Canada where the professor’s father was serving as Consul of the Polish State, the official name of Free Poland after the collapse of the Second Republic in September 1939.
The New Jersey Division “kicked-off” its Karski Campaign when Mr. Maurycy Leszkiewicz handed a copy of Karski’s book to Ms. Taya Petino, who said that the Ocean County Library System plans to buy several more copies of STORY OF A SECRET STATE. Mr. Leszkiewicz is the youngest national director in the PAC’s 70 years’ history. He persuasively and successfully spoke at several CND meetings to persuade his colleagues to enact two resolutions. The first called on the United States Government promptly to convene an independent international investigation of the Smolensk Disaster of 10 April 2010. The second resolution encouraged the transformed communist Tusk Government to stop interfering with the application for a digital broadcasting license by TRWAM, the patriotic and Roman Catholic television network.
Those who donate the new edition of Karski’s book, which first was published in 1944, to public libraries will do much to correct the wrong, but strongly held view that is imbedded in American public opinion that Poland and the Poles perpetrated the mass murder of European Jewry in tandem with Nazi Germany. This wrong view of Poland’s role during World War II gives a bogus historical legitimacy to pressure by the United States Government on today’s Poles to tax themselves to pay $50 billion in lump-sum compensation for private property formerly owned by Jews on conquered Polish territory that was despoiled by Nazi Germany and then nationalized by the communists during the World War II era. Let Moscow and Berlin pay lump-sum compensation, not Warsaw. Nevertheless, the United States Government continues to pressure Poland to pay lump-sum compensation. Measured by money, lump-sum compensation for World War II era private property is the top contentious issue in state-to-state relations between the United States and Poland.
By John Czop