Now that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has agreed to cooperate with the U.N. in disclosing and destroying his country’s chemical weapons stockpiles, why should Americans care about the bloody Syrian civil war which has claimed the lives of over 100,000 people and created more than 2 million refugees?

The answer — that our sense of decency and common humanity requires us to care — is underscored by a book I recently spotted in the new acquisitions section of the Auburn Public Library. It’s called “Story of a Secret State.” A bestseller when originally published in 1944, it was republished this year by Georgetown University Press.

“Story of a Secret State” is not about the current Syrian conflict but concerns an event separated from it by a continent and nearly three-quarters of a century. It’s the story of the organized resistance movement created by Polish patriots after their country was invaded, occupied and enslaved by Nazi Germany (in concert with Soviet Russia) in 1939. Nevertheless, the book carries a universal message that resonates today. Genocide against others is a crime against all of us, one which needs to be stopped and punished.

The author, the late Jan Karski, was a professor of Eastern European affairs and comparative government when I attended Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in the late 1960s.

Before Karski emigrated to the U.S., he had been an operative and courier for the Polish underground and Polish government-in-exile during World War II. In that capacity, he provided eyewitness reports to Western leaders, including President Franklin Roosevelt, on the plight of the doomed Jewish population of the Warsaw Ghetto and the slaughter of Jews in a Nazi death camp – evidence of Germany’s secretive scheme for mass murder, later known as the Holocaust.

Fortunately I had the opportunity to take a course taught by Karski and to interview him about his wartime experiences for my college radio station. He was a great man (whose achievements were posthumously recognized by the White House with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012), and his compassion and courage in the face of the horrors he endured in Nazi- occupied Europe deeply impressed me.

University educated, well-traveled and multi-lingual, Karski was a handsome, charming young Polish diplomat and reserve army officer, when the Soviets and Germans invaded his country in September 1939. Mobilized into service, he was captured by the Soviet Army in eastern Poland. The Russians released him into German army custody (literally from the frying pan into the fire). He then escaped from the Germans to join the resistance.

In June 1940 while on an underground mission, Karski was captured by the Gestapo in Slovakia and subjected to days of brutal interrogation, during which he was beaten with rubber truncheons. For the rest of his life, his face and psyche bore the scars of those beatings. With the help from the resistance, Karski again escaped imprisonment and almost certain death.

In October 1942, Karski made two clandestine trips into the Warsaw Ghetto, from which at least 300,000 Jews had already been shipped to extermination camps. In his book, Karski portrayed searing images of the remnants of the ghetto—“the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children, the desperate cries and gasps of a people struggling for life against impossible odds.” He described a rosy-cheeked German boy, clad in a Hitler Youth uniform, calmly targeting and shooting a ghetto Jew for fun.

At a death camp near Warsaw, Karski witnessed some 5,000 Jews being herded into a train of freight cars where the floors had been covered with quicklime. The sweat of the prisoners mixed with the quicklime, creating a hot, caustic slime which burned their skin and slowly cooked them to death.

In mid-1943, Karski traveled to the United States, where he met with prominent leaders in politics, religion, business and the arts. Though a devout Catholic, he did his utmost to plead the cause of Europe’s dying Jewry, whose representatives urged the Allies to bomb rail lines to the death camps, provide passports and money to smuggle Jewish refugees out of the Reich, and, above all, publicize the truth about the Nazi extermination program and threaten reprisals if it persisted.

Despite cordial receptions by FDR and other government officials, Karski’s plea went unheeded. Instead, the hard-headed calculations of international politics prevailed. As a result, millions more Jews would perish before the war’s end. Roosevelt, politically attuned to anti-Semitic sentiment in Congress and the American public, was wary of making the U.S. war effort appear a mission to rescue Europe’s Jews. Besides, FDR reasoned, he could not divert resources away from ultimate goal – a decisive victory that would end the war. Then, too, there was the delicate task of allaying the paranoid suspicions of Russia, by then a vital ally, in whose backyard the “final solution” was taking  place.

Similarly there are many political reasons today for the U.S. to steer clear of the Syrian civil war. Throwing our weight into the balance could prolong the conflict by making the rebels more resistant to negotiations. If the al-Assad regime falls, Syria, like Somalia, could fracture and descend into anarchy, allowing chemical and other lethal weaponry to fall into the hands of warring factions, terrorists and criminals. Intensifying the conflict could destabilize or draw in other Middle Eastern countries. Arming the rebels could potentially strengthen the El Qaeda groups fighting with them. In the U.S., there’s little public support for another military adventure after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, it’s simply wrong to ignore mass slaughter of civilians. Bashar al-Assad may look and talk like a mild-mannered accountant, but, in the mold of his late father and former Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad, he’s a butcher. He has responded to his regime’s opponents with unrestrained ferocity directed against civilians and insurgents alike, employing not only chemical weapons, but air and artillery bombardment, sniper fire, paramilitary massacres, starvation and denial of access to medical care.

President Obama’s warnings to al-Assad have amounted to little more than empty rhetoric. Now that al-Assad has agreed to renounce chemical weapons, Obama has, in effect, declared victory without the need for direct military intervention. I’m not advocating American troops on the ground in Syria, but, we can at least provide the Syrian insurgents with the robust weaponry they need to beat al-Assad. The Obama administration has already sent more than a $1 billion in humanitarian aid to the opposition and has cleared a legal obstacle to supplying weapons by waiving restrictive provisions of the Arms Export Control Act. So far, however, there is little indication that the kind of weapons needed to turn the tide are being delivered to the insurgents.

Will the toppling of al-Assad advance U.S. interests in the Middle East? The region is too complex for anyone to make that prediction. But even if it accomplishes nothing at all for U.S. interests, helping the Syrian opposition will advance the cause of humanity, a cause to which Jan Karski devoted his life.

Elliott L. Epstein,a local attorney, is founder of Museum L-Aand an adjunct history instructor at Central Maine Community College. He is the author of “Lucifer’s Child,”a recently published book about the 1984 oven-death murder of Angela Palmer.Hemay be reached [email protected].