The Last March of Janusz Korczak's Children
LIFTON, BETTY JEAN
THE LAST MARCH OF JANUSZ KORCZAK'S CHILDREN BETTY JEAN LIFTON Most Americans have never heard of Janusz Korczak (pronounced kor-chock), a Polish-Jewish children's writer and educator who is as...
...As he leaned over the windowsill to water the parched soil of "the poor Jewish orphanage plants," he noticed that he was being watched by the German guard posted by the wall...
...She was unpacking a crate when someone glanced through a window and called, "Dr...
...I no longer have the time or the strength to go to war or travel to the land of the cannibals...
...Five days later, Poland fell to the Nazis...
...They ordered the telephone disconnected, and the children removed from the playground across the street...
...Don't stay inside cowering and crying about what might happen...
...I am," Korczak replied...
...Not long after that, as a personal favor to Zertal, by then a trusted friend, Korczak agreed to speak to a group of nervous parents who were reluctant to allow their children to become "Sons of the Desert...
...Whenever the air-raid sirens sounded, the children, whose number had swelled to 150, would rush down the stairs to the basement shelter, where sandbags had been piled up against the windows...
...Go out into the streets and help dig fire lanes...
...In 1910, Warsaw society learned, with some surprise, that Janusz Korczak intended to give up a successful medical practice and literary career to become the director of an orphanage for Jewish children...
...The underlying philosophy of the children's republic was this: Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today...
...Infuriated by the impertinence of this Jew, a German officer had Korczak beaten and thrown into a cell...
...Perhaps he doesn't even know that things are—as they are...
...Deportation notices appeared on wallboards throughout the ghetto...
...It was four in the afternoon...
...On July 20, 1942, Warsaw's Judenrat Chairman Czerniakow went from one department to another at Gestapo headquarters to investigate rumors that 40 railroad cars were ready and waiting to deport everyone from the ghetto...
...Like her, he died in the Holocaust and left behind a diary...
...I shall never forget this scene as long as I live," Remba wrote...
...The children were pushed and shoved through the gate...
...In helping his orphans to respect others—a first step toward gaining self-respect—Korczak was a pioneer in what we now call "moral education...
...He rung for the night clerk and asked for a glass of water...
...He was beaten and thrown into a cell...
...He was concerned not with teaching children their ABCs—they would go to public school for that—but with the grammar of ethics...
...Not knowing quite what to expect, Zertal was amazed to hear a stirring and original talk on the importance of the youth movement from this man "who wasn't even a part of it...
...It was unthinkable...
...There could be no postponement...
...Should you neglect to acquit yourself satisfactorily, you will all hang from the same rope...
...But a few moments later he ducked back inside sheepishly without his hat, explaining that the blast had blown it off...
...And there was always the danger that they might be taken away in his absence...
...On September 23, 1939, after a night of unusually heavy bombardment, when the whole of Warsaw shook as if the earth might open up and swallow it even before the Germans could, Mayor Stefan Starzynski delivered his famous radio address: "Warsaw may be in flames, but we are proud to die bravely...
...For almost three years he had tried to fulfill every Gestapo command, hoping that by compliance the Jews would make themselves indispensable to the Nazi war effort, however long it lasted...
...He was told that it would be taken under advisement...
...The orphans tried to sing as they marched out of the courtyard and into the street, clutching their few possessions...
...To you, the Judenrat-, I entrust the carrying out of the task...
...Nahum Remba, an official of the Judenrat, had set up a first-aid station in the Umsch-lagplatz through which he was able to rescue a few of those caught in the dragnets...
...Stefania (Stefa) Wilczynska, his longtime partner in the orphanage, and other friends, learned that Korczak was in Pawiak, a massive red-brick compound built in Czarist times for political offenders, which was the most notorious of all the German prisons...
...It was still possible to bribe one's way out of Pawiak...
...The human mind cannot know what He is like...
...The man's family and friends had tried to persuade him to leave with them, but he had insisted on remaining behind to watch over the synagogue and cemetery...
...and Mietek with his dead brother's prayer book...
...They were a new breed, these Sabras, tough and resilient as the native cactus after which they were named...
...8' Summarized from The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak by Betty Jean Lifton, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...Disqualified because of age, he moved into the garret room at the orphanage, like a captain taking over his ship's command...
...It was no use asking why the Germans, so intent on killing, were bothering to open such a unit...
...Korczak is coming...
