Henryk Goldszmit of Warsaw
Janusz Korczak was the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, born in Warsaw on July 22 of either 1878 or 1879, he himself was never sure which, because his father had been slow to register the birth. His family were assimilated, Polish-speaking Jews. His family belonged to the circles of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that urged Jews to join European culture, and his father, Józef Goldszmit, was a respected Warsaw lawyer. His mother, Cecylia Gębicka, came from a prominent family in Kalisz. Henryk grew up in comfort in spacious apartments with his younger sister.
That comfort did not last. Around 1890 his father became mentally ill and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1896. The family’s money drained away and they had to give up their fine apartments. While still a schoolboy at a Warsaw gymnasium, Henryk began tutoring other pupils to help support his mother and sister. The experience of a child carrying adult burdens, and of watching a family fall from security into want, would echo through everything he later wrote.
Doctor and writer
He began publishing young. In 1896 a satirical piece on child-rearing appeared in print, and in 1898 he entered a literary competition under the name he would make famous, Janusz Korczak, borrowed from a nineteenth-century novel by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. He studied medicine at the University of Warsaw from 1898 to about 1904, while also attending the clandestine “Flying University” which offered Polish education outside the reach of the Russian authorities who then ruled Warsaw. He wrote constantly for newspapers, and his novels Children of the Street (1901) and Child of the Drawing Room (1906) made his name as a writer.
After qualifying he was drafted as a military doctor in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Back in Warsaw he worked from 1905 to 1912 as a paediatrician at the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital, a Jewish hospital that served the poor, and studied further in Berlin and Paris. Medicine, though, could only treat the symptoms of poverty. Increasingly he wanted to shape children’s whole lives.
The Orphans’ Home on Krochmalna Street
Around 1909 he became involved with the Help for Orphans Society, a Jewish charity, and there he met Stefania Wilczyńska, who would be his closest colleague for the next three decades. In 1912 the society opened a purpose-built orphanage, Dom Sierot, the Orphans’ Home, at 92 Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, designed with Korczak’s input. He became its director and Wilczyńska its head educator. The home took in Jewish children, roughly between the ages of seven and fourteen, who attended Polish public schools and Jewish supplementary classes.
What made Dom Sierot remarkable was how it was run. Korczak treated it as a children’s republic. The children had a parliament, a newspaper and, most famously, a children’s court with a written code that could judge cases brought by anyone, including complaints against the teachers and against Korczak himself, who submitted to its judgment like everyone else. Most of its rulings were forms of forgiveness or warning; the point was to teach justice, not punishment. Children took on duties around the house, kept records and were consulted on its rules. In 1919 he also helped found a second orphanage, Nasz Dom (Our House), for Polish Catholic children.
How to love a child
During the First World War Korczak was again conscripted, serving as a doctor with the Russian army in Ukraine, where he also worked in orphanages near Kiev. There he wrote much of How to Love a Child (1919), the first of the books that made him one of Europe’s most original thinkers about childhood. He served once more as a military doctor during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20. In The Child’s Right to Respect (1929) he argued that children are full human beings now, not merely adults-in-waiting, and that they deserve the same respect as anyone else. He attacked the casual hitting and humiliation of children at a time when corporal punishment was widely seen as a parental duty.
He named rights he believed every child should have, among them the right to be what he or she is and the right to the present day. In 1926 he had the children of Dom Sierot launch Mały Przegląd (The Little Review), a weekly newspaper written by children and published as a supplement to the Polish-language Jewish daily Nasz Przegląd. In the 1930s he became a national voice through a popular radio programme in which he talked, as the “Old Doctor” about children and their lives.
King Matt and the stories
Korczak wrote more than twenty books and well over a thousand articles. His most beloved work for children is King Matt the First (1923), about a boy who becomes king when his father dies and tries to reform his country for the benefit of children. Matt makes mistakes, is deceived by the adults around him, tries to give children a parliament of their own, and is finally overthrown and exiled to a desert island. The novel, and its sequel, treat young readers as capable of facing hard truths about power and responsibility. Other books included The Bankruptcy of Little Jack (1924), When I Am Little Again (1925), Kaytek the Wizard (1933), about a schoolboy who discovers magic powers, and a biography of Louis Pasteur for children.
