Movie planned on Polish WWII courier Karski
PR dla Zagranicy
Nick Hodge
01.03.2016 13:28
A major international co-production is in the pipeline about Jan Karski, the Polish underground courier known as 'the man who tried to stop the Holocaust.'
Jan Karski. Photo: Małgorzata Miłaszewska-Duda [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
The movie will be shot in English, and filming is scheduled to start in Poland in 2018.
According to the Polish Filmmakers' Association (SFP), producers Ole Wendorff-Østergaardh and Anna Wydra have acquired the rights to Karski's memoir 'Story of a Secret State,' first published in 1944.
The project will be the first feature film about the celebrated courier, following last year's well-received documentary 'Karski and the Lords of Humanity,' by Sławomir Grunberg.
No indications have been given yet about who might play the lead role, or who is being considered as director of the picture.
As an emissary of the Polish Underground State, Karski was a link with the Polish government-in-exile, which was initially based in France, before it moved to London in 1940.
He later brought extensive reports of the Holocaust from Warsaw to the West.
As a result of his wartime record, Karski (whose real name was Jan Kozielewski) was declared a 'righteous gentile' by Israel's Yad Vashem Institute, and he was given honorary Israeli citizenship.
He settled in the US after the war, and he worked as a professor at the University of Georgetown, Washington, for over 40 years, and died in 2000. (nh/pk)