...These kibbutz children, who had grown up with "the heat of the sun in their soul" and the "burning wind in their blood," belonged to this land in a "biological sense" that their parents, with their roots in other soil, did not...
...At the first sign of resistance, Czerniakow's wife would be shot...
...The children waved goodbye sadly to the Polish janitor, Piotr Zalewski, who was staying behind to care for the house...
...Thousands of people—crying, screaming, praying—were already waiting there in the broiling sun...
...It was already common knowledge by then that Janusz Korczak was a pseudonym for Henryk Goldszmit...
...Joanna Suadosz, a nurse, saw the orphans as they were approaching their destination...
...In the process of working together, they would learn consideration and fair play, and develop a sense of responsibility toward others, which they would carry with them into the adult world...
...Here was a chance to reach thousands of children at a time, instead of just a hundred...
...If the doctor would close the orphanage, some of the children and teachers would perhaps have a chance to escape to the other side...
...What was not yet known was that the Germans had just set up their first extermination camp in Chelmno, which eliminated the need for guns such as those used to massacre the 34,000 Jews in Kiev, the 28,000 in Riga and the 25,000 in Vilna during this period...
...Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, which followed, was interrupted when German bombs hit a power plant and the station went dead...
...Shortly after the orphanage for Polish children was started, Korczak began to write King Matt the First, a timeless parable about a child-king who dreams of creating a Utopian society with just laws for both children and adults...
...Remba records in his memoir that Korczak headed the first section of children and Stefa the second...
...So began a second orphanage, this one for Polish children, modeled on his ideas...
...I think it's better to show pictures of what kings, travelers and writers looked like before they grew up, or grew old, because otherwise it might seem that they knew everything from the start and were never young themselves...
...But I forgot to, and now I'm old...
...By mid-December there did seem to be reason for hope: after three months of sweeping through Russia, the Germans finally met resistance at the gates of Moscow, and America had entered the war against both Germany and Japan after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941...
...Korczak was just getting up to clear the table when two blasts of a whistle and that dread call, "Alle Juden raus\" ("All Jews out...
...His friend Igor Newerly, who had managed to obtain an identity card with an assumed name for Korczak, went to the ghetto disguised as a water and sewer inspector, carrying papers to bring out a "locksmith" who was working there...
...When the janitor replied that after 20 years of service he considered the orphanage his home, the Germans thrashed him with whips and rifle butts...
...It is as beloved in Poland as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland are in the English-speaking world...
...if he left the children even for a moment in this terrifying place, they might panic...
...The total sum was set at 30,000 zlotys, part of which was to be paid on release, the rest over a period of time...
...They had only a second or so after a fire bomb landed to douse it with sand or water to prevent it from bursting into flames...
...I explained that this was the very last chance to save even a few from perishing," Newerly recalled...
...Although seven shells hit his orphanage in the course of the next three weeks, morale remained high...
...Stefa followed a little way back with the nine to twelve-year-olds...
...The reason I became an educator was that I always felt best when I was among children," he told a young interviewer many years later...
...It seemed to me that when they finished with him, I would be next...
...Eva Mandelblatt, whose brother had been in the orphanage before her...
...THE LAST MARCH OF JANUSZ KORCZAK'S CHILDREN BETTY JEAN LIFTON Most Americans have never heard of Janusz Korczak (pronounced kor-chock), a Polish-Jewish children's writer and educator who is as well known in Europe as Anne Frank...
...Twenty-five years later, when Korczak chose to remain in the Warsaw ghetto with his orphans, he would liken himself to that blind old Jew...
...But when he wrote Child of the Drawing Room it was under the name Janusz Korczak...
...On the eighth day of the invasion, the Germans were at the gates of Warsaw...
...Born Henryk Goldszmit, he never knew the exact year he was born—July 22, 1878 or 1879—because his father, Jozef Goldszmit, a prominent lawyer in Warsaw, delayed registering his birth...
...Infuriated by the impertinence of this Jew, the German officer ordered him seized by the guards...
...The city was like a besieged fortress: fires burned everywhere...
...Word that Korczak and his children were on their way had just reached him when they arrived...
...On the day they were scheduled to depart for the ghetto, November 29, the orphans lined up in the courtyard as rehearsed, while Korczak made a final inspection of the wagons filled with the coal and potatoes that he had so arduously procured on his daily rounds...
