Through November 24
REMEMBER THIS: The Lesson of Jan Karsk The Maxine amd Robert Seller Theatre/Jewish Repertory Theatre
By Augustine Warner
We know the names of thousands of those who led the atrocities of World War II, Hitler. Himmler, Eichmann, Tojo, Mengele and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who actually did the mass murders, experiments and exterminations across the world.
How many names do you know of those who actively were on the other side, not just as generals or presidents or prime ministers, but as individuals?
Certainly, we may know of von Stauffenberg or the members of the White Rose or the feuding resistances of Europe, some shifting with the political winds.
Then there were a few individuals who did more than just speak against what so many knew was going on behind the barbed wire and to those in custody.
One was Jan Karski, who actually went into the Warsaw Ghetto and a death camp, so he could tell those in power what was really going on.
He’s getting a wonderful performance from David Lundy in the Jewish Repertory Theater’s “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”
This Polish soldier and diplomat did tell what was going on to Poles outside of occupied Europe, British leader Anthony Eden and President Franklin Roosevelt, all not wanting to know.
The Catholic Karski told not only what the Nazis were doing to his Polish Christian compatriots but what they were doing to the millions of Jews of Poland, vanishing into the death camps and the furnaces, and, perhaps, into the vanishing of history.
To no avail.
In a fascinating, illuminating and must-see one-man performance from Lundy, in “Remember This,” playwrights Clark Young and Derek Goldman tell the story of one man who bore witness.
He was a man who had the characteristics of Cassandra, the Trojan princess in “The Iliad,” who was condemned to tell the truth and not be believed.
The playwrights take the play’s name from the scene in the death-ridden Warsaw Ghetto, when as Karski walks the streets, he is told “Remember This” and “Remember This.”
This is not a play which doesn’t take a stand, choosing to argue for the power of one man to make clear what happened, to bear witness, and what could happen again if the lessons of the Shoah are forgotten.
Karski spent years after the war suppressing his personal knowledge of what happened and watching high officials lie about what they knew when they could have made a difference.
Gradually, he began to tell his story, to his students at Georgetown, in books and in Claude Lanzmann’s long documentary, “Shoah.”
As Karski and so many others have disappeared into their graves, it’s important their message not be forgotten, the playwrights’ “Remember This.”
Lundy has a lot of experience in one-person show, in his Harry Truman “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!” show
Director Robert Waterhouse has vast experience in the theater and it shows in this production never giving way to the boredom common when one performer is working alone on a stage.
Director Waterhouse and performer Lundy worked with dialect coach Gerry Trentham so that the Polish voice never falters, never drifts.
It’s all up to the man onstage, with a table and chairs, wearing a suit and a sweater.
Lundy never loses command of the story, of this man who saw his friends and his people murdered, not losing command of the audience listening to one man trying to show that one person can make a difference because he testified to truth.
It’s the performance and the message, familiar to many as “Never Again,” and Jan Karski tells the story and he was there.
That’s the key to this show.
He may have been an academic at Georgetown, but he had a personal story, not just a story based on graduate study and a Ph.D. thesis.
Karski was a man who didn’t fold when the Germans and the Russians split his homeland and started mass murder.
He did something when few did.
That’s why Jan Karski’s name shouldn’t be forgotten and why people and not just the theater crowd should see David Lundy in “Remember This: The Lessons of Jan Karski.”
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