EXCERPTS FROM JANUSZ KORCZAK
MILCH, ADELE
EXCERPTS FROM JANUSZ KORCZAK It was in 1973 that I first encountered Janusz Korczak. I had known the tale of his martyrdom for many years, because it is principally the manner of his death that...
...Father wrote back that he hadn't lost the cap and would bring it with him to the station...
...They say: "Please sir, uh...
...And even the jargon has its own melancholy, tender words, like those a mother uses to lull a sick child to sleep...
...Yes," Czarnecki admits, nodding his head...
...Not here at camp, but at home a lot . . ." Kruk wrote a letter home: "Dear Not-forgotten parents...
...The older brother holds the little one's jacket when he is playing, he inspects his ears every morning to see if they've been washed properly, and in the evening he makes his bed and solicitously covers him with the quilt...
...Maybe he's afraid to sleep by himself...
...Throughout the centuries its princes have been the richest, frolicking the most and working the least...
...Kruk became disconsolate...
...my new friend, B.J., who is working on a Korczak biography...
...One word led to another and the boy called Kruk a thief...
...Enough for today...
...Who would imagine that this lout, this unbearable nuisance, is such a fine singer...
...And the little one is a real scrapper, fighting with everyone...
...So he dictated a letter to his father saying that he wasn't crying and doesn't want to return home and is not at all homesick because he wants to be healthy, so Papa shouldn't worry, but what happened to the cap...
...So when Robert Milch, whose work has twice appeared in moment, but whom I have never met, wrote to inquire whether we would be interested in seeing his wife's translation of sections of an early Korczak book that has not before been translated into English, I was not surprised...
...They are taught by the Polish countryside, the Polish sky...
...The Jewish children at the summer camp barely understand Polish, so you have to use simple words with them...
...Sometimes the ringing of the manor house bell can be heard calling the people in from the fields for supper...
...The boys make fun of Mordka because he can't jump rope, runs clumsily when they are playing tag, and can't catch a ball, and they have dubbed him Maciek...
...Kruczek wanted to eat...
...The farm-hands' quarters, the manor house, and the village all knew about them, and there was never any lack of listeners at the windows...
...gized to you, he admitted that the strands were yours...
...No, he's not cold...
...agreed to play dominos...
...Why do you coddle that scamp...
...Because he is as sensitive as a prince...
...The strands are long, hence very valuable...
...My old friend, David, himself a pediatrician, for whom Korczak has become a passion...
...Trans...
...The beds aren't up against the walls but in rows, and not in a small room but in a hall big enough for a wedding...
...Presman is serious and quiet...
...No, I can't...
...If you say anything to him, he gets insulted and refuses to play...
...It was only in 1973, in preparation for a trip to Poland, that I became acquainted with the remarkable life that preceded the remarkable death, the life of a distinguished pediatrician and pedagogue, of an inventive story-teller, of an ambivalent Jew...
...Maybe he has more toys at home...
...Our third singer has the most beautiful voice, the poorest parents, and the most courageous heart...
...There are two kinds of kingdoms in life—one, the kingdom of amusements, salons, and beautiful fashions...
...We aren't homesick and we go to the forest every day...
...Because she'll have to pay for your return trip...
...And a day in Los Angeles a year or so later, mentioning Korczak in the course of a speech, and being approached a bit later by a woman who had worked in the orphanage...
...Lewek knows it is good here because his cousin and the other boys in the neighborhood have told him all about camp, but at home there is Mama...
...No, he isn't hungry...
...Beautiful singing," say the pine trees, "but why can't we understand the words...
...It so happened that the father wasn't working because his boss had fired him, and the mother was sick because a little sister had just been born and the doctor was very expensive...
...they aren't corrected even if they speak poorly...
...Breakfast, evening snack, supper—all are called "dinner...
...First of all, let me tell you that it is very good for us here...
...Chil Rozencwaig is completely different...
...No again...
...Eat, Kruczek, it isn't nice to be such a sourpuss...
...others, a scattering, who share the memory and the reverence...
...Here was a life which ended thirty-seven years ago, yet its many threads are still being woven into a living tapestry...
...But everyone understood when Chaim solemnly announced, "If anyone bothers Czarnecki, I'll knock his teeth out...
...Janusz Korczak: Director of the Krochmalna Street Orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, who in August of 1942 walked at the head of a column of two hundred Jewish children from the orphanage to the umschlaagplatz, clasping a child's hand in each of his own, comforting the children along the way...
