Janusz Korczak

A Heroic Legacy of Sacrifice

In October 1940, German occupying officials decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw, requiring all Jewish residents to move into a designated area. This order consequently confined 30% of Warsaw’s population, 375,000 Jews, to just 2.5% of the city. Additional Jews from other parts of Poland brought the population up to 450,000. Overcrowding, hunger, and disease were serious problems. German authorities sent young children without parents and those who were orphaned as a result of the terrible conditions to the ghetto orphanage where they became wards of the Judenrat (Jewish council). It was here in the orphanage that some of the children met Janusz Korczak.

Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, was born into a Polish Jewish family in 1878. As a young man he trained to be a pediatrician. He began writing children's stories and childcare books for adults in the early 1900s, urging parents to treat their children with love and respect; this was groundbreaking advice at the time. His works include King Matt the First (1923), Bankruptcy of Little Jack (1924), The Child’s Right to Respect (1929), and Kaytek the Wizard (1935). These were popular with children and helped familiarize them with aspects of the modern world: politics, economics, and responsibility to community. As a result of the popularity of his books he was well known by German, Polish and Jewish families.

In 1911 he founded the Jewish Orphanage in Warsaw and soon dedicated his life to it. He lived and worked there twenty-four hours a day. He established a routine for children with rights and responsibilities. The home was run by the “children's republic” similar to modern-day student councils and student mediation programs. He also ran a children's publication called The Little Journal (Mały Przegląd) where the children selected topics and wrote stories.

In the 1930’s Korczak’s national reputation grew as he began making radio broadcasts interviewing children, reading stories, and speaking in a relaxed tone that was reassuring to children and parents alike. By the mid 1930s, Korczak lost his broadcasting position due to rising antisemitism.

As the Jews of Warsaw were forced into the ghetto in November 1940, Korczak insisted on remaining with his children and moved his orphanage into the ghetto. Conditions worsened. As tens of thousands died from disease or starvation, more children needed the services of the orphanage. Korczak’s own diary described how difficult it became to provide enough food and medicine for the children in his care. He also tried to maintain the children’s mental and emotional well-being by keeping to routines, chores, education, concerts, and performances. Korczak continued to run the Jewish orphanage according to the values that had guided him in the past, and he tried to insulate his children from the reality of the Nazi occupation.  His efforts focused on providing livable conditions for the two hundred children in the orphanage; he even tried to expand his activities to help other abandoned children in the ghetto.

In July 1942, the Nazis began mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. Korczak’s Polish Christian friends offered him a chance to escape and live under false papers, but he turned them down. He and his staff were determined to take care of the children as long as they could.

In August 1942, the Germans deported all the residents of children’s homes. When the German police arrived at the orphanage, Korczak and his staff assembled the nearly 200 children in their care and walked alongside them to the Umschlagplatz, the railroad deportation site. To avoid frightening the children he told them they were going on a picnic. First-hand accounts recall the staff and children singing to keep the children calm. The pianist Wladislaw Szpilman’s autobiography recounts the deportation of the orphanage children and personnel.  Korczak and his entire staff boarded the trains with the children for the sixty-mile journey to the Treblinka death camp. The Nazis sent all the children and caretakers to the gas chambers upon arrival.

Relevance and Memory

Korczak kept a diary which others smuggled out of the ghetto after the Nazis deported and murdered him. It survives as a primary source of the struggle to support the children and endure life in the ghetto when faced with overwhelming supply shortages, violence, disease, and neglect.

Korczak’s selfless act of sacrifice to protect the children reverberates throughout history as the best that humanity has to offer. His popularity offered him salvation and yet he denied the protection it offered. German, Polish, and Jewish communities felt the loss of this kind, gentle figure who helped them rear so many of their children through his stories and parenting books.

Numerous monuments recognize Korczak for his achievements and sacrifice both in Poland and Israel. For many, he was the one individual they could name who the Nazis sent to the gas chamber. At Treblinka, 17,000 memorial stones serve to memorialize the more than 800,000 victims whose ashes lie there. Although 216 stones are inscribed with the name of a town or city from which these victims originally came, only one stone is engraved with the name of an individual: Janusz Korczak.  Another monument of Korczak is at the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw and shows him walking and leading children by the hand. It serves as a symbolic grave or cenotaph. In Świętokrzyski Park in the center of Warsaw, at the former site of the children's orphanage, a monument of Korczak with his arms outstretched around children was designed by Jan Bohdan Chmielewski and Zbigniew Mikielewicz. It was unveiled in 2006 on Children's Day. At Yad Vashem in Israel, a bronze sculpture of Korzak and the ghetto children dominates Janusz Korczak square. (“Janusz Korczak and the Children” by sculptor Boris Saktsier (1978). Janusz Korczak Square, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.) Through all these representations, the memory of Korczak remains strong.

Selections from The Child’s Right to Respect (1929):

_{Selections reprinted from Janusz Korczak, “The Child’s Right to Respect,” in Selected Works of Janusz Korczak (translated from Polish by J. Bachrach). Published for the National Science Foundation by the Scientific Publications Foreign Cooperation Center of the Central Institute for Scientific, Technical and Economic Information, Warsaw; [available from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information, Springfield, VA], 1967, 484–490.}

On November 20, 1959, using the writings of Janusz Korczak, and his insistence that every child has the right to respect, the United Nations adopted the "Declaration of the Rights of the Child.