Jan Karski

Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski), a Polish Home Army courier, smuggled himself into the Warsaw Ghetto and later the Belzec death camp in 1942 to witness and report on the Holocaust. He traveled across occupied Europe to London, reporting to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, then to Washington where he met with President Roosevelt in July 1943 and told him everything he had seen. Roosevelt promised to act, but nothing substantive was done to stop the deportation of Polish Jews. Karski spent the rest of his life at Georgetown University, haunted by the fact that his eyewitness testimony failed to stop the destruction he had witnessed.