In October 1942, during the height of the destruction of Polish Jewry, the Polish underground ordered Jan Karski to carry a report to the government-in-exile in London. Before he left, two Jewish leaders from the Warsaw ghetto met him. Their message was simple: “Our entire people will be destroyed.” Karski decided he needed to see it himself. At enormous personal risk, he was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and later into the Izbica transit camp near Lublin, disguised among the guards. He watched starving children, naked corpses left in the streets, and Jews packed into freight cars for the killing centers. The images never left him. He became not only the courier of the Polish underground but the witness who insisted the free world hear what was happening to the Jews. He reached London in November 1942 and briefed the Polish government-in-exile and British officials, including Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. In July 1943, he met President Roosevelt in Washington and described what he had seen. Roosevelt listened, and then asked questions about other matters. Karski later wrote that he had failed in his wartime mission. In 1981, he told American officers who had liberated the camps: “And thus I myself became a Jew … so have all the Jews who were slaughtered become my family. But I am a Christian Jew … My faith tells me the second original sin has been committed by humanity. This sin will haunt humanity to the end of time. And I want it to be so.” Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1982, not because he saved individual Jews, but because he risked his life to enter the ghetto and a transit camp and carried their message to leaders of the free world. In 1994, Israel granted him honorary citizenship. He called it the proudest day of his life. Karski had been a Polish diplomat and underground courier. After the war, he became a Georgetown professor. The silence that greeted his reports never stopped troubling him. He spent the rest of his life insisting that the world had known and had not acted in time.