Jan Karski has a vitally important story to tell for anyone willing to listen.

A member of the Polish underground resistance during World War II, Karski traveled around Poland observing Nazi atrocities, including inside the Warsaw Ghetto and the Belzec death camp. He then traveled to report on what he witnessed directly to people such as the British foreign secretary and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They heard what he said but seemed not to heed it.

Now actor David Strathairn, an Academy Award nominee for “Good Night and Good Luck,” tells Karski’s story at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the solo show “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”

“He’s exemplary of someone who accepted the civic responsibility of speaking truth to power, bearing witness to the events firsthand, being a courier of information critical to survival of states and nations and people — a man who exemplified in his life a real deep sense of duty and sacrifice for others,” Strathairn says. “From what we learned from people who knew him and had him as a teacher, he was an extremely humble, gracious person whose deep faith put him on a path of bearing witness for humanity.”

It’s a story that Karski himself kept quiet about for decades while he taught as a professor at Georgetown University.

“He became a teacher after feeling that he had failed in his attempt to bring the horrors of the Holocaust to the West,” Strathairn says. “Roosevelt gave him a meeting and didn’t really ask any questions about the Jewish situation. Justice Felix Frankfurter, himself a Jew, said, ‘I do not believe you. I don’t say you’re lying, but I do not believe you.’ He felt that he had done everything possible to bring what was happening in Europe at the time to the highest levels of power in the world, and they did nothing. And then he became silent for 35 years.”

But once he started talking about it in Claude Lanzmann’s 9½-hour documentary “Shoah,” Karski’s account was unforgettable.

“I met him, so to speak, when I saw ‘Shoah’ in 1985 when it was released, and I remembered his testimony. It just stuck with me. Many years later, Derek Goldman, who I’d worked with before on an evening celebrating Studs Terkel, called me and said, ‘Would you be interested in participating in this celebration of Jan Karski?’ I remembered him immediately and said yes.”

“Remember This” is a production of Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics, directed by Goldman, the university’s performing arts chair, who cowrote the play with Georgetown alum Clark Young. It began in 2014 as an ensemble play at Georgetown to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Karski’s birth and was later streamlined into a solo show. And Strathairn has been there playing Karski every step of the way.

A San Francisco native who grew up in the city and in Marin, Strathairn has performed locally in several plays at American Conservatory Theater (“The Tempest,” “Scorched,” “Underneath the Lintel,” “Chester Bailey”). He starred in Berkeley Rep’s 2020 radio play of “It Can’t Happen Here” early in the pandemic, joining much of the original cast of the company’s 2016 world premiere stage version.

A run of “Remember This” was briefly announced for this February at San Francisco’s Presidio Theatre but was soon canceled due to COVID concerns.

The play has also been recently adapted into a film that has made the rounds of several festivals, including the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this July.

Strathairn feels Karski’s story is one that must be heard, maybe now more than ever.

“We’re in a critical time worldwide with the rise of nationalism and fascism, the breakdown in trust and rising indifference and denial and partisanship,” Strathairn says. “He tried to make it a better world by telling the truth and giving the most vital information to the most important people. That’s why we’ve chosen to tell his story. It’s not just a historical document. We feel that it can be used as a way for people today to interrogate and reckon with all the critical issues that they’re being faced with: allyship and racial disparities and climate change. All these things that need somebody to bear witness to.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

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‘REMEMBER THIS: THE LESSON OF JAN KARSKI’

By Clark Young and Derek Goldman, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre

When: Dec. 2-18

Where: Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley

Tickets: $20-$94; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org