...When Frydenson, Rozencwaig, and Presman sing, their voices harmonize so well that one imagines only one boy is singing, not three, yet they are not at all alike...
...Because the songs are old— ancient Hebrew words composed over hundreds of years...
...One, leaning wide-eyed on his pillow, watches the fiddler...
...Later that evening, remembering that at the train-station his father had taken his new cap home, he again began to cry a bit...
...Maybe he's hungry...
...On Sunday he wasn't able to go either, because the wagon wasn't available...
...I have no knife or fork...
...Grinbaum, from the Stare Miasto,* speaks Polish well...
...It swells among the clouds for a long time...
...When the boys see a squirrel, they look at it in various ways...
...Be healthy and strong...
...You'll go right after dinner, but your Mama will be upset if you return now...
...Why Ber-Leib Kruk is ? Prince "Why do you call the older Kruk a prince...
...Lewek started to cry again...
...No," he replies without hesitation...
...the clouds...
...In Warsaw Geszel Grozowski goes to sleep late, does not drink milk, and can do whatever he wants because he lives with his sister, and the sister, who nurses patients in the city, is seldom home and often doesn't return even at night...
...If you become a cab driver like your brother, I know for sure that you won't starve the horse...
...How could he have helped losing it, considering that his pockets were stuffed with pinecones and rocks...
...Each of them is thinking about something else, but when Grozowski wants to put his fiddle away, they beg him to play some more...
...He was a bit bored at first, but the country turned out all right because the boys like him...
...I never eat when I'm worried...
...you won't whip him and force him to work even if he belongs to your boss and not to you...
...Some stalk it in order to sneak up and catch it unawares...
...But Korczak earned his share in the world to come long before that day in August of 1942...
...Well, all right...
...They understood that you don't start up with either of the two friends...
...He talks little, prefers to listen, and wants to understand the workings of the thermometer that hangs on the porch and shows whether it is warm enough to go swimming...
...But there is another, much larger kingdom—that of woes, hunger, and exhausting work...
...I hope to hear that it is the same by You—for years to come God willing...
...The handkerchief was found soon enough...
...Only the oldest and most sensible boys understood what the counselor was explaining to them...
...And whenever the bell rings, they run in with happy cries of "Dinner...
...Lewek heaved a deep sigh and Adele Milch is a free lance Polish translator, living in Stonybrook, New York...
...Second of all, we are playing nicely and Chaim is being polite...
...I'm missing a button...
...The singing starts low, near the ground, like a swallow trying out its wings, and then suddenly, with one bold swoop, leaps up and touches * The boys were building a fort and considered digging the best part of the project...
...The crying didn't last very long because one can't help falling asleep after a day so filled with remarkable adventures...
...Polish words are like wildflowers bending down in joyous meadows or standing clean and bright like the setting sun...
...And since 1973, Korczak has so often dropped into my world, my life, that he has now become a part of it...
...When the boys were weaving rush baskets, the older Kruk wanted to make a basket for his brother...
...Lewek got a nice suntan, gained three whole pounds, and when it was finally time to return home, he promised that he would come back the next year and wouldn't cry even once...
...who with the children entered the trains, and with them, later that day, entered the ovens of Treblinka...
...Lewek had trouble only once more—when he lost his handkerchief...
...a mosquito bit me...
...He stopped planning to leave for home, and each day the countryside began to look better to him...
...The boys were told that there are good people and bad people, wise people and stupid people, but Maciek is a peasant name, hence a poor person's name, and not at all funny...
...Suddenly someone said that Kruk had taken two strands from him...
...Chaim and Mordka Why is it that Chaim, who doesn't give anyone a moment's peace, lives in friendship with Mordka Czarnecki and never does him any harm...
...Lewek was the first to confess...
...Maybe he's cold...
...The fame of the camp's evening concerts spreads far out into the world...
...Good night...
...They are princes from time immemorial...
...Lewek Rechtleben is homesick Everything is so strange and different, not at all like Ge...
...he was whistling and snapping his fingers at bedtime...
...And the windows are open—why, a robber could come in...
...In the evening you wash your feet in a long metal trough...
...Once a little girl gave him some jasmine branches...
...There are cloth caps and suspenders for your pants...
...Why will Mama be upset...
...And he became upset still one more time, but it was his own fault...
...The older Kruk takes care of his brother...
