Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World

'I do not pretend to have given an exhaustive picture of the Polish Underground, its organization and its activities.Because of our methods, I believe that there is no one today who could give an all-embracing recital...This book is a purely personal story, my story.' Jan Karski's 1944 war memoir is a heroic act of witness: the courageous testimony of a man who risked everything for his country. At times overwhelming in the details it reveals of the suffering of ordinary people, it is an unforgettable and deeply affecting record of brutality, courage, and survival under conditions of extreme bleakness. During the first four years of World War II, Karski worked as a messenger for the underground, risking his life in secret missions. He was captured, tortured, rescued, smuggled through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto and, finally, disguised himself as a guard to infiltrate a Nazi death camp. Then, travelling across occupied Europe to England, with his eye-witness report smuggled on microfilm in the handle of a razor, he became the first man to tell the Allies about the Holocaust - only to be ignored.

'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

Auteur

Jan Karski (Author)
Karski was his nom de guerre; he had been born Jan Kozielewski, the youngest of eight children, in Lodz, Poland's second-largest city, on April 24, 1914. Karski was a liaison officer of the Polish underground, who infiltrated both the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp and then carried the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to a mostly disbelieving Anthony Eden and Franklin Roosevelt.

Résumé
An incredible eyewitness account of wartime resistance, and 'an astonishing testament of survival' (Ben Macintyre, The Times)In 1939 Jan Karski was a brilliant young student enjoying a life of parties and pleasure. Then war broke out and his gilded world was destroyed. Recruited into the Polish underground resistance, he was entrusted with a clandestine mission that would endanger his own life in order to try and save millions. Story of a Secret State is his extraordinary account of what happened. '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