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Jan Karski Testimonial

The wartime activist Jan Karski is hailed as a hero among the Jews. When Hitler and the

German Nazi invaded Poland in the second world war. They committed brutal atrocities and war

crimes against the Jews and local people of other origins. At that Jan helped the people from the

Jewish community. Quite later on Jan Karski gave an interview in a documentary movie made by

Claude Lanzmann. The movie was called Shoah (1985) and it was a compendium of interviews

and images of where people were kept in ghettos and concentration camps in miserable

conditions and later on exterminated in German-occupied Poland. The Jews were the prime

targets of the human rights violations that the Germans perpetrated.

When you see the movie Shoah (1985), at the end of the documentary Jan Karski

describes the conditions of Jews in particular around the time of the holocaust, at the same time

we see images of the United States, the statue of liberty in New York and the white house in

Washington. As Karski describes that he approached many key figures and influential peoples of

that time of allied forces and others. He said to have reached as many government officials and

leaders as he could. After some meetings, they presented their demands and the message was that

Hitler was not to be allowed further extermination and human rights violations against Jews in

the German-occupied territories of Europe.

As the documentary movie interview with Karski continues scenes of industries in

Europe are shown that seemed a bit off-topic. The images later on that were shown during the
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interview were of the remaining buildings that were the Ghettos where Jews were kept during

World War II. The documentary Shoah had disturbing images painted through vocals but no

such images of such sort were shown. The documentary was not found to be provocative rather it

was educating and entertaining to some extent. However, the quality of the documentary

compared to other more popular historical documentaries on the same topic was not up to par.

Works Cited

Shoah. Directed by Claude Lanzmann, 1985.