...Even the offer of a penknife to cut the strands failed to cheer him up...
...On Monday Lewek didn't cry but he still wanted to go home...
...Some boys speak no Polish at all, but even so they manage well enough...
...they received their patents of nobility in ancient times...
...Do you worry often...
...Here in the country, though, the Polish language smiles at them through the green foliage of the trees and the golden grain...
...Presman is one of the camp judges...
...Why does he want to go home...
...then, quite tired, softly returns to earth, back to people, and falls asleep...
...But tomorrow he will definitely go...
...TRANSLATED BY ADELE MILCH And when you turn to your left, it is a portrait of Janusz Korczak that you see, because it is the Janusz Korczak elementary school of Kiryat Shmonah that you are in...
...There is no time here to teach the children how to speak...
...In addition to the fiddler we have three singers, and they sing to the boys every evening at bedtime...
...with the local Franeks and Janeks, and because he lives on Przyokopowa Street has learned to whistle with his fingers and crow like a rooster...
...Trans...
...I'm not angry at him...
...He stopped weaving and did not want to eat supper...
...Either there's a speck in his eye, or he can't endure the terrible pain of a mosquito bite, or he is thirsty, or the bed is too hard or the water too cold...
...The Furtkiewicz brothers already sport Polish names—they are called Henio and Gucio...
...or in a dozen other ways and places, threads of the story and of its grip on a small number of us, a kind of Korczak cult that has quietly come into being...
...For dinner there is a strange green soup followed by milk...
...How are they supposed to know that meals eaten at different times of the day have different names, when at home, no matter when they get hungry, they are always given the same piece of bread with unsweetened tea...
...Street, or Krochmalna or Smocza...
...I'm grown-up already...
...what a lovely flower...
...Oh no...
...Mordka Czarnecki has big black eyes that always look surprised and a bit sad...
...And if a child there happens to hear some Polish, it's only "Drop dead from cholera, God damn you...
...Is Chaim your friend...
...I had known the tale of his martyrdom for many years, because it is principally the manner of his death that accounts for the streets and the schools named after him, for the statues and the other memorials...
...another time the landowner allowed him to pick a bouquet of white buckwheat and a red poppy from the garden...
...Trans...
...The Jewish jargon doesn't grate on the ear here, because it isn't a jargon of screaming and coarse bickering and insults, but only the foreign tongue of children playing happily...
...When the boys play tipcat, Czarnecki stands at the side, amazed that anyone can so adroitly use one stick to make another fly so high...
...But there are streets in Warsaw where the only Polish word you hear is the cursing of a tenement janitor because the little Jewish brats have littered his courtyard...
...And you understand, perhaps, that the agony of death is tempered by the ecstasy of life, for you are in a school attended each day by two hundred boys and girls who are helped to laugh and to learn, to be Jewish and to be human >vith pride and with joy...
...He may know all about fighting with the other boys but he can't even make his own bed...
...But you're a kid too...
...It is an honor to print them, and a privilege to invite others to view—perhaps themselves to help weave—the Korczak tapestry...
...even in childhood its princes know how much a loaf of bread costs, they take care of their younger siblings, and they do hard work side by side with their parents...
...If they use the name Maciek so contemptuously, they are acting exactly the same as those who make fun of the name Mosiek...
...A tribunal of three judges, elected by the boys, settled all disputes among the campers...
...Let him have fun," says the older brother, "he's still a kid, he's only eight years old...
...Are you kidding...
...it is irridescent, like pearls made of stars...
...Trans...
...Uh" means: my pants are too long...
...Why do the boys speak Polish so poorly...
...And I was snapping my fingers," he added, snowing how he snapped them...
...Surely Papa had lost the new cap, and it had cost half a ruble...
...No, he doesn't have any toys at home...
...Lewek constantly read and reread the letter, and each time returned it to its hiding place...
...or in Kansas City, discovering a new Russian immigrant, a filmmaker who had left behind in Russia some hundreds of feet of a film biography of Korczak he had been working on...
...I'm twelve years old...
...I know of none that is more evocative, richer in detail, more brilliant in design, even now, generations before it is completed...
...the older Kruk was asked...
...He watches the sunset the same way, as if preoccupied by some important thought and wakened from his reverie only by the sight of something very beautiful...
...And the trees, with their needles, are so peculiar...
...He is always disagreeable, always unhappy...
...I want to go home...
