Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, educational thinker, writer, publicist and social activist. He was one of the earliest and most profound voices for children’s rights, the dignity of the child and the treatment of children as complete human beings rather than raw material in the hands of adults. In the orphanages he directed in Warsaw together with his partners and colleagues, above all Stefania Wilczyńska, he created a children’s society with democratic institutions, a newspaper, a court, a parliament, shared responsibility and an educational language that placed the child at the center.

Korczak is known worldwide as a children’s author, doctor and broadcaster, but his memory is marked most deeply by his final choice. When the children of his Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to the Umschlagplatz and from there to Treblinka in August 1942, he refused offers to save himself and accompanied his children and staff to the end. That act made him a Jewish, Polish and universal symbol of loyalty to children, moral responsibility and human dignity inside a world of extermination.

Childhood in Warsaw and Polish Jewish roots

Korczak was born in Warsaw on July 22, 1878, or according to some sources in 1879, as Henryk Goldszmit. He grew up in an assimilated and educated Polish Jewish family. His father, Józef Goldszmit, was a lawyer, and his mother, Cecylia née Gębicka, came from a Jewish family with roots in the Kalisz region. Physicians and people of learning were present in his family background, and the home in which he grew up connected Polish culture, Jewish identity and broad education.

His childhood was not easy. The family’s financial situation deteriorated because of his father’s mental illness; his father was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital and died in 1896. Young Henryk had to help support the household by giving private lessons. That experience — a child carrying adult responsibility in a society where poor children often remained invisible — shaped his social sensitivity and his understanding of the child as someone already living real life, not merely preparing for the future.

From youth he was drawn to reading, writing and questions of education. He studied at a gymnasium in Warsaw and later began medical studies at the Imperial University in the city. Alongside formal education he also studied at the Flying University, the semi-clandestine framework of free Polish learning under Russian rule. There his understanding deepened that education is not only the transmission of knowledge, but a struggle for human freedom, consciousness and a more just society.

A pediatrician between science, compassion and poverty

In 1905 Korczak qualified as a physician. He served as a military doctor during the Russo-Japanese War and later worked as a pediatrician at the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital in Warsaw. His medical work was never detached from the life of society around him. He treated poor children, often without payment and sometimes even giving families money for medicine, while charging higher fees to families who could afford them.

For Korczak, medicine became a gateway to understanding the child. He saw the child’s body, mind, fears, games and pain as one system. He did not stop at diagnosis, but looked at children’s living conditions: overcrowding, poverty, violence, neglect, shame and dependence on adults. From that grew his educational approach: one cannot educate a child without respecting the reality of that child’s life, without listening, and without understanding the tension between external weakness and a rich inner world.

Korczak studied further in Berlin, Paris and London, observed methods in hospitals, schools and orphanages, and encountered the ideas of Pestalozzi, the New Education, progressive education and the pedagogical currents developing in early 20th-century Europe. In London, as he later wrote, he made the decision not to establish a family of his own but to devote his life to the child and the child’s cause.

The writer Janusz Korczak and the birth of a public voice

Henryk Goldszmit began publishing as a teenager. In 1898 he first used the pen name Janusz Korczak in a writing competition, borrowing it from a novel by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski; a printer’s error helped produce the form by which he became known to generations. He also used other names, including the Old Doctor, but Janusz Korczak became his literary, public and historical identity.

At first he wrote feuilletons, social sketches and fiction for adults. His early books, including Children of the Street and Child of the Drawing Room, dealt with the social gaps of Warsaw and the contrast between poor children and the children of established classes. His writing combined compassion, irony, social criticism and deep understanding of the child’s inner life.

He later published children’s books that became classics, including King Matt the First, King Matt on a Desert Island, The Bankruptcy of Little Jack and Kaytek the Wizard. In these books he used fairy tale, adventure and imagination to speak with children about power, responsibility, government, money, fear, error, justice and human limits. He did not write down to children; he wrote to them as partners in conversation.

The Orphan House: a republic of children

In 1912 the Dom Sierot, the Orphan House, opened in Warsaw as a home for Jewish children established by the Help for Orphans Association. Korczak directed it together with Stefania Wilczyńska, the chief educator and a central figure without whom the project cannot be understood. The orphanage operated at 92 Krochmalna Street and served Jewish children aged seven to fourteen.

