I remember the intense emotion that overwhelmed me when I realized, during one of the exploratory trips that preceded the making of Shoah, that Jan Karski was alive. I had read Story of a secret State, published in 1944 in the USA, in which he recounted his perilous courier missions between the Polish underground and the Polish government-in-exile in London, his visits to the Warsaw ghetto, the desperate pleas of Poland's Jewish leaders, the few frightening hours he spent, disguised as a Ukrainian guard, in a "transit" camp that could not be identified with certainty, long and wrongly considered by him to be the Belzec extermination camp.
Alive, Karski would have been a vital witness for the film I was making. But from the very beginning of my work, I was so haunted by the immensity and reality of the destruction that I convinced myself that everyone - victims, witnesses, executioners themselves - had perished. These were years of madness: what was then called the Holocaust was a tabula rasa, and every time I discovered a living person, it was for me an overwhelming exhumation, like when archaeologists come across a rare masterpiece after long months of obscure and patient excavation work.
So Karski was alive, and the emotion redoubled when I saw him, then when I began to film with him. With the war over, Karski had disappeared from the public eye and, for decades, the Holocaust was shrouded in silence, left to the specialists. Forty years later, in 1985, the release of my film Shoah resurrected Karski for all of us, inscribing him in history and in the objective spirit.
I filmed with Karski for two whole days at his home in Washington in 1978. I only included the first day in Shoah, leaving Karski to say at the end of his account: "But I reported what I saw". "But I reported what I saw". Karski was thus telling me that he had accomplished his mission, managing to get from Warsaw to London. The Polish government decided that he should go to the United States and rehearse what he had to say before the highest authorities there. On the second day of shooting, Karski explained to 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, to be very different from what he had been on the first, I had chosen to leave out all these passages. However, it's some of them, in particular the meeting between Karski and Roosevelt, that you'll see in a moment. I decided to do so because I felt it absolutely necessary to set the record straight. In the account he gives of the reactions of his various English and American interlocutors, Karski lets us experience a central question in all its gravity: What is knowledge? What can information about a horror, unheard of to the letter, mean to a human brain unprepared to receive it because it was a crime without precedent in human history? Whatever one may say, the majority of Jews, once Hitler's war against them had begun, could not be saved. Such is the tragedy of history, which forbids retrospective illusion, oblivious to the thickness, weight and illegibility of an era, the true configuration of the impossible.
Raymond Aron, a refugee in London, was asked if he had known what was happening in the East at the time. He replied: "I knew, but I didn't believe it, and since I didn't believe it, I didn't know.
