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Jan Karski Days in St Louis Area

September 24 - November 15

ABOUT JAN KARSKI

The story of Polish-born diplomat and “citizen of the world” Jan Karski (1914-2000) is not well known today, remarkably, but he carried out one of the most monumental missions during World War II – a cross-continental trek to inform Western leaders in 1942 that the Holocaust was underway. Planned by the Polish Underground, the largest anti-Nazi resistance movement in occupied Europe, Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and the vast Nazi system of industrialized slaughter to directly bear witness and report on what he had seen to the top leaders of the Allies. Along the way, he was captured, tortured, nearly executed, and managed daring escapes that allowed his message and evidence to be carried to the West. He presented his dramatic report in 1943 to the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and was then sent to Washington where he met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt for an hour in the Oval Office. At the time Karski was sounding the alarm, most of Poland's Jewish citizens had already been killed. But there was still time to save the few who survived.
 
Karski stayed in the U.S., eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. He was a professor of history and politics for over 40 years at Georgetown University, where he taught in the School of Foreign Service, influencing generations of future leaders. In his later life, he received many awards for his courage and was a controversial speaker on the callousness of the Allies toward the fate of the Jews in Europe. In June 1982, Jan Karski planted his tree on the Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. In subsequent years, many significant honors were bestowed on him: the Anti-Defamation League Courage to Care Award (1988, which in 2012 was renamed the Jan Karski Courage to Care Award); the Pius XI Award (1990); the Eisenhower Liberation Medal (1991); the Wallenberg Medal (1991); and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012) conferred by President Barack Obama.

Additional links: 

The World Knew – Jan Karski’s Mission for Humanity 
Sept. 24 - October 31 Saint Louis University Pius XII Library 
Nov. 1 - Nov. 15 Lindenwood University Spellmann Center 

This 22 panel educational travelling exhibition reflects heavily on Jan Karski’s World War II memoir Story of a Secret State, detailing his mission from the Polish underground government in exile. He was charged with bringing an eyewitness account of the Holocaust to skeptical Allied leaders, including British foreign secretary Anthony Eden and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The exhibition was created by the Polish History Museum in partnership with the Jan Karski Educational Foundation and the support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. Additional funding was provided by the National Endowment for Humanities. 

The Pius XII Memorial Library’s installment of The World Knew – Jan Karski’s Mission for Humanity is co-sponsored by the Rubin and Gloria Feldman Education Institute of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, a department of Jewish Federation, St. Louis, the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University, and  Saint Louis Polonia, Inc. 

For additional Information  please refer to SLU Newslink article

ALL LOGOS

An extensive collection of Jan Karski archives can be viewed on-line at the digital collection Jan Karski, Humanity's Hero presented by the Google Cultural Institute:  

September 24, 6:00 PM
 Exhibition Opening
Saint Louis University 
Pius XII Memorial Library, Second Floor Gallery



Special Guests:
  • Andrzej Rojek, Chairman of the Board of Jan Jarski Educational Foundation;
  • Robert Ogrodnik, Honorary Consul of the Republic of Poland in St. Louis; and
  • John Kurowski, founder and Managing Attorney of Kurowski Shultz, LLC in Swansea, Illinois and Visiting Professor of Law at the Nicolaus Copernicus School of Law and Administration in Torun, Poland.
For additional informatioon, pleade refer to the following link:
SLU LIbraries Events and Calendar Page

Thursday, October 1, 2015
Symposium
Remembrance, Responsibility and Reflection:
The Moral Courage of Jan Karski

Saint Louis University School of Law  
John K. Pruellage Courtroom
100 North Tucker Boulevard, 12th Floor, 

PROGRAM 
2:00   Doors Open
2:30   Welcome Remarks - Professor Monica Eppinger, Assistant Professor of Law, St. Louis University
2:35   Karski & The Lords of Humanity: Emmy Award winning producer and film director Sławomir Grünberg will present a special screening of his new film “Karski & The Lords of Humanity”
4:15  A Conversation With Andrew Nagorski - award winning journalist who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek and who interviewed Jan Karski visits with SLU LAW alum John Kurowski.
5:00 Keeping the Legacy Alive Today: Professor Monica Eppinger, Sławomir Grünberg and Andrew Nagorski will discuss the continuing importance of Jan Karski’s legacy
5:30 A Tribute to Rabbi Harold White by John Kurowski
6:00 Reception

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE SPEAKERS
 
Sławomir Grunberg is an Emmy Award winning documentary producer, director and cameraman.  He is a graduate of the Polish Film School in Lodz. Born in Poland, he immigrated to the US in 1981 and has since directed and produced over 45 documentary films including: Shimon’s Returns, Castaways, Santa Rosa, The Peretzniks, Portraits of Emotion, Coming Out in Poland, The Legacy of Jedwabne and Saved by Deportation. Grunberg’s film School Prayer: A Community At War, screened on PBS, received an Emmy Award. It also won The Jan Karski Award, a competition designed to recognize and award outstanding television documentaries produced on the theme of moral courage. Grunberg is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts and Soros Justice Media Fellowships. His credits as director of photography include: Legacy (Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature in 2001), and Sister Rose’s Passion, which won best short doc at Tribeca Film Festival in 2004 and received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary short in 2005.  Karski & The Lords of Humanity.  Karski & The Lords of Humanity, is his latest film and was first released in Poland in 2015.
 
