Taurance Robnett
Intro to Ballet
12/3/15
The World Knew: Jan Karski’s Mission for Humanity One of the most impactful classes I have ever taken in my life was my Holocaust and Human Behavior class. I took this class my senior year of high school and it very much opened my eyes to all that had really taken place during the holocaust. Coming into the course I always wondered when we would talk about the atrocities that took place was why didn’t any of the free world do anything? Surely they knew what was going on? These questions really didn’t get answered for me until the end of the course when I went to the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. The answer that I found made me even more than the question I had had. The answer was the world did know that something was taking place and knew about the Ghetto’s but was not going to do anything about it. This for me was so impactful that the world thanks to the likes of Jan Karski who sacrificed a tremendous amount to get this information out, did nothing about. The gallery was very impactful seeing Karski’s life through the a few pictures growing up with his family. The family looked like they were just that a family, and knowing what was ultimately going to happen gave me a tinge of sadness thinking how things can change so quickly. The other picture of Karski that I thought was very impactful was when he is standing with his date on New Year’s eve in 1938, this just shows how happy both him and his date were and how in that moment they were just living there life. When the Germans invaded and starting bombing Poland they hit Karski’s barracks but thankfully for Karski he wasn’t hurt. He then narrowly missed the Katyn Forest Massacre. These two events and pictures showed that for every person that survived these events they needed a certain amount of luck because all of the odds were stacked against them. These pictures really brought out some of the most nostalgic emotions I had when I saw similar photos during my high school class. The same bleak feeling or the terror that has been shown in some of these photos is a concurrent theme because at the time this was the feeling that most individuals impacted by the Nazi’s during this time period. The quote that resonated with me the most was “Second Original Sin”, because the world knew about this but they did not do enough or not act quickly enough to save as many human lives as possible.