From the Director

DEREK GOLDMAN

This project is a signature creation of our Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, which was home to Karski as a beloved professor for decades. The Lab’s mission is to humanize global politics through performance, and through our journey with this play, new aspects of Karski’s legacy continue to emerge as relevant to the current moment. In a time where the status of truth is diminished and contested, our curriculum "Bearing Witness: The Legacy of Jan Karski Today" brings this home as hundreds of diverse students on and far beyond Georgetown’s campus also grapple with the questions Karski poses in their own lives. With collaborators Eva Anisko and Jeff Hutchens, we have created and recently premiered a feature film version with the goal of making Karski’s legacy more widely accessible to audiences, especially young people around the world.

Karski bore witness to the worst of humanity and revealed firsthand what happens when nationalism and populism turn to extremism. Despite feeling a failure, he devoted his life to teaching young people, and sought to enlighten the world about what he had witnessed and attempted to expose. His is an inspiring and timely account of the importance of individual responsibility and moral action in the face of hatred and injustice.

Derek Goldman, Director

David Strathairn (Karski). Photo by Hollis King.