Is it possible that most Americans have never heard of Janusz Korczak? Yet in Europe, he is as well known as Anne Frank. He died in the Holocaust. Korczak had a chance to escape that fate. He chose not to take it. We are standing here in front of Rue Janusz Korczak.
Janusz Korczak was a Polish-Jewish children’s writer and educator. He introduced progressive orphanages designed as just communities into Poland. Korczak founded the first national children’s newspaper. He trained teachers in what we now call moral education. He worked in juvenile courts. He defended children’s rights.
His books gave parents and teachers new insights into child psychology. Generations of young people had grown up on his books. The classic was King Matt the First. It tells of a boy king who aspires to bring reforms to his subjects. It was as beloved in Poland as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were in the English-speaking world.
During the mid-1930s, he had his own radio program. As the Old Doctor, he dispensed homey wisdom and wry humor. Somehow, listening to his deceptively simple words made his listeners feel like better people.
Korczak had directed a Catholic and a Jewish orphanage before the war. He refused all offers of help for his own safety. These offers came from his Gentile colleagues and friends. He said you do not leave a sick child in the night. You do not leave children at a time like this.
His legend began on August 6, 1942. This was during the early stages of the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Germans ordered his famous orphanage evacuated. Korczak was forced to gather together the two hundred children in his care. He led them with quiet dignity on that final march. They marched through the ghetto streets to the train. It would take them to resettlement in the East. This was the Nazi euphemism for the death camp Treblinka. He was to die as Henryk Goldszmit. That was the name he was born with. But it was by his pseudonym that he would be remembered.
Korczak emerged as a utopian and pragmatic figure. He was preoccupied with creating a better world through the education of children. He set up orphanages and lived among children in real life. He saw the mass the salvation of the world.
Korczak felt that within each child there burned a moral spark. It could vanquish the darkness at the core of human nature. To prevent that spark from being extinguished, one had to love and nurture the young. Make it possible for them to believe in truth and justice. When the Nazis materialized, Korczak was prepared to shield his Jewish children. He shielded them, as he always had, from the injustices of the adult world. He went with them into the ghetto. He had been offered refuge on the Aryan side of occupied Warsaw. He spent the last two-odd years of his life protecting them and other orphans from starvation and disease.
People watched from behind shuttered windows in the Warsaw Ghetto. Korczak marched by with his little band on that last day. It seemed that this man had failed. He behaved as if he had a divine calling to save children. Much as his fictional King Matt had failed in his attempt to make the world a better place. By remaining true to his principles he had achieved his own kind of victory. He did not abandon the children when they needed him most.
Korczak wrote of life as a strange dream. He had chosen to die rather than compromise the principles by which he lived. What had given him the strength to uphold those principles in a world gone mad?
The International Janusz Korczak Association is based in Warsaw. The four-storied white building was restored in the mid-fifties without the garret room that had served as his study. The stretch of roof is no longer broken by the graceful arc of the three-paned window. He had peered through it at the children playing below. He fed the wild sparrows who kept him company.
Korczak’s whole life was made up of moral decisions. The decision to become a children’s doctor. The decision to give up medicine and his writing career to take care of poor orphans. The decision to go with the Jewish orphans into the ghetto. As for that last decision to go with the children to Treblinka, it was part of his nature. It was who he was. He wouldn’t understand why we are making so much of it today.
He was ever faithful to his conviction. Our strongest bond with life is the child’s open and radiant smile. True to children and true to his ideals he laid down his own life. He shared with the children their tragic fate at Treblinka. He did not take advantage of the opportunity to relinquish his charges and save his own life at that price. He really lived for his children.