...When they reached the place where the wall cut across Chlodna, slicing its "Aryan" half off from the ghetto, they found German and Polish police at the gate demanding identification, as if they were crossing a foreign border...
...It is not only the Jews who suffer," he wrote...
...Korczak drew himself up and started to explain as he had so often: "There are human laws which are transitory, and higher laws which are eternal...
...On the air, the Old Doctor encouraged young people to make themselves useful...
...Korczak rose quickly...
...When Czerniakow asked if he could tell the population that their fears were groundless, Scherer assured him that he could, that all the alarm was utter nonsense...
...His medical articles in professional journals, however, were consistently signed Henryk Goldszmit, as they would be for the rest of his life...
...Resettlement in the East...
...Korczak shouted at the German to release the potatoes or he would report the incident to his superiors...
...He agreed to call himself the "Old Doctor...
...The Germans had taken a roll call: 192 children and 10 adults...
...What would he do if I nodded to him...
...They were certain their beloved Doctor had been killed...
...The German was angry by now...
...Two days later the government left the city...
...The God that Korczak believed in, like Spinoza's, was a free spirit, a mystical force that flowed through the universe...
...Korczak's friends in children's programming had been able to arrange this show on the condition that he assume yet another pseudonym, this time to placate higher officials who did not want to be accused of allowing a Jewish educator to shape the minds of Polish children...
...Not until later would she understand that the infirmary was just a cover to allay any suspicion about resettlement...
...No sooner had Korczak gone out to investigate than the whole house shook from another explosion...
...As he watched the kibbutz children helping adults in the fields, he could see that they moved differently from his orphans in Warsaw, who cringed at the invectives and stones hurled at them...
...He had only to give the order and come away with me at once...
...But no sooner had he received his medical diploma in March 1905, than he was conscripted as a doctor into the czar's Imperial Army to serve in the Russo-Japanese War...
...Unlike the usual chaotic mass of people shrieking hysterically as they were prodded along with whips, the orphans walked in rows of four with quiet dignity...
...1988 by Betty Jean Lifton...
...In his letter declining the invitation, however, he did acknowledge that ' 'something very great, very courageous, and very difficult" was taking place, and he agreed to sign the Jewish National Fund's appeal that Jews contribute the equivalent of one day's salary as an expression of their solidarity "with their brethren building a Jewish land...
...He had to try to reassure the children as they lined up fearfully, clutching their little flasks of water, their favorite books, their diaries and toys...
...Harry Kaliszer, a resourceful young man who had been one of Korczak's favorite orphans, finally arranged a ransom through the notorious Nazi collaborator Abraham Gancwajch—a mysterious figure with great power in the ghetto...
...His little republic would be a just community whose young citizens would run their own parliament, court of peers and newspaper...
...She was setting up a small infirmary in the evacuated hospital next to the Umschlagplatz...
...Nineteen-year-old Moshe Zertal, who was in charge of inviting guest speakers to the meetings of the Zionist organization, remembers making his way one night to ask Korczak to talk about education to their group...
...Sometime later, Zertal mustered enough courage to ask Korczak if some of the orphans could join Hashomer Hatza'ir's annual boat excursion to the countryside on Lag B'Omer, a spring holiday that is celebrated with camping trips and bonfires...
...The "special stamp" that was the common badge of orphans—pale faces, short haircuts, drab clothing—was no longer noticeable...
...mothers clung to their children...
...However, when word of the possible dissolution of the ghetto reached Korczak's friends on the Aryan side, they immediately took action...
...I have found my own kind of faith: There is a God...
...When Great Britain entered the war on September 3, Korczak joined the excited crowd gathered outside the British Embassy...
...The orphanage would give him a chance to put some of his educational ideas into practice, and though it might appear he was making a sacrifice, it did not seem so to him...
...It does not surprise me that God has no beginning and no end, because I see Him as unending Harmony," he once wrote...
...Shortly after Korczak returned to Warsaw in early 1919, the minister of education asked him to set up an orphanage for the children of Polish workers in the small town of Pruszkow, about fifteen miles to the south...
...Remba took Korczak aside and urged him to go with him to the Judenrat to ask them to intervene...
...Although he didn't have access to the top echelon, Czerniakow was told by the officials he contacted that they had heard nothing...
...but he didn't get to finish...
...He couldn't risk that...
...His face was swollen almost beyond recognition from the beating he had received the day before when he and the laundress had applied to the Nazi police for permission to go into the ghetto with the orphans...
