Ever wondered who the man was behind the pensive, chess-playing statue in front of White Gravenor?

Yesterday, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to this war hero, the late Jan Karski, a Polish World War II resistance movement fighter who later became a professor at Georgetown University. The Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor. Karski died in 2000 and spent 40 years as a Georgetown professor.

During the early 1940s, Karski reported to the Polish government-in-exile, the American, and British allies on the atrocities committed in German-occupied Poland. ”Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, it being one of the first accounts of the Holocaust, imploring the world to take action. It was decades before Jan was ready to tell his story, and by then he said, ‘I don’t need courage anymore, so I teach with passion,’” Obama said during the awards ceremony.

Karski was a part of ZWZ, Union of Armed Struggle, which was an underground army formed in Poland to resist German occupation. ”When Karski told Jewish Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter what was happening, Frankfurter replied, ‘I do not believe you.’ Winston Churchill refused to meet with Karski to discuss saving the Jews. Had the allies acted when Karski spoke up, millions could have been saved,” the Huffington Post writes about Karski.

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Clean as of 5:15

Update: Facilities has already cleaned up all signs of the vandalism. Anyone catch a glimpse of what the vandalism entailed this time?

Georgetown’s Office of Student Affairs reports in an email (full text after the jump) that last night, and unknown suspect vandalized the statue of the Virgin Mary on Copley Lawn. This, of course, is the second time someone vandalized this statue (the first being sometime before February 22) and the third campus incident in which someone vandalized a statue (someone painted the face of Jan Karski’s statue red).

Weirdly, they don’t report the specifics of what happened to the statue this time. I assume it was painted (photograph to follow, unless Facilities has already completed clean-up): “This morning University officials became aware that the statue of the Blessed Mother on Copley Lawn was vandalized overnight.  This incident is the most recent to have been reported over the past several weeks where paint has been used to deface religious symbols and other property in our community.”

The email reports that in response to this incident, DPS is ramping up security efforts around statues and religious spaces (DPS smacks forehead) and is the first of the emails to introduce the Metropolitan Police Department into the mix:

The Department of Public Safety (DPS) called the Metropolitan Police Department to report this incident and request cooperation in the ongoing investigation of these acts of vandalism.  DPS is also increasing patrols of campus, with a particular emphasis on areas that include the presence of statues, religious symbols and sacred spaces.

Once again, nothing seems to be known about the perpetrator, including whether the incidents are related.

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The Jan Karski statue near White Gravenor, pre-vandalism

At 8:07, an email from Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson and the Office of Student Affairs notified Georgetown students and faculty that a second statue on Georgetown’s campus had been vandalized.

The statue of former Georgetown professor Jan Karski, a World War II Polish war hero who reported on the existence of concentration camps to the Allies during the war, “symbolizes many of the values central to our community,” Olson writes. It was found painted a little more than a week after the statue of the Virgin Mary was found with her face painted black on Copley Lawn. The late professor Karski taught at Georgetown for nearly 40 years. He died in 2000.

According to the email, Facilities has already removed most of the paint from the statue.

As is the case with the defacement of the Mary statue, the Department of Public Safety is investigating, but “[does] not know the motivation of the person or persons who painted the statue, nor whether or not they are members of the University community.” Any connection to the vandalism of the Mary statue is also unclear.

Full text of the email after the jump.

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