His books have been widely translated and adapted for stage, film and opera. They share his conviction that children’s feelings and judgments deserve to be taken seriously, a conviction that, in the Poland of the 1920s and 1930s, made him a celebrity.
A Polish Jew between two worlds
Korczak was a Polish patriot and a Jew, and he refused to choose between the two. Raised in an assimilated home, he was not religiously observant and did not believe in forcing religion on children. But he devoted most of his working life to Jewish orphans, and as antisemitism hardened in Poland in the late 1930s he felt its pressure. Between 1934 and 1936 he travelled to Mandate Palestine, visiting kibbutzim and studying how children were raised there, and Stefania Wilczyńska spent time there as well. His letters show that he thought seriously about emigrating, but he concluded that he could not leave his children.
When the Second World War began in September 1939, Korczak, then about sixty, volunteered for the Polish army and was turned down because of his age. Wilczyńska, who had been in Palestine, returned to Warsaw that year as war loomed, to be with the children.
In the Warsaw Ghetto
In the autumn of 1940 the German occupiers forced Warsaw’s Jews into a sealed ghetto, and Dom Sierot had to leave Krochmalna Street, which lay outside it. The orphanage moved first to 33 Chłodna Street and later to Sienna and Śliska streets. Korczak moved with it. For nearly two years, amid hunger, typhus and terror, he begged food and money from ghetto institutions and wealthy residents, nursed sick children and tried to keep the life of the home, its court, its newspaper, its plays and celebrations, going. He kept a diary, written mostly at night; its last entry is dated August 4, 1942.
On July 18, 1942, the children staged Rabindranath Tagore’s play The Post Office, about a sick boy confined to his room who longs for the world outside, a choice often read as Korczak’s way of helping the children face death calmly. Four days later the Germans began the mass deportation of Warsaw’s Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. Friends and members of the Polish underground, including people connected to the Żegota rescue organisation, offered repeatedly to hide him on the “Aryan side” of the city. He refused each time. He would not leave the children.
The last walk
On August 5 or 6, 1942, sources differ, German forces came for the orphanage. Korczak, Wilczyńska, about a dozen staff and roughly 190 children (the exact number is uncertain, and some accounts say about two hundred) were marched through the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz, the deportation point. Eyewitnesses described the children walking in rows, neatly dressed, with Korczak at their head. Accounts that he was offered a last-minute reprieve at the station have circulated for decades; whatever was offered, he went with the children.
They were taken by train to Treblinka, where they are believed to have been murdered in the gas chambers soon after arrival. Only one staff member and a few older boys who were working outside the ghetto that day survived. For decades Korczak’s legal date of death in Poland was a court-set presumption of 1946; in 2015 a court established that he died in 1942.
Legacy
Korczak’s death made him a symbol of moral courage, but his lasting importance lies in what he did while he lived. He was among the first to argue, in practice and in print, that children have rights of their own. When Poland proposed a United Nations convention on the rights of the child in 1978, its delegates cited Korczak as a forerunner, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, is often described as carrying forward his ideas. Educators around the world still study his methods of self-government and respect.
He is commemorated in Warsaw by a memorial at the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street showing him leading children to the trains, by a statue near the Palace of Culture, and by schools, streets and societies across Europe and Israel; Andrzej Wajda’s 1990 film Korczak told his story to a wide audience. His books are still read by children who know nothing of how he died, which is perhaps the tribute he would have valued most.
Sources & further reading
Janusz Korczak, Wikipedia · The Krochmalna Street orphanage, USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia · Stefania Wilczyńska, or Mrs. Stefa, Jewish Historical Institute · “European Children’s Right: Polish Heritage”, National Chengchi University (on Poland’s 1978 UN proposal and Korczak) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.