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Janusz Korczak was a Polish-Jewish medic, educator and writer who was dedicated to the upbringing of children and working with them. His theories included a partnership in his relationship with his pupils, and he was a pioneer of child rights advocacy and educational diagnosis.
Janusz was a Polish Jew, whose actual name was Henryk Goldszmit, and came from a moderately wealthy Warsaw family. After graduating from medical school, he became involved in helping children. He took a job as a teacher and volunteered in a reading room for children, whilst during the summers he organised camps for Jewish children. He also wrote books on education and hygiene. As a medic, he worked in a children’s hospital in Warsaw, and aged just over 30 years old, he decided to devote his life to working with children and to not start a family of his own.
During the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1919-1921, he joined the Polish Army and served as a military medic. However, it was the inter-war period that was the peak of Janusz’s career. He worked in many national and international organisations dedicated to children, and organised courses for nurses. He also worked as an educator at the House for Orphans, which he co-founded, and edited and wrote in press for children and youth, including the Little Review. He worked in court as an expert witness on children’s cases.
When World War II broke out and the Nazis entered Poland, Janusz continued to work at the House for Orphans, organising food and summer camps for them. In 1940, the children of the orphanage facility were moved to the ghetto. Janusz was arrested, but after a few weeks in prison, he returned to his pupils to arrange secret teaching in the ghetto, as well as performances and fairy tales for children. The last play was displayed on 18 July 1942. During this period he wrote a diary. A month before his death he wrote:
When, in the weary hours, I weighed the project of putting to death, putting to sleep the doomed infants and elderly of the Jewish ghetto, I understood it as murder against the sick and the weak, as stealth murder against the unconscious.
Elsewhere in the diary, he prophetically asked:
After the war, people will not be able to look into each other’s eyes for a long time, so as not to get the question: how did it happen that you are alive, that you survived?
On the day of Janusz’s birthday, the Nazis began their operation to exterminate he Warsaw Ghetto. On 6 August 1942, the German forces marched over 200 wards of the House for Orphans, along with employees of the institution, and Janusz. The march of the starved and sick children to Umschlagplatz (the loading area) lasted several hours. Janusz walked in a group of children carrying one child in his arms, others holding his hand. They were all murdered in the Treblinka camp.