...old people sat in a daze...
...If Zalewski, the Catholic janitor at the Kroch-malna Street orphanage, had risked his life trying to accompany Jewish orphans into the ghetto, how could Newerly propose that Korczak, their father and their guardian, leave them in order to seek his own safety...
...As Korczak led his children calmly toward the cattle cars, the Jewish police cordoning off a path for them instinctively saluted...
...As a teacher, I value eternal laws above transitory human ones," he had once written, and he still held to that position...
...What a fever or cough is for the doctor, a smile, tear or blush should be for the educator...
...A wail went up from those still left on the square...
...The ambivalence and depression that Korczak struggled with in the late 1930s— "those wicked, shameful, destructive prewar years"—lifted with the German invasion...
...before long, a map of Palestine appeared on the bulletin board, and two Hebrew-speaking tables were created in the dining hall...
...Squadrons of SS and Ukrainians were waiting for them with whips, guns and dogs...
...Two days after being assured the rumors were groundless, Chairman Czerniakow rose early as usual to arrive at his Judenrat office by 7:30...
...Who was to say that, if anyone had a chance of surviving out there in the East, it might not be them...
...Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary that the Jews were waiting for that day with such anticipation that they wouldn't even commit suicide for fear of missing it...
...The children dove under the tables with the young teachers, not even daring to run down to the shelter...
...There was one terrifying moment when a shell exploded right outside the dining hall, smashing all the windowpanes...
...He eventually reached the deputy chief of Section III, SS First Lieutenant Schere, who expressed surprise, as had the others, at the rumors...
...Shortly after he returned to Warsaw, Korczak was offered his own radio show...
...He 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...
...He looked more like a monk...
...He never forgot the way a boy who urinated on the blackboard eraser as a prank was spread out on a desk by the janitor, who held his legs while the composition teacher stood over him with a switch...
...Instead, he used fragments of his two selves: Hen, Ryk, Hen-Ryk, G., Janusz, or K.—as if he needed time to fully integrate his new identity...
...And suffering does not make men noble, not even the Jews...
...The stars, the very universe, inform me about the existence of the Creator, not the priest...
...I had to make a quick retreat," he said with an impish grin...
...Korczak was so impressed with the Lag B'Omer outing that he told everyone he wished children of all religions could participate...
...Korczak signaled his children to rise...
...Go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier who died for Poland and put flowers on his grave...
...He also stopped regularly at the American Joint Distribution Committee and at the CENTOS, the Jewish welfare agency for children...
...Czerniakow asked for the exemption of children in the orphanages and other institutions...
...What did it mean...
...Before long the warm, intimate voice of the Old Doctor became famous in Poland...
...While camping overnight in a deserted village, he was riveted by the sight of a blind old Jew groping his way with his stick through the infantry unit's convoy of horses and wagons...
...They are entitled to be taken seriously...
...By noon the ghetto was in turmoil...
...In the fall of 1898, Henryk—by then an intense young medical student of twenty— entered a playwriting contest under the pseudonym Janusz Korczak...
...An influential member of CENTOS had petitioned the Gestapo on his behalf that morning, and the story goes that Korczak was offered permission to return home—but not the children...
...Families huddled together, their meager belongings tied up in pillowcases or sacks...
...She saw that Korczak was carrying one child, and had another by the hand...
...All the world is submerged in blood and fire, in tears and mourning...
...Halinka Pinchonson, who chose to go with Korczak rather than stay behind with her mother...
...For the first few days, while the Germans were bombing the outlying districts of Warsaw, it was possible to believe that everything might go on as usual if the citizens took the necessary precautions of digging ditches and erecting barricades...
...He became a familiar figure at the offices of the Judenrat, the Jewish council set up by the Germans to act as intermediary between them and the Jewish community...
...So deeply did Korczak identify with this young king who (like his creator) would not live to see his dreams come true, that he used a picture of himself as a child for the frontispiece of the book, with this explanation to his young readers: When I was the little boy you see in this photograph, I wanted to do all the things that are in this book...
...At the gate where the ghetto ended, fresh squadrons of SS and Ukrainians were waiting with their whips, guns and dogs...
...Newerly asked Korczak to accept his help...
...Don't stay inside cowering and crying—go out into the streets...
...I was ashamed, too, because they beat him on his bare bottom...
