Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski by Clark Young and Derek Goldman is an unsettling piece of theater in performance through November 17, 2021, by the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Michael R. Klein Theatre. In a tour-de-force performance by David Strathairn, this one-man 90-minute play asks questions that shake the foundations of our own existence.
Our world is in peril, fractured, toxic…we are torn apart with fear, hatred, denial, impoverished, sickened, silenced, forgotten….Don’t we see this? What can we do? Don’t we have a duty to do something?
Making her first foray back to live theater since Covid-19 shutdown the performing arts, the Dresser on October 8 heard something like the lines above as the first words of this remarkable play. The Dresser became aware of the courageous Jan Karski, the Polish resistance agent and Georgetown professor during a horrific event in his life. He was quietly her neighbor at the Elizabeth Condominium in Chevy Chase on a Saturday in 1992 when his beloved wife Pola Nireńska, a dancer who had fled Poland ahead of the Nazi extermination of Jews—she lost 74 relatives in the Holocaust, jumped from their balcony to her death.
Following the opening questions, a clip of a couple of minutes from Claude Lanzmann’s well known documentary Shoah presented the real-life Jan Karski who for 35 years did not talk about what he had experienced and how his efforts to engage world leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, to save the few Polish Jews left failed. Throughout the play, the character Karski says he was a little man but this little man who endured jumping out of a moving Nazi train, suffering beatings that broke his jaw and ribs, surviving a prison breakout where his liberators told him either he would be successful in following their plan or they would shoot him …this little man with a photographic memory who witnessed in clandestine visits the Warsaw Ghetto at its worst moments and toured a death camp disguised as a Ukrainian officer. To get past the trauma he experienced, he thought of himself as a camera.
In an interview with Deborah Tannen (author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation), Clark Young affirms that almost all the words spoken in the script were Jan Karski’s. David Strathairn (most recently seen in the film Nomadland) is on stage for the entire 90 minutes performing a physically demanding role of jumping, falling, undressing, dressing. Despite the ultra-seriousness of this story, Strathairn as Karski occasionally makes his audience laugh like when he imitates Roosevelt’s ponderous way of speaking or when he quips after he had jumped out of the Nazi train that he was no James Bond.
The play closes in the way it opens. Karski says “Great crimes start with little things.” He repeats what has been said that governments have no souls, but individuals do. He asks again about what we can do and don’t we feel responsibility to do something. All these lessons he learned starting with his mother who had him guard one night a Jewish neighbor’s sukkah when the neighborhood boys were throwing dead rats into the enclosure as a way of bully them.
Karski was Catholic and his wife Pola was Jewish. He first saw her dance, when he was sent to London to report on how the Nazis were killing the Jews. In “Farewell Concert,” Karren Alenier (a.k.a. the Dresser) relates the experience of Pola’s final act.
FAREWELL CONCERT
(with excerpts from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad)
A woman on the eleventh
floor plunged to her
death Saturday, I heard
the sirens. She never screamed.
When he comes to weakness—
The explosion, when I sleep, repeats
and repeats, the body at rest
I see once, color splashed,
an artist out of control.
—whether he come to weakness
through old age or through disease—
this person frees himself from these limbs
just as a mango, or a fig, or a berry
releases itself from its bond;
Earlier in the week, dressed in slippers
and robe, hair uncombed, the performer walked
her miniature dog in the street. Some say
she fell.
…and he hastens again, according
to the entrance and place of origin,
back to life.
Monday I go to the office, teeth on edge,
the noise, the blood, the spilled brains
still with me. and what is it can be said?
…As noblemen, policemen, chariot-drivers,
village-heads wait with food, drink,
and lodgings for a king who is coming,
and cry: ‘Here he comes! Here he comes!’
The obituary tells about the choreographer
who last year, her eightieth year, danced
what she called a farewell concert,
having survived what seventy-four
relatives did not: the Nazis.
…so indeed do all things wait
for him who has this knowledge
and cry: ‘Here is the Imperishable
coming! Here is the Imperishable coming!’
My head bursts with unfinished
work I must complete. How
in the name of the Limitless,
will I celebrate this life?
—Karren L. Alenier
from Looking for Divine Transportation
Photo of David Strathairn by Teresa Castracane Photography
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