Karski Jan - Story of a secret state [1st edition].

Karski Jan, Story of a secret state, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1944, 1st edition, p. 389, dimensions 13.5 x 20 cm. Ex libirs on the facing page. Publisher's cloth cover.

Jan Karski (Italian: Jan Romuald Kozielewski) - born April 24, 1914 in Lodz, died July 13, 2000 in Washington, DC.
In interwar Poland he graduated from the Faculty of Law and Diplomacy Studies, as well as from cadet school. After the outbreak of war, he was taken prisoner, but managed to escape and undertook underground activities. Due to his excellent memory and knowledge of foreign languages, he was entrusted with the duties of political emissary to the authorities of the Polish Underground State.
During one of his missions to France, he was arrested by the Gestapo. After brutal interrogations, he tried to commit suicide, fearing that during further torture he might reveal vital information about the Polish Underground to the Germans. Rescued, he was taken to a prison hospital, from which he was recaptured with the help of the Polish Union of Armed Struggle.
In 1942, under the pseudonym Jan Karski, which he would use permanently from then on, he embarked on another mission, this time to Great Britain and the United States. One of his main tasks was to inform the Allies about the tragic situation of the Jewish population under German occupation. Gathering information on the subject, he twice made his way to the Warsaw ghetto, as well as to the transit camp in Izbica, from which Jews were sent to death camps.
He conveyed the shocking eyewitness account to a huge number of American and British politicians, journalists and artists. Among others, he met with the British government's foreign minister and the US president. However, the emissary's dramatic appeals for the rescue of the Jewish people did not yield results - most of the interlocutors did not believe his reports or ignored them.
After the war, Jan Karski decided to remain in exile in the United States. He took up studies in political science and earned his doctorate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he taught international relations and the theory of communism for the next forty years. Among his students was future President Bill Clinton.
Jan Karski was also the author of several books. A publication on the activities of the Polish underground state ("Story of a Secret State"), published in 1944 in the US soon became a bestseller and was translated into many languages.