Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £5.99
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
'Stands in the absolute first rank of books about the resistance in World War II. If you wish to read about a man more courageous and honourable than Jan Karski, I would have no idea who to recommend' Alan Furst
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a brilliant young Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.
'Insistently asks the question: What would you do? Would you fight, or acquiesce, or collaborate? ... Karski was deeply patriotic and ludicrously brave ... an astonishing testament of survival' Ben Macintyre
'Karski's adventures are worthy of the wildest spy thriller' Daily Telegraph
'This eye-witness testimony is imbued with a passion that subsequent memoirs can rarely match' Financial Times
'Deeply moving' Daily Mail
'Reads like the screenplay to an incredibly exciting war movie - but it is all true' Andrew Roberts
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published to instant acclaim in 1944, Karski's memoir supplemented here with photos, facsimiles, and a foreword by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tells of the four years (1939 1943) he served as the leading liaison officer in the Polish Underground during Nazi occupation. Only 25 in 1939, Karski recounts his work linking various aspects of the underground's extensive administrative, political, and economic apparatuses, as well his capture and subsequent torture at the hands of the Gestapo (he likens being beaten by a rubber stick to "the sensation produced when a dentist's drill strikes a nerve, but infinitely multiplied and spread over the entire nervous system"). After his capture, Karski was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, where he was horrified to discover "hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children." At a death camp, he witnessed Jews being murdered in cattle cars through asphyxiation and burning by quicklime. Sent in 1942 1943 to London and Washington, D.C., where he met with British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and FDR, respectively, Karski delivered the first shocking eyewitness reports of the Holocaust to the Western world. Briskly paced, this is a gripping and immediate account of Nazi brutality from a brave leader of the resistance. Karski, who died in 2000, was awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. B&w photos & illus.
Customer Reviews
Excellent book
Everyone interested in history should read this.