...There was no bread, gas, electricity or water for its citizens or for the thousands of refugees and demoralized soldiers who had streamed in from other parts of the country where the Polish cavalry and infantry were being decimated by German tanks and planes...
...You know that there are too many Jews...
...For the next six years, he did not sign Janusz Korczak to the hundreds of articles that flowed from his pen...
...The older children took turns carrying the flag during the course of their two-mile walk...
...He was adamant about not wearing the white armband with the blue Star of David which had been made mandatory for all Jews over eleven years of age...
...In 1933 Korczak was awarded the Silver Cross of the Polonia Restituta, a decoration given only to a select few for their contribution to Polish society...
...En route, he was surprised to see that the borders of the Small Ghetto were surrounded by units of Polish police, and by Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Latvian support troops, in addition to the regular guards...
...On the boat trip home, Zertal noticed the change in Korczak's children...
...He held five-year-old Romcia in one arm, and perhaps Szymonek Jakubowicz, to whom he had dedicated one of his stories, with the other...
...He seemed to be talking to them quietly, occasionally turning his head to encourage the children behind...
...I was terrified...
...Korczak dashed about the blazing city, rescuing frightened children, giving aid to the injured and comfort to the dying...
...I imagined he would be someone with wings," Zertal recalls...
...But Korczak wouldn't consider it...
...One of the older boys carried the green flag of King Matt, with the blue Star of David set against a field of white on the other side...
...The Judenrat was then informed that all Jews, irrespective of sex and age—except for council members, their families, and essential service units—were to be deported to the East...
...In 1925, Korczak was invited to attend a Jewish National Fund conference in Warsaw, but he refused because he hated the "high-falutin" speeches...
...Because of their mutual-assistance pact with France and Britain, the Poles were waiting for their allies to come to their rescue...
...Didn't he know that Aryans were no longer allowed to work for Jews...
...But that night, Korczak decided to protest to the Gestapo the first thing in the morning...
...Korczak began speculating about the young soldier in what was to be the last entry of his diary: "Perhaps he was a village teacher in civilian life, or a notary, a street sweeper in Leipzig, a waiter in Cologne...
...By four that afternoon, Czerniakow was to see that 6,000 people were at the Umschlag-platz, a large loading area just north of the ghetto, where freight trains were waiting to transport them to their destination...
...Remba burst into tears when the Germans asked who that man was...
...The doctor not only gave his permission, he arrived at the Vistula dock with the children...
...The orphans tried to sing as they marched, clutching their few possessions...
...Yet he tried to see everything in universal terms...
...Then, to Remba's dismay, Schmerling—the sadistic chief of the ghetto police in charge of the Umschlagplatz—ordered that the orphanage be loaded into the cattle cars...
...Unlike the Germans who had been giving Czerniakow the runaround, Hofle was brutally frank with him and the other council members: ' 'Today begins the evacuation of the Jews from Warsaw...
...Korczak deliberated for a while, and then made the pragmatic decision that it was better to influence people anonymously than not at all...
...The older children took turns standing guard near the roof during incendiary attacks...
...He had 24 tablets of potassium cyanide locked in his drawer, one for each member of the council, should they ever be asked to do anything that went against their conscience...
...Stefa was in touch with Korczak's friends, but the problem was not so much money as to how to make contact with the Gestapo...
...the "unknown person" inside each of them is the hope for the future...
...Not only did he feel it was demeaning to the Jewish star to wear it as a badge of shame, but he would not let the Germans erase his Polishness by branding him only a Jew...
...Newerly would never forget Korczak's reaction...
...Using the orphanage as a laboratory for clinical observation, he wanted to work out an educational diagnostic system based on tangible symptoms...
...For three weeks her people had struggled valiantly together against impossible odds, and now it was over...
...They should be allowed to grow into whomever they were meant to be...
...Their movements were proud and erect, their clothes brightened with the flowers they had picked, their faces smiling, their cheeks rosy...
...The ceremony was conducted with great solemnity in the dining hall of the orphanage...
...Then where is your armband...
...What could he say without taking away their hope, and his own...
...He couldn't refuse...
...Christians and Jews were ' 'children of the same God...
...In World War I, Korczak once again served as a doctor in the army...
...Don't you know you are breaking the law...
...When Korczak arrived at Gestapo headquarters the next day, the officer on duty was at first bemused by the highly agitated man in the remnants of a Polish uniform who introduced himself in flawless German as Dr...
