Remembering Jan Karski Transcript

March 8, 2023

Jan Karski: Their minds cannot absorb that it was really real. It was. It becomes a myth.  

Michael Berenbaum ((Professor, American Jewish University): I always felt that I was in the presence of nobility, of greatness.  

David Strathairn (Actor): You have to be willing to do the work in order to find out the truth. He did work.  

Michael Berenbaum: So here is a man who alerted the world to genocide as it was taking place.  

Jacek Nowakowski: He felt that he was a failure in delivering the message.  

Stuart Eizenstat: I think he lived it every minute of every day.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: He came to say, I became a Jew. I’m a Christian Jew, but I became a Jew.  

Remembering Jan Karski 

REMEMBER THIS film clip: Jan Karski. A man who told of the annihilation of the Jewish people while there was still time to stop it.  

David Strathairn: Rarely do we get an opportunity as performers to share this kind of material.  

David Strathairn on stage: Our world is in peril. Every day, it becomes more and more fractured, and toxic.  

Eva Anisko (Producer): I experienced David’s performance and was just blown away.  

Derek Goldman (Director/Co-writer):  We can’t imagine a more resonant story for this moment and for this time.  

Eva Anisko: I asked Derek, could I help you? Could we capture this on film?  

REMEMBER THIS: I ask you – what is your duty as an individual? Every generation takes on a new revolution.  

David Strathairn: A lot have no idea who this man was. So it is a kind of a gift to them.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: Jan Karski…he came from a different place. It was a place of dignity and integrity and a place of true patriotism.  

Clark Young (Co-writer): I was struck because it was a story of failure. And I find stories of failure to actually be more generative than stories of success. They teach us what we’ve done wrong in relationship to what’s happening in the world right now.  

REMEMBER THIS: Then the sun descends on one point alone. A man, medals on his chest, light glowing around.  

Jeff Hutchens (Co-Director/Cinematographer): I felt like there was a way that we could translate it on film in a way that was, you know, going to feel like a cinematic adaptation.  

Eva Anisko: The scale and vision grew from a live capture of David with maybe three cameras. We decided, no, let’s film this like a movie.  

Derek Goldman: Turning the camera in a sense into kind of the extension of an experience that we built for an audience and seeing the kind of complementary but also different rules and opportunities.  

Eva Anisko: You know, it was a very intentional choice to shoot it single camera. So there’s not a cutaway in the piece. We have no alternate angles that we can cut to, that we can work around if we find ourselves in a pinch with how we shot it or something. So everything had to be worked out exceptionally precisely.  

Eva Anisko: The camera follows David and gets so close that you are just in Karski world.  

REMEMBER THIS: I understand my mission. I am not supposed to have any feelings. I am a camera.  

Derek Goldman: It’s a dance, the piece, in a certain way. And in a sense, on film, that dance became, you know, such so much about focal shifts, like the difference between looking into the camera and off the camera and off to the side.  

Jeff Hutchens: It felt to me like he was moving through these sort of three different worlds in a way. You know, there is this light world where there’s the hope for, like, you know, moral clarity and justice.  

REMEMBER THIS: A poem by Mickiewicz.  

Jeff Hutchens: I wanted us to like also then see Karski in this, like, gray sort of memory world. And then there is this other world, which is this like black, dissociative, chaotic world where you are adjacent to all the atrocities that are happening.  

Jeff Hutchens: One of the other choices in conjunction with that was to switch around the lensing. So for those white worlds, we went with a very clean, clear, like modern lens for those gray memory worlds and the black world as we switched to like a very flawed vintage lens. That, you know, contributed to helping you land yourself inside Karski’s head a little bit more and to feel like what his psychological state was at any given point in the story.  

REMEMBER THIS: It was not part of humanity.  

David Strathairn: Carrying his lesson or his legacy, it’s a real privilege, but it’s daunting to carry that weight of that man, of what he did forward.  

Clark Young: Someone who did so much at such a young age. And, and yet. Learned through that process the power of his own insignificance in relation to the size of humanity – and humanity’s greatest crimes.  

Michael Berenbaum: I taught at Georgetown University with Professor Karski, and I had all my students see the Claude Lanzmann documentary, Shoah. They saw him as an old man and what appeared to be a documentary, which they thought was taken, you know, 40, 50 years ago.  