Andrew Nagorski is an award-winning journalist and author who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek. He was the magazine’s bureau chief in Moscow both before and after the Cold War; his first tour ended with his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1982. He was also the magazine’s bureau chief in Hong Kong, Rome, Bonn, Berlin and Warsaw. From 2008 to 2014, he was vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute. Nagorski interviewed Karski in 1998 for Newsweek's "Voices of the Century" project, a collection of interviews with a select group of people who had a huge impact in the 20th century that was then drawing to a close. Nagorski was born in Scotland to Polish parents, moved to the United States as an infant and has rarely stopped moving since. He now lives in St. Augustine, Florida but continues to travel extensively, writing for numerous publications. His most recent book, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, has received rave reviews. His new book, The Nazi Hunters, will be published in 2016.
 
Professor Monica Eppinger joined the SLU Law faculty in 2010. She teaches and writes in the areas of property, comparative and international law, national security, and anthropology of law. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.  Before entering academia, Professor Eppinger served in the United States diplomatic corps as a tenured Foreign Service Officer for nine years, with tours of duty or policy-making experience in Nigeria, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Caspian energy, and West African security. She was awarded an individual Superior Honor Award, the State Department's highest civilian honor, in 1999. She earned her law degree from Yale Law School in 2006 and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California Berkeley in 2010.  Professor Eppinger has been a featured expert on the law of war, Russia, and Ukraine on CNN, public radio, and in local print and broadcast news media.  She has lectured at law schools across the United States and in Poland, Ukraine, and Korea. In the fall of 2013, she was a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley. She speaks Russian and Ukrainian and is conversant in Mandarin, French, and Hausa.
 
 
John Kurowski  is a 1978 SLU LAW graduate and has been in private law practice in St. Clair County, Illinois his entire career.  He is the Managing Partner of Kurowski Shultz, LLC, today the largest law firm in St. Clair County which he founded as a solo practice in 1983.   He has a wide variety of interests in the law and public policy.  In recent years has served as a Visiting Professor of Law at the Nicolaus Copernicus University School of Law in Torun, Poland where he has taught courses in Civil Litigation and Human Rights law.  In addition, for each of the past ten years he has organized and sponsored a Human Rights Symposium, “Human Rights and a Just Society” which is held each October at Copernicus University in Torun.  He studied abroad as an undergraduate at Loyola University’s John Felice Rome Center.  He received his undergraduate degree in history from Loyola in 1975.  He and his wife, Connie are members of the Society of Fellows of the Aspen Institute.  In 2013 Loyola presented him with its John Felice Award for his career accomplishments, in particular his role in founding the Torun symposium.   He lives in Swansea, Illinois with Connie.  They have three adult children.
 

The World Knew:
Jan Karski’s Mission for Humanity

NOVEMBER 1 – NOVEMBER 14: Jan Karski Foundation Exhibition about “The Man Who Tried to Stop the Holocaust.” Lindenwood University, Spellmann Center: co-sponsored by the Center for International and Global Studies and the Liberty and Ethics Center.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 7:30 p.m.:  E. Thomas Wood, biographer of Jan Karski, will speak on “The Man Who Tried to Stop the Holocaust” in the Spellmann Campus Center’s Anheuser-Busch Leadership Room followed by a panel discussion.   The event, presented as part of Lindenwood University’s Center for International and Global Studies Speaker Series wil feature two special guests: Mr. Andrzej Rojek - a Board Chairman of Jan Karski Educational Foundation and Thomas E. Wood, journalist, writer and the principal narrator of the 2015 documentary “Karski & The Lords of Humanity”.

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE SPEAKERS

E. Thomas Wood is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and holds an M.Phil. degree in European Studies from the University of Cambridge. Tom Wood’s investigative, business and historical journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and numerous other newspapers and magazines. His books include Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley, 1994; updated edition Texas Tech University Press, 2014). He served as a writer and the principal narrator of the 2015 documentaryKarski & The Lords of Humanity.

For additional information about E. Thomas Wood, please refer  to this link on Amazon.com

Andrzej Rojek is a Board Chairman of Jan Karski Educational Foundation.

He has been active in global finance since 1986. He has recently retired as the Managing Director at Advent Capital Management. Previously, Andrzej Rojek was one of the founders of Lydian Asset Management, the global hedge fund, established in 1999, and focused on convertible bonds and relative value credit investments. Mr. Rojek served as a managing director and partner at Bankers Trust and also with the convertibles groups at Merrill Lynch.

A US citizen who was born in Poland in 1956, Mr. Rojek graduated with honors from the University of Warsaw in 1979 with a degree in economics. He received his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1985. Andrzej Rojek serves presently as a trustee of the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York , Packer Collegiate Institute in New York as well as member of the investment committee of Mount Holyoke College. He is involved in numerous charitable initiatives in Poland (Museum of History of Polish Jews) as well as in the U.S. (Polish Studies Chair at Columbia University). In 2012, Mr. Rojek was decorated by the President of the Republic of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski, with a Knight’s Cross of the Order for Merit of the Republic of Poland for his work with the Jan Karski U.S. Centennial Campaign.

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