Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

by Jack Mayer

the remarkable story of Jan Karski, a representative of the Polish government-in-exile – a spy sent to Poland in August of 1942, during the liquidation of the ghetto, to bring eyewitness evidence of the Holocaust to Allied leaders. Since Irena knew the ghetto so well, the underground had asked her to give Karski a tour, after which he was taken to a partisan unit in the forests near Lwow. They disguised him in a Ukrainian uniform so he could witness firsthand the murders at transit stations en route to the Belzec extermination camp. He then returned to Warsaw where a dentist removed several of his teeth so the resultant swelling would disguise his Polish-accented German. He escaped from Poland to Berlin, then through Vichy France to Marseilles where the French underground smuggled him across the Pyrenees into Spain. Karski carried evidence – a key whose hollow shaft contained microfilm of hundreds of documents. Several weeks later he was in London telling his story, begging the Allies to at least bomb the rail lines to the camps. Newspapers declined to print his accounts; no one could believe his allegations. Neither did Churchill nor Roosevelt.