Playing Jan Karski: David Strathairn Stars in a New Production About The Holocaust Whistleblower
A new Holocaust-themed play called My Report to the World, which just concluded a seven-performance run at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City (with a brief stop in Washington D.C.), tells the story of Jan Karski, a key yet often unknown figure in the Polish underground of World War II. His contributions to the resistance included a secret visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and a Nazi transit camp for Jews, and then communicating to world leaders, including FDR, about the atrocities he had witnessed. Karski, who escaped the Soviets’ Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish officers in 1940, ultimately immigrated to the U.S., where he became a professor of government at Georgetown University. He died in 2000.
I attended the sold-out, second performance of the play, still a theatrical work-in-progress, on the evening of the July 15. As the show is an early workshop incarnation, virtually everything is subject to change; even the subject matter is so wide-reaching that what themes take prominence may shift. Although the play seeks to highlight the life of a war hero, what makes it most compelling is what he witnessed, his unique place in World War II as a man between the persecuted and the safe.