Korczak

April 9, 2010
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

     Treblinka was the site of the death camp where three-quarters of a million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime. At war's end, the criminals attempted to wipe out every trace of the camp, but Poles living in the neighborhood returned to the forest when the Nazis left. They dug up the mass graves and rummaged through the skeletons of the dead looking for gold teeth or jewelry.

     Jews were later permitted to rebury the bones and, in the early 1960s, the government allowed the Jews to create a monument. If you visit Treblinka today, you will find 16,000 broken tombstones -- 15,999 tombstones are inscribed with names of cities, villages, and shtetls, the points of origin of the Jews who died in the death camp. But one tombstone is dedicated to an individual -- in large letters is the name "Janusz Korczak" and, beneath this, in small letters, is the name, "Henryk Goldszmit."

     Even as a student, Henryk Goldszmit dreamed of being a writer. While still in medical school, he entered his first play into a literary competition. His play was about mental illness, a subject too close to reality since his own father suffered mentally, so Goldszmit chose to enter the contest under a pen name. He took the name Janusz Korczak from the hero of a popular Polish novel. He did not win the contest, but he continued to use the pen name. He became Dr. Henryk Goldszmit, a pediatrician who wrote about children and their problems; and Janusz Korczak, who wrote popular books for children and championed children's rights.

     In 1912, Goldszmit was invited to create a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. Orphanages then were generally waiting stations, holding pens for children whose only hope was adoption. Goldszmit had a different vision. In his orphanage, children were allowed to create their own government and set their own rules. Those who broke the rules faced a court with children as judges and juries. His orphans composed their own newspaper -- not just for the orphanage, for Goldszmit arranged to have it run as a section of a Warsaw daily newspaper. School in the orphanage was challenging, and graduates were proud of where they had grown up.

     Goldszmit himself received no salary from the orphanage. He lived in a small attic room which he often shared with some child who needed special attention. He willingly took his turn doing chores like washing dishes or scrubbing the floor. Nine years later, in 1920, Goldszmit opened another orphanage, this time for Catholic children. He called his orphanages, "children's republics." And he, and his devoted assistant, Stefa Wilczenska, ran both orphanages.

     As Henryk Goldszmit, he wrote several well-known books on orphans and children's rights. All over Poland, his name was recognized, but he was only getting started. In 1928, using the name Janusz Korczak, he wrote the children's book, King Matt the First. In Poland, it was the equivalent of Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland. Within a few years, King Matt the First was translated and published in twenty languages! Now if you asked who Henryk Goldszmit was, people would hesitate, but, if you asked who Janusz Korczak was, they could answer at once. In the 1930s, Goldszmit had his own program on Polish radio. He was "the Old Doctor Korczak," answering questions from parents and children. Before long, he used the name Janusz Korczak all the time.

     Some of the children who graduated from his Jewish orphanage moved to Palestine and he went to visit them. They were living in a new kind of settlement, the kibbutz. Korczak immediately liked what he saw. The kibbutz was much like his orphanages, only for grownups. Everyone shared in making decisions. Everyone shared in chores and tasks. Everyone shared work and fun. His graduates told him, "Things are not good for Jews in Poland. Stay here with us. Help us build this new life." Korczak promised to return, but only if he could bring his orphans with him.

     Just after his visit to Palestine, Germany invaded Poland. Both of his orphanages were closed and Korczak and two hundred orphans were forcibly moved into the walled ghetto of Warsaw. Over 400,00 Jews were squeezed into a space that measured only about one thousand acres -- just a little bigger than New York's Central Park. Korczak managed to get hold of a sack of potatoes that he guarded like a sack of gold, but a German soldier took it away from him. So he marched into the office of the governor of Warsaw, demanding that the potatoes be returned because they were for "his children." The governor had him arrested and Korczak was sentenced to four months in prison.

     When he was released, many Poles offered to help him escape. Korczak refused. He would stay with the orphans. He told his friends, "You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this." He returned to the ghetto. For nearly two years Korczak and Stefa did what they could to keep things normal for the orphans, but conditions in the ghetto grew worse day by day.

     The end came on August 6, 1942. Janusz and Stefa demanded that the German police wait while they got the children ready to go. They dressed the children in their best clothes. Stefa told the orphans that they were going to a picnic some place where there would be green grass on which to sit and open fields in which to run. The children formed up in neat rows -- two hundred of them five across. Janusz Korczak took the two smallest by the hand and led the way. From time to time, he carried the littlest child. Together, they marched to the railroad station.

     Now let me tell you about King Matt the First. Of course, you realize that not every story -- not even every story written for children -- has a happy ending. In Korczak's book, Matt's mother dies in childbirth and Matt's father dies when Matt is only nine or ten years old. Matt becomes king, but he has to learn what can be changed in the world and what cannot be changed. Before the book begins, there is a picture of Janusz Korczak at age nine or so. Under the picture it says:

When I was the little boy you see in the photograph, I wanted to do all the things that are in this book. But I forgot to, and now I'm old. I no longer have the time or the strength to go to war or travel to the land of the cannibals. 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. 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. And then children will think they can't be statesmen, travelers, and writers, which wouldn't be true.

Grownups should not read my book, because some of the chapters are not very nice. They'll misunderstand them and make fun of them. But if they really want to read my book, they should give it a try. After all, you can't tell grownups not to do something -- they won't listen to you, and you can't make them obey.

     The book concludes when the reforms that King Matt tries to make -- things like sending grownups back to school and letting children run the country -- go wrong. King Matt is taken prisoner by the army of a jealous king who sentences Matt to death. But two other kings convince the jealous king that it is not a good idea for one king to put another king to death. It might give people the idea that all kings should be put to death. So they decide, at the very last minute, to banish Matt forever. But they don't tell Matt. He marches through the city thinking that he is going to his execution. Korczak writes:

It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining. Everyone had come out to see their king one last time. Many people had tears in their eyes. But Matt did not see those tears, though that would have made it easier for him to go to his death. ...

He was tied to a post on the square near a freshly dug grave. But he was still calm and composed when the firing squad loaded their rifles and aimed them at him.

And he was just as calm when, at the last moment, he heard his reprieve: "Death sentence commuted to exile on a desert island."

     Korczak ends his book by saying, "I'll tell you what happened to Matt on that desert island just as soon as I find out."

     When the two hundred children reached the train station in Warsaw, they were told to remove their yellow stars and pile them together. One of the guards remembered, "It looked like a field of buttercups." Legend has it that one Polish guard recognized Korczak. He offered to smuggle his favorite author out of the ghetto if Korczak would just load the children onto the transport and leave them. Instead, Korczak helped the children on to the train and went with them to Treblinka. Neither he nor the children were ever seen again. They were all murdered in the death camp.

     It's not a happy ending to the story of Janusz Korczak and his children's republic. But maybe it was not the real ending, either. I'll tell you what really happened to them just as soon as I find out.