Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.

They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.

“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.

By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.

Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?

“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”

Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”

Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.

“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”

So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.

Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.

Hours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.

“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.

“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.

To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.

At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.

“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”

That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.

In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.

“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”

Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.

“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”

If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.

“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.

“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?

“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”

Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity.