Jan Karski was an emissary of the Polish Underground State authorities during World War II. Risking his life, he relayed the first reports to the West, primarily about the Holocaust. He is a symbol and a witness to the tragedy of Poles and Jews. Over a span of several years, being on the jury of the documentary film competition named after my Father, at the NNW festival in Gdynia, I watched over a hundred films documenting, most often, the tragic modern history of Poland, from World War II, the resistance of the Home Army against Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, the massacre of the cursed soldiers, to the struggle of "Solidarity" against the communist dictatorship for freedom and human dignity. I always left the festival, on one hand, uplifted by the heroism of those fighting for freedom, uplifted by the living, today cultivated memory of the past, and on the other hand, oppressed by the enormity of cruelty, suffering, human bestiality. If I had to summarize the image of this entire history, which I saw, to sculpt it in one symbol, it would be exactly this tear of Karski, the pure human tear of a person who did more than anyone could to stop the evil he witnessed. In this place, at Trzech Krzyży Square, a symbol of the massacre of Warsaw, the massacre of the Polish and Jewish nations, his words particularly ring in my ears: "By turning away from evil, distancing oneself from the awareness of its existence, a person becomes part of it." I look at archival photographs of the ruins of Warsaw and think of today’s bleeding Ukraine...