The innovation of the Orphan House was not only in the quality of care, but in the social structure created inside it. The children were not voiceless subjects of adults. They participated in a system of duties, a newspaper, a parliament, a loan fund and a children’s court. The court was not meant to humiliate or punish, but to teach responsibility, listening, correction, forgiveness and self-judgment. Children learned that a decent society is not built by power alone, but by rules, trust and recognition of every person’s dignity.

In 1919 Korczak also founded Nasz Dom, Our House, for Polish children, together with Maria Falska. Similar educational methods were used there as well. In both institutions he demonstrated that respect, responsibility and democracy are not principles for Jewish or Polish children only, but for children as human beings.

The child’s right to respect

Korczak’s great pedagogical contribution can be summarized in one revolutionary idea: the child is a person. Not a small adult, not parental property, not a pupil whose will must be broken, but a human being with feelings, thoughts, memory, fears, desires and a right to respect. In works such as How to Love a Child, Educational Moments, When I Am Little Again, The Child’s Right to Respect and Playful Pedagogy, he formulated an approach that anticipated much of the modern language of children’s rights.

Korczak opposed corporal punishment and the humiliation of children at a time when both were still considered normal in many educational systems. He asked adults to recognize that a child experiences insult, fear, justice and injustice with an intensity no less real than that of adults. Childhood, for him, was not a waiting room before real life; it was life itself.

His approach was not soft in a shallow sense. He did not want to raise spoiled children detached from reality. On the contrary, he believed children should encounter responsibility, duties, mistakes, limits and social life. But that responsibility had to be built through respect, dialogue and experience, not fear. In this way he created a practical moral education: not lectures about justice, but everyday life in which children learn to judge, listen, consider others and repair harm.

The children’s newspaper and the Old Doctor on radio

In 1926 Korczak founded Mały Przegląd, The Little Review, a weekly children’s and youth supplement to the Polish Jewish daily Nasz Przegląd. It was among the first newspapers created by and for children. Children sent letters, notes, reports and reflections, and the newspaper gave them a real platform in a culture where their voices were rarely heard.

The paper was a direct continuation of his educational philosophy. If the child has a right to respect, the child also has a right to narrate the world, formulate thoughts and participate in public conversation. Korczak understood the power of the medium: a children’s newspaper is not only an educational amusement, but a small civic institution. It teaches writing, listening, public responsibility and the feeling that a child’s words matter.

During the 1930s he also spoke on Polish radio as the Old Doctor. His talks to children and parents became widely loved. He spoke simply about deep matters, without condescension and without preaching. In 1936 his programs were stopped amid antisemitic pressure, but he later returned to broadcasting and spoke to listeners in the first days of the war. On radio, as in the orphanage and the newspaper, he tried to build a language of trust between adults and children.

Jewish and Polish: double identity and closeness to Zionism

Korczak saw himself as both Jewish and Polish. Polish was the language of his writing, and he was deeply connected to Polish culture, yet he never abandoned his Jewish identity. Precisely because he lived between two worlds, he worked for understanding between Poles and Jews. His identity was not a political slogan but a lived reality: a Polish Jewish doctor, writer and educator in a city where the two identities met, clashed and needed one another.

In the 1930s he moved closer to the Zionist movement, began studying Hebrew, cooperated with Zionist youth movement publications and participated in their seminars. He visited the Land of Israel in 1934 and 1936, stayed at kibbutzim including Ein Harod, Ashdot Ya’akov, Kfar Giladi and Merhavia, and met pupils and educators. These visits were not only geographical journeys; they were attempts to find a spiritual, historical and educational point of support during a period of personal, professional and European crisis.

Yet Korczak did not become a political Zionist leader and did not abandon his responsibility to the children of Warsaw. Letters and testimony indicate that he considered possibilities connected to Palestine, but could not leave the children in his care. That choice reveals the depth of his identity. He looked toward a Jewish future, but remained faithful to the Jewish and Polish children of the present, in the place where they needed him most.

The Warsaw Ghetto: an orphanage inside a collapsing world

When Nazi Germany occupied Poland and created the Warsaw Ghetto, the Orphan House was forced to move from its building on Krochmalna Street into the ghetto, first to Chłodna 33 and later to Sienna 16 / Śliska 9. Korczak moved with the children. He refused to separate from them even as conditions became inhuman: hunger, overcrowding, disease, daily terror and a growing awareness of approaching catastrophe.

