I remember the intense emotion that overwhelmed me when I realized, during one of the exploratory trips leading up to the realization of Shoah, that Jan Karski was alive. I had read Story of a Secret State, published in 1944 in the United States, a book in which he recounted his perilous mail missions between the Polish Internal Resistance and the Polish Government in exile in London, his visits to the Warsaw ghetto, the desperate requests of the Jewish leaders of Poland, the few hours of terror he spent, disguised as a Ukrainian guard, in a “transit” camp that could not be identified with certainty, for a long time and wrongly considered by him to be the Belzec extermination camp.
Living, Karski would have been a key witness for the film I was undertaking. But from the very beginning of my work, I was so haunted by the immensity and the reality of the destruction that I convinced myself internally that everyone - the victims, the witnesses, the torturers themselves - had perished. They were years of madness: what was then called the Holocaust was a tabula rasa, and every time I discovered a living person, it was a shocking exhumation for me, as when archaeologists encounter a rare masterpiece after long months of obscure and patient excavations.
That's how Karski lived, the emotion was redoubled when I saw him and then when I started shooting with him. With the war over, Karski had disappeared from the public scene and, for decades, a cloak of silence stifled the Holocaust, leaving it in the sole hands of specialists. Forty years later, in 1985, the release of my movie Shoah resurrected Karski for each of us, placing him in history and in the objective spirit.
I shot with Karski for two full days at his house in Washington in 1978. I did not integrate Shoah only on the first day, leaving only Karski to say at the end of his story: “But I reported what I saw.” “But I reported on what I saw.” Karski thus told me that he had accomplished his mission, succeeding in getting from Warsaw to London. The Polish government decided that it should go to the United States and repeat what it had to say there, before the highest authorities. During the second day of filming, Karski laid out in front of my camera all the details of his meeting with President Roosevelt. For purely artistic reasons of dramatic tension, at the point where I was in the construction of my film, because it would have been too long, because Karski himself showed himself, on the second day, very different from what he had been the first, I had chosen to leave aside all these passages. However, it is some of these, in particular the meeting between Karski and Roosevelt, that you will see in a moment. I decided so because it seemed absolutely necessary to me to re-establish the truth. In his account of the reactions of his various English and American interlocutors, Karski makes us experience a central question in all its gravity: What does it mean to know? What can information about an unprecedented horror mean for a human brain, unprepared to receive it because it was an unprecedented crime in human history? Whatever one may say, the majority of Jews, once the war waged by Hitler began, could not be saved. Such is the tragedy of history, which prohibits the retrospective illusion, forgetting the thickness, the heaviness, the illegibility of an era, which is the true configuration of the impossible.
Raymond Aron, a refugee in London, was asked if he had known then what was happening in the East. He answered: “I knew, but I did not believe it, and since I did not believe it, I did not know it.”