...But on hearing Korczak's tirade about potatoes being confiscated at the ghetto gate, the German began wondering why this Pole was so concerned about the Jews...
...There was no water, no food, no place to relieve oneself, no protection from the German whips and curses...
...There were Giena, with sad, dark eyes like her mother's...
...Attempting a smile, he dismissed her with "Thank you"—his last words...
...I have included this photograph because it's important what I looked like when I truly wanted to be a king, and not when I was writing about King Matt...
...buildings were gutted...
...The green flag of King Matt, with a Jewish star on one side, flew over the little parade as it made its way through the teeming streets the short distance to 33 Chlodna Street...
...There was nothing to do but lead the children and teachers straight into the unknown and, if he was lucky, out of it...
...He became so nervous at the very thought of going to school that his parents withdrew him after a few months...
...I wilted under his gaze, and he turned away, saying quietly, but not without reproach in his voice: 'You know, of course, why Zalewski was beaten.' " Newerly knew what Korczak meant...
...With an old gentry name such as Janusz Korczak, Henryk could re-create himself as an insider, linked to a heroic Polish past...
...On Yom Kippur, the most sacred of the Jewish holy days—October 12, 1940—the Germans announced the creation of a special "quarter" for Warsaw Jews...
...The Jews of Warsaw read and reread the terse announcement...
...Korczak was not an observant Jew, but he had always been a man of faith...
...If Korczak had to go, so would they all...
...Just as a doctor diagnosed disease by the complaints of the patient, so the teacher had to be aware of the moods of his pupil: "What a fever, a cough, or nausea is for the physician, so a smile, a tear, or a blush should be for the educator...
...Generations of young people grew 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...
...Critics proclaimed him a new voice in Polish literature that had found ' 'the color of poverty, its stench, its cry and its hunger...
...They brought the dream of the homeland, too...
...Thereafter, so many kibbutzniks stopped by the orphanage to consult with him that Korczak often quipped that Warsaw was turning into a suburb of Palestine...
...As the November 30 deadline for the Jewish population to move into the ghetto approached, the city was in chaos: 138,000 Jews, hauling their meager belongings in pushcarts or on their backs, streamed through the 28 gates of the ghetto to the apartments left by 113,000 Poles who were moving out in much the same demented frenzy...
...The Jewish police were walking on both sides, cordoning them off from the rest of the street...
...It is a daydream, like the one Henryk Goldszmit had when he was young and wanted to reform the world...
...He may have arrived only yesterday . . ." Promptly at seven, Korczak joined Stefa, the teachers and the children for breakfast at the wooden tables that had been pushed together once the bedding was removed from the center of the room...
...Part of the German strategy was not to announce anything in advance, but to take each area by surprise: The plan that morning was to evacuate most of the children's institutions...
...That moment had arrived for him...
...Czemiakow kept poison available...
...Punitive teachers pulled children by the ears and beat them with rulers or a cat-o'-nine-tails...
...I couldn't believe that this man wearing a simple smock over work clothes was the great Dr...
...rang through the house...
...When the Germans left, Czemiakow sat in his chair, a broken man...
...There were Jakub, who wrote a poem about Moses...
...Leon with his polished box...
...Still, he held to his universalist position, writing to a friend in Palestine: "The problem of Man, his past and future on earth, somewhat overshadows the problem of the Jew for me...
...When the sentry stood firm, Korczak had no choice but to continue to their new home...
...People spilled out of apartments to read them...
...While Child of the Drawing Room was being serialized in Voice magazine under the byline of Janusz Korczak, Henryk Goldszmit began a residency at the Jewish Children's Hospital...
...During the mid-1980s, he had his own radio program, in which, as the "Old Doctor," he dispensed homey wisdom and wry humor...
...The public was anxious to meet the audacious young writer who had been called away to war just when his star was rising and was now back to illuminate their drawing rooms...
...He took out the musty Polish uniform that he had worn as a medical officer during the Polish-Soviet War in 1920, and volunteered for duty...
...Korczak no doubt stood in the crowds reading the deportation notices, watching the wagons carry the first deportees off to the trains...
...He offered his visitor a chair...
...There are some who say that at that moment a German officer made his way through the crowd and handed Korczak a piece of paper...
...From that moment, the guttural sounds of German would command the air waves...
...In a country where one's surname reveals one's religious affiliation, Goldszmit was unmistakably a Jew, the outsider...
...She no longer dwelt on such questions, but went numbly about her routine...
