“Remember This,” performed at Theatrical Outfit in downtown Atlanta and presented with The Breman Museum, is a story set during World War II of the attempt to alert the world to the destruction of the Jews in Germany by the Nazis and their allies.
The one-man show, which is also titled, “The Lesson of Jan Karski,” is a performance of a lifetime by Andrew Benator, whose family has their roots in Atlanta’s Sephardic community. Working on a bare stage with only a wooden table and two wooden chairs as props, he simulates the abuse and torment that Karski, who was Catholic, and active in the Polish resistance, suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
With his sharp mind and an almost photographic memory, he became a trusted courier between various factions active in the underground. Eventually, with his skill in languages he is chosen to alert the world to what he had seen as a personal witness to the brutality of the Nazi occupation.
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“Remember This,” presented by Theatrical Outfit and the Breman Museum, is an intense drama starring Atlanta actor Andrew Benator.
He also secretly tours the Warsaw ghetto, and he visits a Nazi concentration camp where Jews are stuffed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz.
But his most intense anguish came in 1943 at the hands of those whom he attempts to alert in the American and British government.
He travelled to London to speak with the British wartime Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and then to Washington for a half-hour meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt. Both of them ignore his dramatic pleas. Roosevelt particularly shows more concern for the horses of Poland than its Jews. After meeting the president, he sought out the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was Jewish. However, Frankfurter curtly dismisses him, with the words, “I don’t believe you.”
Many of the most dramatic moments in the play come when Karski…
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