Jan Karski Courage to Care Award

The Anti-Defamation League's Courage to Care Award was established in 1987 to honor rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Jan Karski was among the first recipients of the award."Such is the esteem we feel for Jan Karski, whom I had the privilege of knowing during his years teaching in the United States, that we decided to rename the award in his memory," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor from Poland.

In 1942, Karski as a liaison officer of the Polish underground during the early days of World War II.  witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto and the Izbica transit camp, the last stop before the Belzac death camp. He traveled to London and Washington, D.C. to alert Western politicians to the Holocaust by reporting his eyewitness accounts and made urgent pleas to save European Jewry, to no avail.

Dr. Karski remained an emigrant and later became an American citizen and taught international relations ad theory of communism at Georgetown University. In 1982, he was honored with the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.

The first presentation of the ADL Jan Karski Courage to Care Award will take place in New York City, where the award will be presented posthumously to Count János Esterházy, a Hungarian aristocrat and member of the Slovakian Parliament who in 1939 actively participated in assisting the settlement of Polish refugees in Hungary, many of whom were Jews, and who later helped Slovakian Jews.