Jan Karski survived Soviet captivity, Gestapo torture, and a suicide attempt to carry eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust to London and the Oval Office, only to watch the world do almost nothing. This episode traces his path from a Catholic upbringing in a largely Jewish neighborhood of Lodz, through the elite Polish diplomatic service, to the POW camp where he swapped his officer’s uniform for a private’s rags and escaped the fate of the Katyn Massacre.

It follows his work as an underground courier, his escape from a Gestapo-guarded hospital, his two trips into the Warsaw Ghetto, and his infiltration of the Izbica transit camp in a guard’s uniform. The conversation covers microfilm hidden in hollowed-out keys, the meetings with Anthony Eden, Felix Frankfurter, and Franklin Roosevelt, the creation of the War Refugee Board, his 35 years of postwar silence, his clash with Claude Lanzmann over Shoah, and the honors that came late in life and after his death in 2000.

• How Karski used Soviet bureaucracy against itself to avoid execution
• Why he risked entering the ghetto and a transit camp when he already carried the documents
• Frankfurter’s words, I am unable to believe him, and the failure of imagination they revealed
• What the War Refugee Board accomplished and what Karski felt his mission failed to do
• Why precision in historical language mattered to him, even at the 2012 Medal of Freedom ceremony