Remember This

The Lesson of Jan Karski

Plot

"This book is the text of the play and screenplay, Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, a one-man play - and soon to be released film - starring David Strathairn. The text is accompanied by still images from the film, and essays by a range of outstanding contributors, including Samantha Power, Madeleine Albright, Azar Nafisi, and Leo O'Donovan, SJ. The goal is to publish the book this fall to coincide with the release of the film and new presentations of the play. The play and screenplay were inspired by the reissuing (by GU Press) of Jan Karski's Story of a Secret State in 2014. The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown first presented an early version of Remember This in 2014 with Georgetown students as the actors. Strathairn then become involved, and the play workshopped in New York, Warsaw, Washington, DC, and Princeton, before a fully-realized version was staged for the SFS Centennial in 2019 and in London in January 2020. When the pandemic made further productions of the play impossible, the authors decided to film the production. Jan Karski (1914-2000) served as a liaison officer of the Polish Underground during World War II and carried the first eyewitness report of the Holocaust to UK and US political leadership. After the war, Karski earned a PhD at Georgetown, where he served as a distinguished professor in the School of Foreign Service for forty years. He was recognized as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem and in 2012 was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom"--