...Lewek will go home, but not until tomorrow because today is Saturday and riding is not allowed on Saturday...
...Korczak keeps happening to me...
...Her translation of Stanivlaw Lem's novel The Investigation war published by Seabury Press in 1974...
...it is breathed in with a whiff of the river breeze...
...The next day at breakfast, when it was asked who had been whistling in the dorm the night before...
...He put the buckwheat in a bowl with flowers and wore the red poppy until the petals fell off...
...Someone jokingly called Kruk a prince...
...The strings of the fiddle sing grandly and it is quiet in the dorm because the boys are listening...
...But it's another thing with those who live on streets where there are lots of Polish boys...
...he is quick to forgive and always knows why and when an acquittal is appropriate—forgiveness is necessary when the culprit is not evil but young and silly or poor and neglected...
...This article is a selection from Janusz Korczak 's Fragmenty Utwor?w, published in Warsaw in 1978 by the Institut Wydawniczi "Nasza Ksi?garnia...
...A one-story building in the forest, no courtyard, not even a gutter...
...He gives him his personal flag,* he always defends him...
...Why did Chaim, one of the worst rowdies, ally himself with Czarnecki, one of the quietest boys in the summer camp...
...Good night, boys...
...And when things go badly for a child, whether he is Polish or Jewish, he uses the same word in his thoughts—he is smutno...
...You understand that neither Korczak's death nor the deaths of his two hundred orphans nor the deaths of these nine here inscribed have defeated our people...
...He lifted the spoon to his lips...
...Since he didn't bring any music he plays from memory, but he knows many tunes...
...I send greetings from myself Ber-Leib and from Chaim...
...But he himself never attempts to play...
...I work with my father at the shoe factory...
...There was a day in 1974 when I was in Kiryat Shmonah and the mayor of that development town in the Upper Galilee asked whether I wanted to visit the school, by which he meant the school directly across the street from the apartment building where, a year earlier, the PLO had killed nineteen Jews, nine of them children, students at the school...
...And Mama and Papa are far away...
...You have to sleep by yourself in a bed, the pillow is stuffed with straw...
...It may have been a joke, but it wasn't far from the truth...
...So in camp Geszel wants to do as he pleases: stay up late and not drink milk...
...When you enter the lobby ofthat school, a large lobby, and you turn to your right, you see a plaque with the names of the nine children, and it is an unbearable sadness that now, so many years later, there are still names of children to be added to our list of the slaughtered...
...Here the Polish language is intertwined with the happy singing of the forest birds...
...A rascal, not a prince...
...But the quiet, commonplace Polish word smutno ("sad") is also used in Jewish...
...Grozowski and our singers In the evenings, when the boys are lying in their beds, Grozowski takes out his fiddle, stands in the center of the dorm, and plays for bedtime...
...And the boys—the audience— squint through half-shut eyelids...
...Janusz Korczak, in whose honor both Israel and Poland have published postage stamps, the centenary of whose birth just last year led UNICEF to declare 1978 as a year of special remembrance...
...After all, he apolo* Issued lo him during a game described elsewhere in the book...
...They let him dig as much as he wanted,* Margulies made him a gift of a stick he found on the way to the birch thicket, and the judges brought in a verdict in his favor whenever Geszel Grozowski committed an offense.** All the boys yearn to pal around with him, but Geszel can't team up with anyone because he is always searching for long-stemmed yellow flowers...
...Does he fight with you...
...Others laugh gleefully at the sight of a small russet animal jumping so nimbly from branch to branch where a person would surely fall and break his neck...
...Fine...
...Czarnecki and Kruk are both princes in a land of sad thoughts and black bread...
...Czarnecki doesn't laugh, but his eyes open wide and he seems astonished that a squirrel knows how to do something that a human being could never manage...
...Translation © Adele Milch 1979...
...J?sef was there listening, and old Abram the tenant, and farm-hands and girls and the ancient pine tree...
...All of these phrases are replaced by one short "uh...
...They were sitting on the porch steps and working...
...But the following day, since there was some free time after breakfast...
...So Lewek Rechtleben burst into tears the first evening...
...And as for Topcio Mosiek—he flies pigeons * Warsaw's Old City...
...And is little Kruk a prince also...
...My dear sweet singer, your poignant songs and bright soul will carry you through life...
...The only whispering comes from outside the windows, where the pines are talking to each other and to the sky...
Vol. 4 • November 1979 • No. 10
