Who was Janusz Korczak?

“The lives of great men are like legends-difficult but beautiful,” Janusz Korczak once wrote, and it was true of his. 

Janusz Korczak

Most Americans have never heard of Korczak, a Polish-Jewish children’s writer and educator, who is as well known in Europe as Anne Frank.

Like her, he died in the Holocaust and left behind a diary. Unlike her, he had a chance to escape that fate, a chance he chose not to take. 

His legend began on August 6, 1942 during the early stages of the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, though his dedication to destitute children was legendary long before the war.

He was to die as Henryk Goldszmit, the name he was born with. But it was by his pseudonym that he would be remembered.  As Janusz Korczak he introduced progressive orphanages  into Poland, founded the first national children’s newspaper, trained teachers in what we now call moral education, and worked in juvenile courts defending children’s rights. His books How to Love a Child and The Child’s Right to Respect gave parents and teachers new insights into child psychology.

Dining Hall at Korczak's Orphanage

Generations of young people had grown up on his books, especially the classic King Matt the First, which tells of the adventures and tribulations 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.

When the Germans ordered his famous orphanage evacuated, Korczak was forced to gather together the one-hundred-ninety-two children in his care. He led them with quiet dignity on that final march through the ghetto streets to the train that would take them to “resettlement in the East,” the Nazi euphemism for the death camp Treblinka.

At the end, Korczak, who had directed a Catholic as well as a Jewish orphanage before the war, had refused all offers of help for his own safety from his Gentile colleagues and friends. “You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this,” he said. 

According to a popular legend, when the group of orphans finally reached the Umschlagplatz (deportation point to the death camps), an SS officer recognized Korczak as the author of one of his favorite children's books and offered to help him escape. Korczak once again refused. 

He boarded the trains with his children and was never heard from again.

Polish government officials recently unveiled a memorial plaque in Warsaw in honor of the Warsaw Ghetto hero on the 70th Anniversary of his death.