Based on the one-man play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, this is a filmed adaptation starring David Strathairn in a magisterial performance as one of the great "Righteous Gentiles" of Holocaust history.
Working on a bare set containing two chairs and a table, Strathairn captures the essence of Karski who as a young man acted as a courier at the behest of the Polish Government-in-exile to deliver news to the allies of the situation in Nazi-occupied Poland between 1940 and 1943.
Karski early on worked for the Resistance and escaped from the Gestapo on more than one occasion, enduring continuous beatings and outright torture.
Strathairn's dialogue is culled from Karski's own words and his tale of escape is harrowing. Directors Derek Goldman and Jeff Hutchens add in a multiplicity of lighting techniques and sound effects coupled with penetrating music by Roc Lee to make you feel like you're actually on the ground with Karski.
Strathairn's performance is brilliant-you can describe it as acrobatic as he twists and turns his body into multiple positions to suggest various events that Karski went through. And the delivery of the lines is extremely powerful with Strathairn conveying Karski's despair at not being able to change anything he observes.
Karski was given the rare opportunity to witness the atrocities committed against the Jewish people. He describes the Jews being treated like animals in both the Warsaw ghetto and a transit camp in which starving people were loaded on to trains headed for their extermination.
Karski brought this information to high government officials in England as well as the United States. Karski even met with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter as well as President Roosevelt. The account of those conversations is riveting.
Frankfurter couldn't accept what Karski told him indicating he chose not to believe that fellow human beings would do such horrible things to their fellow men. President Roosevelt comes off as indifferent to the plight of the Jews and Strathairn brilliantly nails his mannerisms.
One realizes after watching this that unless you are an eyewitness, trying to really comprehend the enormity of the crimes committed is virtually impossible. You can listen to all the intellectual descriptions of the horrors but it's not the same as if you were there.
This appears to be the source of Karski's despair as he felt he was unable to effectively communicate that Polish Jewry was being systematically exterminated.
The despair of the failure of the average person to comprehend what was going on was shared by Szmul Zygielbojm, the Jewish leader and friend of Karski who lived in the US and bemoaned the indifference to the plight of the Jews. Karski was haunted to the end of his days by Szmul's suicide in 1943.
How much could the Allies have done to save the Jews? There's always been some discussion the US and British governments could have bombed the railway lines leading to places like Auschwitz. But this major issue is only brought up in the context of Karski's despair-his feeling was that more could have been done had people been less indifferent.
And from Strathairn's performance we garner the idea that Karski blamed himself too-that he SHOULD have done MORE to save the Jewish people but felt he failed in that regard. Of course, we all know that Karski did more than what most men would have done, and his actions were truly heroic.
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