[4][3] In July 1945, Consul General Sylwin Strakacz repudiated the new communist Polish Provisional Government of National Unity, and resigned his post.

[4] In November 2007, the Consulate installed near its entrance as a permanent memorial a life-size statue of Jan Karski sitting on a bench, playing chess.

[5] During the Holocaust, at the direction of the Polish government-in-exile, Karski had in disguise and smuggled in by the Jewish underground entered the Warsaw Ghetto and observed Nazi atrocities against the Jews there, and the forced transport of Jews to the Nazi Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland.

[5][6] Karski then traveled to England and the United States to warn the governments that the Nazis were exterminating Jews in Poland, and encourage them to do something to stop it.

[5][7] He died in 2000, as he was playing chess with a Polish diplomat while sitting on a park bench.