The show, entitled Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, portrays the Polish Holocaust witness, who, as the company writes on its website, “risked his life to carry his report of the Warsaw ghetto from war-torn Poland to the Allied Nations and the Oval Office only to be disbelieved.”
Written by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, the play stars Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn, whose credits include the films Nightmare Alley, Nomadland, Lincoln and Good Night, and Good Luck.
In its review of the production, The Washington Post wrote: “David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski’s struggle to convince the Allies of the Holocaust’s enormity … Truth is the crux of Remember This. Strathairn and his moving narration tell the harrowing story.”
Strathairn has portrayed Karski in the play’s successive iterations since its 2014 opening at Georgetown University in Washington, where Karski lectured for over four decades.
Remember This is scheduled to run at the Theatre for a New Audience through October 9.
During World War II, as a member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Karski took part in courier missions with dispatches from the Polish underground to the Polish government-in-exile, then based in France.
During one such mission, in July 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo, the Nazi German secret police. Rescued by the Polish resistance, he soon resumed active service in the Information and Propaganda Bureau of the Polish Home Army’s High Command, and in the summer of 1942 he was assigned to perform a secret mission to London on behalf of the Polish Government’s Delegate in Poland and several political parties.
In order to gather evidence on the plight of Polish Jews, he was twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto. He later met several Allied leaders, including Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, and US President Franklin Roosevelt, but failed to secure support for European Jews.
After the war, Karski settled in the United States. In 1954, he became a US citizen. He remained an advocate of Holocaust memory until his death in 2000.
Karski’s honours included the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish state distinction, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Righteous Among the Nations Medal from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, and the honorary citizenship of Israel.
He is the author of Story of a Secret State and The Great Powers and Poland: 1919-1945, from Versailles to Yalta.
(mk/gs)