...While they were passing through, a German policeman confiscated their last wagon, the one filled with potatoes...
...They unbuttoned everything—in front of the whole class...
...He wanted to believe that rather than renouncing medicine for pedagogy, he could combine the two disciplines...
...There was no apparent logic in anything they did...
...Greatly relieved, the chairman then ordered his aide to make a public announcement through the precinct police stations that, on investigation, the Judenrat had found that there was 'no substance to the deportation rumors...
...People hurried home from their offices on Thursday afternoons to be on time for the 15-minute program...
...Warsaw was then part of the Czarist empire and many parents falsified their sons' ages with the hope of postponing, even avoiding, their induction into the czar's army...
...In spite of the increasingly sinister atmosphere of the city, and fears for his safety, Korczak continued to wear his Polish uniform, without insignia, on his daily rounds to procure food and supplies for the orphanage...
...He was assigned to a divisional field hospital on the Eastern front...
...Korczak stood at the head of this little army, the tattered remnants of the generations of moral soldiers he had raised in his children's republic...
...He didn't know which made him happier, the hope that England would help Poland push back the Germans, or the sight of Poles and Jews once again "rubbing shoulders like brothers," as they had during the uprisings against Czarist Russia and in World War I. Tears filled his eyes when he heard the singing of Poland's national anthem, "Poland Is Not Yet Lost," followed by the Zionist song, "Hatikvah...
...Korczak was up early, as usual, on August 6, 1942...
...He looked at me as though I had proposed a betrayal or an embezzlement...
...In the meantime, the Judenrat was responsible for seeing that the 2,000 members of its police force delivered their required quotas to the trains every day...
...When he returned to Warsaw in early 1906, Lieutenant Henryk Goldszmit was amazed to find that during his absence he had become famous as Janusz Korczak, the author of Child of the Drawing Room...
...Korczak walked, head held high, holding a child by each hand, his eyes staring straight ahead with his characteristic gaze, as if seeing something far away...
...Janusz Korczak introduced progressive orphanages into Poland which were designed to be moral communities...
...He expected the worst by the time ten top SS officers charged into his office, led by SS Major Hermann Hofle, who had directed the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto...
...He had compromised more than one principle for the sake of the ghetto, but he drew the line at cooperating in the evacuation of its children...
...It was only natural that the children would bring the blue-and-white flags of Hashomer Hatza'ir into the orphanage with them, as well as the secular Hebrew songs about social justice they had learned...
...It could mean only one thing, she thought—they had Korczak...
...The Germans had thrown the laundress out, but had detained Zalewski for questioning...
...Korczak is said to have shaken his head and waved the German away...
...But what could he tell them, he whose credo it was that one should never spring surprises on a child—that "a long and dangerous journey requires preparation...
...Perhaps they had some potato peels or an old crust of bread, perhaps there was some carefully measured ersatz coffee in each little mug...
...Maryna Falska, who was hiding Jewish children, found a safe room for Korczak...
...Korczak also made two trips to Palestine, where he stayed on a kibbutz...
...They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals, not as masters treat slaves...
...Korczak arrived back at the orphanage, pale and debilitated, to find the children lined up to greet him, just as they had been when he returned from World War I. Despite what was happening in the ghetto, people clung to the hope that the war would soon end with the defeat of the Germans...
...Then, on September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland...
...The next day, Czemiakow was informed that no exceptions would be made for orphans...
...His hands were trembling as he took the glass...
...My bald head would be a perfect target for those planes...
...Few people understood that medicine alone was no longer enough for this visionary pediatrician—that it did not, as Erik Erikson said of Gandhi's law practice, "feed his reformatory zeal...
...Becoming suspicious, he asked, "You're not a Jew, are you...
...But one lesson he learned there remained with him: Children are not respected by adults...
...dead horses lay rotting on the ground...
...Some of Korczak's apprentices joined Hashomer Hatza'ir, the left-wing Zionist organization that was preparing young people for emigration to Palestine...
...And then children will think they can't be statesmen, travelers, and writers, which wouldn't be true...
...His books How to Love a Child and The Child's Right to Respect gave parents and teachers new insights into child psychology...
...She saw that he was as white as a sheet...
...Henryk was tutored at home by governesses until he was seven, as was the custom in educated circles, and then sent to a "strict, boring and oppressive" Russian elementary school...
Vol. 13 • June 1988 • No. 4
