The Story Of A Secret State

Karski joined the resistance movement. His credentials and character quickly made him a trusted and versatile operative. His position enabled him to see and then write about how "The Secret State" worked - literally as a state within a state. Such was Polish hatred of the Germans and their behaviour that all the diverse political parties worked in an underground coalition, linked to the Polish government in exile by couriers. Poland was proud to have no Quislings.

The risks, however, were enormous. To be caught as a member of the resistance led to almost certain torture and death. For active operatives, strychnine capsules were regulation issue.

The Underground had to cope with terrible choices. The German policy of terror was based on collective responsibility. Any number of innocent civilians would be shot if one German was killed. Resistance continued undiminished and more than five million civilians - 16 per cent of the population - were killed during the occupation.

Karski tells his extraordinary story with simplicity and directness. Acting as a courier, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured. Losing his capsule, and half-dead already, he found a fragment of razor blade and cut his wrists. Taken unconscious to a German hospital to be revived for more torture, he was rescued by a Socialist resistance group. Ironic, Karski writes, as his mother had always warned him to "beware actresses, cards and radicals".

After recuperating in hiding, Karski was chosen for his most important mission: to report on the condition of Poland to the outside world. Before he left for London, Karski determined to view at first-hand the condition of Polish Jews. This chapter forms the horrendous climax of the book.

With a Jewish guide, he makes two nightmare trips into the Warsaw Ghetto seeing the appalling conditions in which 400,000 Jews were living. He hears of their plans "to die fighting, not suffering." Later, he is smuggled into Belzec concentration camp disguised as an Estonian camp guard. What he saw there was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

After a dangerous, 22-day journey, Karski reached London on December 1 1942. He met politicians and community leaders, and on the February 5 1943, talked with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. He then flew to the US and met President Roosevelt that July.

This was a full nine months before the two young men, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz and brought their report to the outside world.

It was generally thought that this was the first that the West heard of the grotesque facts about the camps. But, thanks to Karski, the Allied leaders already knew what was happening.

After the war, much-decorated for his bravery, Karski settled in Washington DC and taught at Georgetown University for 40 years. On his statue in the grounds, a plaque reads: "Messenger of the Polish People to Their Government in Exile. Messenger of the Jewish People to the World… A Noble Man Walked Amongst Us and Made Us Better by His Presence." His name is on a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous Gentile. His book, 67 years on, is still hard to put down.

Stanley Price's next book, 'The Way to Apocalypse' (with Munro Price) will be published in October