Jacek Nowakowski (Senior Curator Collections/USHMM): They thought that he is – that this cannot be the same person. That person who is in the Shoah is dead.  

Michael Berenbaum: And after I showed that to my students, I would get a call inevitably from Professor Karski, in which he would say, Professor Berenbaum, you tell your students that I am very much alive. There will be plenty of time for me to be dead.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: When I became president of Georgetown in 1989, I, of course, got to know Jan because he was so prominent in the School of Foreign Service. Classes ended at five, and that’s when the cocktail hour began. And that was fine with me.  

Jacek Nowakowski: Karski was a diplomat. He was educated as such.  

Michael Berenbaum: He stood ramrod straight.  

Jacek Nowakowski: Always immaculately dressed.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: I don’t know whether David has ever worn such good clothes as Jan wore. He was very European in dress. Pocket handkerchief, always.  

Michael Berenbaum: Part of the reason he was chosen as a courier was he had a photographic memory. He used the language, I am a tape recorder.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: His name was Kozielewski but Karski became his courier name and stayed with him.  

Jacek Nowakowski: He was a heavy smoker, but somehow he talked himself into believing that if he smokes only the end of the cigarette, it’s healthy. It’s still okay.  

REMEMBER THIS: He’s more than the president of the United States. I see a lot of humanity.  

Michael Berenbaum: Karski used to mimic Roosevelt. (Long cigarette) He would go like this.  

Michael Berenbaum: You tell your people that we shall win the war and then we shall do something about the refugees. And his response to that was, by then it will be too late.  

Jacek Nowakowski: Karski never wavered. Never. He knew that there is just one truth and no different takes on that.  

Stuart Eizenstat: He was willing to try to save people who were not coreligionists. He was Catholic, they were Jewish. And that’s part of the courage and morality of Karski.  

REMEMBER THIS:  We can organize for you to visit the Jewish ghetto. We can organize for you to visit the Jewish camp.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: He almost had no choice. He had to become a Jew, as he said, and he had to identify with the suffering people he saw.  

Stuart Eizenstat: Let’s remember also the Warsaw Ghetto was the capital of Poland. So although they were not his coreligionists, they were citizens of his country.  

Michael Berenbaum: I had the unique privilege of speaking at his funeral in St Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, the very spot where the coffin of John F Kennedy had stood. As a tribute to Jan Karski, the Jewish community of Warsaw had sent over a Jewish star, and we placed it in his coffin because he was the voice of the Jewish community of Warsaw when they desperately needed a voice.  

(reciting Kaddish) 

Michael Berenbaum: And I had the opportunity to recite the Jewish mourner’s prayer, the Kaddish, perhaps the first time that the Kaddish had been recited in the cathedral, and one of the very few times to cut it had been recited for a non-Jewish person.  

(Kaddish) 

Jacek Nowakowski: If I was looking for a definition of righteousness, I would just say Karski.  

Karski: Now I remember.  

Stuart Eizenstat: There was a sort of underlying sadness about him. Rather than being triumphant about his courageous ventures into the Warsaw Ghetto, there was a sadness about the fact that he hadn’t broken through –  to President Roosevelt, to Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, to the American public. They either didn’t want to believe or might have believed, but felt it was inconvenient to believe.  

Michael Berenbaum: It didn’t make sense that a country of Bach and Beethoven, of of concern of Heidegger and Hegel, would be capable of doing such things. How could they become? We presumed that that was going to be a barbaric act. So we dismissed it.  

Jacek Nowakowski: Karski somehow seeing it and being in Poland in 1942, he understood it ahead of time and really he understood what was happening. I don’t think that a lot of the victims, a lot of Jews, understood what is happening. Probably those who understood died because they they lost any kind of hope. You know, the hope was, in many cases, what carried people to survival.  

REMEMBER THIS: This sin will haunt humanity to the end of time. It haunts me now. And I want it to be so.  

Stuart Eizenstat: When he said, I want to be haunted by this, he never wanted to forget what he had seen, what he had tried to accomplish, and what, from his perspective, he had failed to do.  

Clark Young: It’s a powerful idea to want to be haunted by something and to make that choice. And it took Karski I think a while to say that. He said it in 1981.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: He thought that he had written two pretty good books.  

