NEW YORK—Polish immigrant and Holocaust survivor Jan Karski (David Strathairn) may have thought of himself as “an insignificant little man,” but as “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski” makes clear, he was far more.
Written by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, who also doubles as the director, this one-person show at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center examines Karski’s experiences in the time leading up to and during World War II, and his attempts to tell of the horrors the Nazis inflicted upon the Jews of Europe.
Born into a Catholic family in Lodz, Poland, at the time “a center of culture and politics,” Karski (1914–2000) trained to be a diplomat, a career path drastically altered by the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. His life of order and protocol which, in an ironic twist, had once caused him to be invited to a rally in Germany where Hermann Göring was the speaker, was becoming one of suffering, captivity, and more than one daring escape….