“We see what goes on in the world, don’t we?”
These are the first words of the play “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” which opens June 5 at Spoleto Festival USA. This story retraces the life of Polish diplomat and resistance fighter Jan Karski, who died in 2000.
Among the questions raised by the solo show starring Academy Award nominee David Strathairn: Would Karski, who alerted the West to the horrors of the Holocaust in 1943, recognize the world today?
Director Derek Goldman, who co-wrote the script with his former student Clark Young, brings Karski’s story to vivid life. A former courier for the Polish underground resistance during World War II, Karski escaped a Gestapo prison, infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto and carried the first eyewitness accounts of Nazi atrocities to the Oval Office.
“The play is about how every individual has to make choices about who they’re going to be in the world,” Goldman said. “Karski talks about these moments in your life where you can do the right thing and be this person. Often, the gap between becoming good and becoming evil is actually very little.”
A simple set, a powerful performance
Strathairn, who has been involved with versions of “Remember This” since its creation in 2014, commands the stage with just a chair, a table and Karski’s words.
“The origin of this piece is just Karski in a classroom sharing the memories and stories of his life,” Goldman said.
After the war, Karski received his doctorate from Georgetown University in 1952 and went on to teach Eastern European affairs, comparative government and international affairs there for 40 years. The play was written as part of Georgetown’s commemoration of his 100th anniversary of his birth.
Video footage of Karski has great importance in the play: Not only did it help Strathairn build his performance, but it also appears during the show itself. In a clip taken from Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, spectators can hear footage of Karski speaking.
“Now … now I go back. … Thirty-five years. No … I don’t go back. As a matter of … All right. I come back,” Karski says as he leaves the frame. The clip ends.
As someone who refers to himself as “an insignificant little man,” Karski takes on a nearly mythical stature, confronting atrocities head-on rather than looking away to ensure he remembers them.
From Georgetown to Charleston
Since its debut under the auspices of Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, which was created by Goldman, the play has also become a feature film and appeared around the world, including in Warsaw.
“It’s our honor to be telling this story, not only helping people process what’s going on in the world now but leading them to the fact that we don’t have Karski anymore,” said Goldman. “Karski was an extraordinary man, and we don’t have people who provide that kind of moral leadership right now.”
The piece was a relatively late addition to the Spoleto schedule, joining the program after a separate solo theater piece, Patrick Page’s “All the Devils Are Here,” was canceled in February due to illness. Liz Keller Tripp, Spoleto’s chief artistic producer, described the “powerfully timely” message of “Remember This” as “a call to action and to conversation about history, ethics, and individual responsibility and courage in the face of injustice.”
The play’s themes prompted the festival to extend the conversation through audience talkbacks and other community programming.
“We hope that audiences leave with a deeper understanding of this particular history,” Tripp said, “but also about our own lives, the world around us, and with hope.”
IF YOU WANT TO GO: “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski” runs June 5–8 at the College of Charleston’s Sottile Theatre. Tickets are $44 to $128.
Mathilde Refloch is a graduate student in the Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications program at Syracuse University.
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