Janusz Korczak: The Doctor Who Stayed With His Children

In early August 1942, in the third week of the mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto, German and auxiliary police surrounded the orphanage on Sienna Street. Its roughly two hundred children were ordered to the Umschlagplatz, the loading square from which sealed trains left daily for the Treblinka killing center. Witnesses later described what they saw: the children walking through the ghetto streets in rows of four, dressed in their best clothes, each carrying a small bundle. At the head of the column walked a slight, balding man in his sixties who had refused, again and again, every offer to save himself. His name was Janusz Korczak, and by that morning he had spent more than thirty years insisting that children deserved to be treated with dignity. He did not abandon the principle at the end.

The details of that march have passed into legend, and historians caution that eyewitness accounts differ on the particulars — the date, the songs, whether a child carried the green flag of King Matt, the hero of Korczak's most famous novel. But the essential facts are not in dispute. Korczak was offered sanctuary on the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw multiple times, by Polish friends and by the underground. He declined every time, because the children could not come with him. He boarded the train.

The Old Doctor

Janusz Korczak was born Henryk Goldszmit in Warsaw, in 1878 or 1879 — his father never registered the exact year — to an assimilated Jewish family. He trained as a physician and served as a military doctor in three wars, but his true vocation announced itself early: he wrote, constantly, and what he wrote about was children. The pen name Janusz Korczak, borrowed for a literary competition, became the name by which all of Poland knew him.

And all of Poland did know him. His children's novel King Matt the First — the story of a boy king who tries to build a world governed justly, for and by children — held a place in Polish childhood comparable to Peter Pan in the English-speaking world. His guides for parents, above all How to Love a Child, were read across Europe. In the 1930s he became a beloved radio personality, dispensing warm, wry advice as the "Old Doctor." He was that rare figure: a genuine celebrity whose fame rested entirely on the conviction that children were not future people, but people.

A Republic of Children

In 1912 Korczak gave up his medical practice to direct Dom Sierot, a Jewish orphanage on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, together with Stefania Wilczyńska, the educator who would remain his closest collaborator for thirty years — and who would also refuse to abandon the children at the end. The building was designed to his specifications, and so was the community inside it.

Dom Sierot was run as a children's republic. It had a parliament of elected child deputies. It had a court of peers, in which children judged cases brought by other children — and where adults, including Korczak himself, could be summoned as defendants. It had its own newspaper, and in 1926 Korczak founded Mały Przegląd (The Little Review), a national weekly written by and for children, produced from letters and reports sent in by thousands of young correspondents across Poland. Nothing like it existed anywhere in the world.

Behind these institutions stood a simple, radical idea: the child has the right to respect. The right to be taken seriously, to be heard, to make mistakes, to own the present day rather than be treated as a mere preparation for adulthood. Korczak articulated these rights decades before any government recognized them, and his thinking would eventually flow — through the advocacy of postwar Poland — into the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Inside the Ghetto

When Germany occupied Warsaw in 1939, Korczak — nearly ill and past sixty — reported for military service and was turned away. He refused to wear the blue-and-white armband required of Jews, regarding it as a degradation, and spent time in prison for it. In the autumn of 1940, the orphanage was ordered into the newly sealed ghetto, and Korczak moved with it.

Inside the ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of people were starving in an area of barely more than a square mile, Korczak's work narrowed to a single task: keeping his children alive and keeping them children. He spent his days begging donations from ghetto institutions and the wealthy few, humiliating himself, as he recorded flatly in his diary, so that the children could eat. He insisted on lessons, on plays, on birthdays. In July 1942, weeks before the deportations began, the orphanage staged Rabindranath Tagore's The Post Office, a play about a dying boy at a window — chosen, Korczak suggested, to teach the children to meet death calmly.

Through those final months he kept a diary, writing at night between duty rounds — exhausted, sick, and unsentimental. Smuggled out of the ghetto and hidden, it survived the war and was published as Ghetto Diary. It records no self-pity and no illusions. "I exist not to be loved and admired," he had written years earlier, "but to love and to act."

The Last March

The Großaktion — the great deportation — began on July 22, 1942. Over the following two months, some 265,000 Jews were taken from Warsaw to Treblinka and murdered. The orphanages were not spared. When the order came for Dom Sierot in early August, Korczak understood, as most in the ghetto by then suspected, that "resettlement in the East" meant no such thing.

He organized the children so they would not be frightened. Accounts from the Umschlagplatz — including that of Władysław Szpilman, the pianist, who watched them pass — describe an orderly procession amid scenes of horror. According to a persistent account, an official recognized Korczak at the square and offered him, one final time, a chance to turn back. Whether or not that moment occurred, his answer had already been given many times over. He went with the children, along with Stefania Wilczyńska and the rest of the staff, into the cattle cars.

The train reached Treblinka on or about August 6, 1942. Korczak, Wilczyńska, and the children were murdered in the gas chambers, almost certainly on the day they arrived. No grave exists.

What Remains

At the Treblinka memorial today, seventeen thousand jagged stones stand in a field of concrete, representing the communities destroyed there. Only one stone carries the name of an individual. It reads: Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit) and the children.

His legacy runs deeper than memorials. The year 1979 was declared the International Year of the Child on the centenary of his birth, and Poland's proposal for a binding treaty on children's rights — adopted a decade later as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history — was advanced explicitly in his memory. Every child who today holds legal rights to protection, to education, and to a voice stands, in some measure, in a line that leads back to a Warsaw orphanage with a children's parliament and a court of peers.

Korczak's death was not a rescue; he saved no one, and he knew it. What he offered the children was something the machinery of murder was specifically designed to strip away: the assurance, held to the last hour, that they mattered — that someone who could have left chose to stay. In a catastrophe measured in millions, his final walk endures as one of its most legible moral acts: a teacher's last lesson, delivered without a word.