Outside Poland, Janusz Korczak is best known for his truly heroic final act: incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto, with nearly 200 children from the orphanage he ran, he decided to refuse the offers of rescue he received from his Polish friends, and to accompany the children instead on their journey to Treblinka, and to certain death.
The episode is recounted in a moving film by Andrzej Wajda. But there was much to admire about Korczak in his life before the catastrophe. Like Chekhov, Korczak (the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit) was a literary doctor, whose writings are based on close observation and whose many works are shot through with empathy and insight. In 1912, having served in the Russo-Japanese war as a military doctor, he established an orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw, which he ran like a microcosmic democracy. The children had their own parliament, newspaper and court, in which they debated transgressions against the school’s code and suitable penalties – although these were often leavened by sympathetic understanding of each child’s background and inner world. In effect, Korczak was administering an education in natural justice and ethical psychology. His educational beliefs were informed less by theory than by a large-minded humanism. He believed in the full dignity of children (“the oldest proletariat in the world”), and their need for love and respect.
His pedagogical writings have the immediacy and drama of very good fiction. His books for children are still read in Poland today. In 1939, when Poland was invaded from two directions, he volunteered to serve as an officer in the army, but was turned down on grounds of age. Instead, the orphanage was transported to the terrible confines of the ghetto. There, he tried to feed the children, and, against all odds, to nourish their spirit. In an act of wrenching poignancy, he had them perform a play by Rabindranath Tagore about a child’s death, in order to prepare them for this eventuality. His profound courage and his rigorous compassion held till the very end.
