2014 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jan Karski (1914–2000), one of the first to deliver eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to Allied leaders during the war. A courier in the Polish underground, Karski was smuggled in and out of the Warsaw ghetto and a transit camp at Izbica, where he saw for himself the horrors suffered by Jews under Nazi occupation including mass starvation and transports of Jews en route to the Belzec killing center.

In 1942, Karski traveled to London where he delivered a report to the Polish government-in-exile and to senior British authorities including Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. He described what he had seen and warned of Nazi Germany’s plans to murder European Jews. In July 1943 Karski journeyed to Washington and met with American President Franklin D. Roosevelt to give the same warning and plead for action. Allied governments were focused on the military defeat of Germany, and Karski’s message was greeted with disbelief or indifference. Spurred by the memory of the Holocaust, for the rest of his life Karski worked tirelessly for Polish-Jewish understanding and to honor the memory of all victims of Nazism.