SOURCE: "The Unbelieved," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4805, May 5, 1995, p. 8.

[An English educator and historian, Burleigh has written extensively on Nazi Germany. In the following review, he discusses E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski's Karski, the biography of a Polish underground agent, and The Buchenwald Report, a study of the SS concentration camp system combined with testimony of Buchenwald inmates, edited and translated by David A. Hackett.]

Karski is the remarkable story of a modest man who has become a "professional hero", which the journalist authors tell with sympathy and verve, even if their hyperbolic subtitle ["How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust"] is rather discordant. Jan Kozielewski (also known as Witold Karski) was born in 1914 in the industrial city of Lodz in Poland. Educated by the Jesuits and at the University of Lwow, where he witnessed (and later regretted doing nothing about) attacks on...