Hoover curator and Research Fellow Katharina Friedla tells the story of Jan Karski, the Polish diplomat who in 1942 infiltrated the Warsaw Ghetto, witnessed the unfolding Holocaust, and tried to warn British and American officials, including President Franklin Roosevelt. Drawing on Karski’s papers, housed in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Friedla describes the skepticism that greeted Karski’s warnings about the complete destruction of Europe’s Jews. She recounts how, after the war, Karski was enlisted as a Hoover curator and played a pivotal role in helping the Library & Archives amass its outstanding Polish wartime collections.
Katharina Friedla
Books
How can we make better decisions—especially when the stakes are highest? In Judgment Calls, historian Zachary Shore tackles this timeless puzzle with intellectual daring and uncommon range.
November 1, 2026
Articles
The world breathed a sigh of relief when, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—November 11, 1918—the guns fell silent. The Great War, as World War One was then known, was over in Europe.
November 11, 2026
Articles
This Monday marks thirty-six years since the beginning of the end of the Cold War. In the excerpt below from Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, I recall watching the Iron Curtain part while serving in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment, a unit charged with border surveillance and control along the East-West German border and the West Germany-Czechoslovakia border.
November 10, 2026