We live in a world where a recent United States leader – like a brat throwing a tantrum – has convinced millions of followers that the truth needn’t be accepted, that truth, when inconvenient, can be summarily discarded.
So, it follows that we live in a world where a theater piece about the immeasurable damage resistance to truth can cause acquires an especially powerful meaning.
The work is Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski. Karski was born a Catholic in Poland in 1914 and fated to endure barely survivable treatment during World War II before becoming a courier for the Polish underground. In that capacity he was eventually sent to observe conditions endured by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto as well in concentration camps.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The adjective “harrowing” only begins to describe Karski’s life as depicted in the monologue created from his 40 years of teaching at Georgetown by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. The piece is scrupulously written by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, directed by Goldman, and played with inexhaustible energy by David Strathairn.
It’s likely that those watching and listening to Strathairn recreate Karski’s experiences will find it tough going. Nonetheless, they’ll understand they cannot turn away from what he endured and witnessed. As time goes by, and the Holocaust increasingly threatens to fade in the collective memory—and is even denied by some with willing followers—Remember This is necessary.
The most cogent facts of Karski’s life that stay with audience members might be several only revealed when Karski has put together a report on what he’s seen during his stressful travels. He’s quite graphic about the spectral appearances of the ghetto and concentration camp populations.
Karski apparently omits little when in 1943 describing his findings to Great Britain’s prime minister. Anthony Eden sees no urgent reason to send the courier on to Winston Churchill for updating. The same results obtain in the States when Karski visits Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who refuses to believe anyone, no matter how evil, can behave as he’s just been told. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while smoking a cigarette in his well-known cigarette holder, listens to Karski with a benign show of interest but leaves it at that.
Karski – who, by the way, had been given a code name and was introduced as Witold during those excursions – also recalls that Churchill and Roosevelt, when later informed of the camps, claimed they knew nothing of them until WWII ended. This is additional info difficult to face but unpleasantly necessary to absorb.
Clark and Goldman begin their look at Karski from his childhood in the Poland he loved. They follow him assiduously through his shock at 24 when Germany invades his homeland, taking it over in a matter of minutes. They fill in the degrading treatments he receives through the early war years. Though he attempts suicide – he has trouble slashing his wrists – he recovers and, for his resilience, is eventually recruited for resistance activities.
Strathairn demonstrates it all. Entering in an open-necked white shirt, tan trousers and dark socks, he adds and subtracts a tan jacket, a brown tie, a Fair Isle vest, and shoes for the next 90 minutes. Although he acts as emcee at the beginning and end, he’s mostly Jan/Witold with convincing accent.
Clearly not wanting Remember This to resemble a professor lecturing, Goldman keeps Strathairn to an unflagging workout. He’s constantly moving the two straight-backed wood chairs and long wood table that set designer Misha Kachman provides. Or he lies on the table or climbs up on it to simulate jumping from a great height to escape prison. He recoils from relentless beatings that nearly do Karski in. At the end, he’s completed a romp that would put anyone in a gym today to shame.
By the time Remember This ends, with Strathairn breathing as if he’s gone through nothing particularly demanding, the audience is released. Spectators can leave but not without more than the usual questions and concerns that attend the blackout at many another dramatic offering.
That’s the authors’ intention, of course. They recognize obligations the highest government officials had to believe their ears during World War II. Simultaneously, they’re commenting on the need for today’s audiences not to ignore any sort of big lie told them. The consequence of such failing – of a preference to dismiss disturbing evidence given by reputable representatives — too greatly imperils a nation. Clark and Goodman are declaring that deliberate ignorance is tantamount to sedition.
It may even occur to audiences that Karski’s understandably enduring longing for his homeland has a certain drawback. Yes, he dedicates much of his life to saving Jews, a life he repeatedly says he lives as “an insignificant little man.” As an honorary Israeli, he’s indisputably more than that.
But the drawback? At a potent Remember This moment Karski states that “Governments have no soul” but that people do. Nevertheless, he never speaks at any length of Poland’s long substantiated anti-Semitism, an aspect of his battle that must have hampered him sometime or other through at least the earlier decades.
Maybe that’s a monologue for another time. For now, what Karski talks about through able surrogate Strathairn (Karski died in July, 2000) is plenty to take in and, beyond that, to take on. Certainly, that’s the pressing message Clark and Goldman want to send – and Karski does, from the grave.
Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski opened September 15, 2022, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (Brooklyn) and runs through October 9. Tickets and information: tfana.org