Clark Young: Karski’s memoir, Story of a Secret State, which he wrote, you know, before the war ended. That was a Book of the Month club, a best seller.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: But what he really had done was teach a great many students who would never forget him.  

President Obama: For years, John Karski’s students at Georgetown University knew he was a great professor. What they didn’t realize was he was also a hero.  

REMEMBER THIS: Alone on stage, dancing barefoot – a girl. Polish girl of outstanding beauty. Her name is Pola, a Polish girl named Pola. Pola Nirenska.  

Michael Berenbaum: He married a very beautiful, very talented dancer of Jewish origin.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: It was a terrible, terrible affliction for him when she took her own life in 1992. She lost something like 16 members of her family in the Holocaust. And I think finally it was just too much.  

REMEMBER THIS: Try to imagine the people who see their loved ones dragged away to their deaths every day.  

Derek Goldman: There are moral, ethical, personal questions and challenges that Karski raises. And, if you’re working in the theater, you’re constantly thinking about, what do we need to bear witness to today? 

Derek Goldman:  And now we have this Bearing Witness: the Legacy of Jan Karski Today that we’ve been developing at Georgetown.  

Student: Language plays a huge role in our lives because it conveys social meaning and…  

Ijeoma Njaka (Georgetown University): There are these all these sort of different touch points that come from Karski’s life, resonates in these students. And then these students are sort of going out in the world in different ways. They’re really motivated by his sense of action and his sense of purpose.  

Clark Young: We need figures like Karski in the world, and there are so many. And one of the best parts about teaching the course is that students come in, they come in from all over the world. They come in from all disciplines, and they talk about their Karskis.  

Nelson Mandela clip: I stand here not as a prophet but as a humble servant.  

Nyasha Gandawa (Georgetown University student): I compared John Karski to models like Nelson Mandela on our continent. It felt impossible for them to overturn sort of this powerful, large structure that was oppressive. And the fact that they tried is a surprise and a miracle in a sense.  

Derek Goldman: I think about the status of truth. How do we know what to believe? The sense of disinformation and of competing and alternate truths is so pervasive and such a crisis in the world. But in particularly, I think in the lives of students as they’re trying to process and understand who to be and what to do.  

Nyasha Gandawa: When I walk past the bench, I remember I get a feeling of what it means to be brave and to try hard to do something good.  

REMEMBER THIS: If there is no effort at Allied Intervention within the years, the Jewish people of Poland will cease to exist.  

Eva Anisko: For me, it was not only the importance of this Holocaust story and this one individual, but the lessons that he represented. I feel like it’s incredibly relevant to what we’re experiencing around the world.  

David Strathairn: Misinformation, disinformation. Who do we believe? Who do we know is telling the truth? What is the truth? How relative are these truths to each other?  

Eva Anisko: One line in the film that human beings have infinite capacity to… 

REMEMBER THIS: Have infinite capacity to ignore things that are not convenient.  

Eva Anisko: And how do we stay engaged? Interested? What can we do?  

Stuart Eizenstat: I think the best way to honor Jan Karski’s memory, his courage, his morality. We can’t all be Jan Karskis. They’re few and far between. But it does mean speaking out when you see injustice, not turning a blind eye.  

David Strathairn: We need to interrogate. We need to grapple. We need to acknowledge.  

REMEMBER THIS: All those I am reporting to are very important people. And I am an insignificant little man.  

Ijeoma Njaka: Bearing witness and talking about the truth and being honest about the truth and the things that we’re seeing, those are things that enable us to have a future. And my hope is that it enables us to have a just future.  

Derek Goldman: We don’t, I think, have false illusions that a work of art is going to radically change some of the core issues that this play asks us to think about or grapple with. But just as Karski did, I think significance comes from then individuals who, in witnessing it, find themselves taking more or different responsibility or wanting to live with some of the values and principles that Karski insisted on and espoused. And that, to me, as an artist, that feels like enough.  

Fr. Leo O’Donovan: I’d like to read something that Jan wrote: I am old and no longer strong. I don’t need courage anymore, so I teach compassion. How wonderful.  

Last Video: 

Photo of Jan Karski with quote: 

“The common humanity of people, not the power of governments, is the only real protector of human rights.” 

Jan Karski 

1914-2000