Hours after Claude Lanzmann’s epic 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah, an urban silver-haired man in a suit and tie sits in front of the camera and summons the courage to tell his story. Karski. he gasps.
“Now I’m going back 35 years,” he begins, savoring his words with a strong Polish accent. But almost immediately his composure breaks down and he starts crying. The memories he’s been asked to tap into are too excruciating.
“No. I’m not going back,” says Karski. He flees the room as the cameras watch.
To Strathairn who watched over 9 hours “Shore” was released at once, and the “microscopic moment” of the movie was “the entrance to 35 years of silence”. In the dressing room of the theater, with his glasses on his head, he traced the timeline of Karski’s life on the table—in Strathairn’s mind, all that happened was that short tormented film. is somehow contained in
At the beginning of the timeline, during Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother saw a “bad Catholic boy” throwing dead rats at the Jews, he taught Karski to do something. gave me Next, in his late twenties, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish leader snuck him into his Warsaw ghetto and German concentration camp so that he could tell the world what was happening there. I made it After that, in the years after the war, after writing a book about his experiences, he never spoke of them anymore, even though he taught at Georgetown University’s Diplomacy School for decades. This chapter, which began in the late 1970s, began when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again about the “Shoah.”
Set to open in Brooklyn on Thursday and run through October 9, “Remember This” was created as a multi-character production in Georgetown to mark Karski’s 100th birthday in 2014. Written by Derek Goldman, artistic director of the university’s Institute for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, the book was initially intended as a “to the world.” It was titled “My Report”. The subtitle of Karski’s bestselling 1944 war memoir. “Story of a Secret State”