Off-Broadway’s Remember This Streams Free Now Through PBS

In what is described as a "powerful solo performance", Academy Award nominee David Strathairn tells the true story of reluctant World War II hero and Holocaust witness Jan Karski with Strathairn portraying over 30 other characters.

The recorded performance will be accompanied by Remembering Jan Karski, a behind-the-scenes companion film produced by The WNET Group’s Exploring Hate initiative that examines the ongoing relevance of Jan Karski’s story.

The play will premiere Monday, March 13 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings) and now streams online as part of Great Performances’ 50th anniversary season.

"Remember This" was shot in July 2020 at a Brooklyn soundstage and was just recently completed last year. 

After surviving the devastation of the Blitzkrieg, Karski swears allegiance to the Polish Underground and risks his life to carry the first eyewitness reports of the Holocaust to the Western world, and ultimately, the Oval Office.

Escaping a Gestapo prison, bearing witness to the despair of the Warsaw ghetto, and confronted by the barbaric inhumanity of a death camp, Karski endures mental anguish and physical torture to stand tall and speak the truth. At times addressing the audience directly, Strathairn powerfully communicates this story of moral courage and individual responsibility that has become even more urgent for today’s world.

In his review for The Wrap, Thom Geier said: "David Strathairn plays Jan Karski, a Roman Catholic who became a young Polish diplomat in the 1930s and ’40s and sounded the alarm to the Allies about the scope and horror of the Nazi Holocaust — he met with Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt to share his first-hand accounts of the slaughter of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and in death camps. (He also later met with the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-hour Holocaust documentary “Shoah” brought new attention to Karski.)"