Sidebar: Jan Karski and the Hoover Institution

By Cissie Dore Hill

Sidebar to: Jan Karski and the Hoover Institution.

1. Poster promoting a lecture by Karski at the Indianapolis Town Hall, January 1, 1945.

2. Letter from Hoover Library director Harold Fisher (April 19, 1945), informing Karski that Stanford president Donald Tresidder had sent a letter appointing Karski as a representative of the Hoover Library.

3. Journal Na Szlaku Kresowej, directed to the men of the Polish Second Corps in Italy, one of the many wartime periodicals collected by Karski as a Hoover representative.

4. One of more than 18,000 statements of Polish survivors incarcerated in the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941. The statements are from the Wladyslaw Anders collection.

5. Letter from Karski to Herbert Hoover (October 28, 1946), saying farewell and thanking Hoover for his aid to Poland and his family after the war: "There are millions and millions of Europeans who will always consider you, Sir, as their protector and their hope. . . . I never had the courage to tell you that my poor old mother used to [claim that she] survived the difficult times after the First World War ‘thanks to Hoover’s help to Poland.’"

6. Photograph of Karski reviewing Polish materials at the Hoover Institution Archives in 1995.

7. Letter from Karski to European collections curator Maciej Siekierski expressing thanks for the attention shown him during his visit to the Hoover Institution in 1995.

8. Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, by E. Thomas Wood. Wood researched documents in the Hoover Institution Archives, including the Jan Karski Papers and the records of several ministries of the Polish government in exile, to write his biography.

Available from the Hoover Press are Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union, by Roman Szporluk, and The Collapse of Communism, edited by Lee Edwards. To order, call 800-935-2882.