It’s the essence of a nightmare, isn’t it? You are screaming in terror, in outrage, and no one responds. They go on about their business as if you didn’t even exist.
This was Polish diplomat Jan Karski’s life in the 1940s, when he took on the role of secret courier – spy – for Poland’s government-in-exile and witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Holocaust. As World War II raged on, the Allies’ motives seemingly more territorial than moral, Franklin Delano Roosevelt brushed Karski off, as did Supreme Court associate justice Felix Frankfurter, who stated flatly: “I do not believe you.”
The play’s richly detailed script, painstakingly co-constructed by Clark Young and director Derek Goldman from reams of background material, builds to this jaw-dropping moment gradually, starting with a table, two chairs, and actor Daniel Strathairn serving as an anonymous Everyman narrator: “We see what goes on in the world, don’t we?” he starts mildly. “We are being torn apart by immense gulfs of selfishness, distrust, fear, hatred, indifference, denial…. Human beings have an infinite capacity to ignore things that are not convenient.”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The latter is a direct quote from the real-life Jan Karski, who – having survived the emotional and physical traumas of World War II – sought refuge in academia: post-war, he taught for four decades at Georgetown University, where this play germinated. But there would be no escaping the trauma he experienced. Cue a film clip of Karski breaking down as Claude Lanzmann tries to elicit his recollections for posterity in the 1985 film Shoah. In one blink, Strathairn becomes Karski, complete with Polish accent and a peculiar breathy cadence to his speech. The transformation is quietly dazzling.
At this point, one might expect to segue into a chronological memoir, starting with childhood reminiscences. We do hear how Karski, though raised Catholic, easily made friends within his largely Jewish neighborhood – but the larger world soon intruded, as Germany sought to expand its empire. Conscripted into Poland’s army, Karski was sent to defend the western border.
The action up to this point has been relatively contained, but in one bone-rattling moment, Karski is catapulted across the room. (I witnessed this, of course, and yet I still can’t fathom how Strathairn, perhaps with help from movement director Emma Jaster, pulled off this effect.) From the Blitzkreig onward, it becomes clear that Strathairn will be fully inhabiting Karski’s physicality as well as his unique voice.
The Polish underground, recognizing a skilled survivor, granted Karski a new identity and a mission – once he had managed to spirit himself out of a Russian prisoner-of-war camp and trudge 100 miles homeward amid hordes of displaced refugees.
He embraces the mission: “I become a tape recorder, a camera,” His first assignment? To report on his hometown, Lodz, which he found thoroughly Germanified. Town after town, the same – until the Gestapo closed in on him. It would be impossible to take in, fully, the pain inflicted on Karski, but Strathairn’s embodiment and the onslaught of light and sound summoned by composer/designer Roc Lee take us as far as our imaginations will allow.
These excruciating memories of capture are overshadowed by a fact-finding mission instigated by the Jewish underground. Unnamed guides spirit him into the Warsaw Ghetto, twice, where words all but fail him: “So now comes the description of it, yes?” Karski’s halting account will transport you there.
He was also afforded a glimpse of what he was told was a death camp. He later learned that it was a transit camp. a waystation. At an an actual camp, the treatment of the condemned would have been exponentially worse. “This cannot be described,” Karski says, and yet he does.
Then comes the aftermath: Karski’s nightmarish missions to London and Washington, where he tries in vain to impress upon world leaders the urgency of the situation.
In this moving, immersive tribute to one man’s efforts to expose the truth, Karski’s adjurations live on. His message does not age: that we must listen and act in the presence of inhumanity and unimaginable evil. His simple counsel, echoed, concludes the play: “We have to take care of each other.”
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