Inside the ghetto he continued to run the orphanage as a small island of order, humanity and dignity. He fought to obtain food, clothing, medicine and donations, but he also continued to preserve an educational language: duties, routine, plays, conversations and the sense that children do not lose their human image even when the world around them tries to strip everything away. In July 1942 the children staged Rabindranath Tagore’s play The Post Office, a work about a sick child, expectation and inner freedom. It was the last play inside a closed and threatening world.

In the final months of his life Korczak resumed keeping a diary. The diary, given to his friend Igor Newerly and published after the war, is a rare document: not only historical testimony, but the voice of an educator who continues to think, observe and worry about children amid hunger, fear and extermination. The last known entry is from August 4, 1942.

The final march to Treblinka

On August 5 or 6, 1942, during the great deportation action in the Warsaw Ghetto, the children of the Orphan House were sent to the Umschlagplatz, the collection point from which trains departed to the death camps. According to various testimonies, Korczak had opportunities to escape or save himself. He refused. He would not abandon the children and staff.

The details of the final procession survived in different versions, some more legendary and some more sober. Some described children in order, dressed in their best clothes, carrying toys or books; others described silence, exhaustion, confusion and terror. What all the testimonies share is the decisive fact: Korczak went with the children. Stefania Wilczyńska and other staff members went with them as well. They boarded the train with the children and were murdered at Treblinka.

Precisely because the story became a myth, moral accuracy matters. The final moment does not need ornament in order to be understood. It is enough that an educator, doctor and writer in his sixties, who might have sought a way to save himself, chose to remain with the children whose lives had been entrusted to him. This is not a legend of ceremonial heroism; it is testimony to extreme human responsibility.

Educational thought ahead of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

After the war, Korczak’s legacy became one of the important sources in international discussion of children’s rights. His ideas influenced educators, researchers, care professionals and legislative initiatives. Poland was one of the countries active in advancing the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and in Polish and international discussion Korczak has often been remembered as a moral and pedagogical forerunner of that approach.

What keeps Korczak relevant is that he did not formulate only beautiful ideals. He created mechanisms: a children’s court, a children’s newspaper, a children’s parliament, duties, conversations, a diary, clinical observation and education rooted in real life. He understood that children learn democracy not when adults tell them about democracy, but when they are given place, responsibility, the right to make a case and the opportunity to repair.

He also knew that adults are not angels. One of the strengths of his writing is its honesty: educators make mistakes, parents fail, children can be difficult, and life is not always just. For that reason, education must be truthful rather than theatrical. A child needs an adult who does not pretend to know everything, but is ready to learn, apologize, listen and accept responsibility.

Literature, memory and commemoration in Israel and the world

Korczak’s work has been translated into many languages, including Hebrew, Yiddish, English, German, Japanese and Esperanto. His books for children and adults continue to be read not only as literary works, but as educational and moral documents. King Matt the First remains one of the wisest books about children, power and democracy; The Child’s Right to Respect still sounds as if it were written for the educational systems of our own time.

In Israel, Poland and around the world, monuments, schools, streets, educational institutions and organizations bear his name. In Israel, many institutions were named for Janusz Korczak, and the Beitenu orphanage in Ra’anana, established in 1942 soon after his death, received child survivors of the Holocaust and drew inspiration from his educational method. His figure appears in memorials, literature, theater, film, opera and children’s books, and continues to inspire educators, parents and caregivers.

His commemoration rests not only on the way he died, but on the way he lived. His death at Treblinka made him a symbol, but the symbol would be empty without the decades of prior work: medicine, education, writing, listening to children, building institutions and developing a moral language in which the child is not an object of pity but a person with a voice.

Why this legacy belongs in Moreshet

Janusz Korczak merits inclusion in Moreshet because he is one of the great Polish Jewish figures of the 20th century in education, children’s rights and human morality. He was a physician who saw the child as a whole person, an educator who built a republic of children, a writer who addressed young people with respect, a journalist and broadcaster who gave children a voice, and a Polish Jew who carried responsibility to the last moment.

Moreshet.com documents Korczak because Jewish and Israeli heritage is composed not only of political leaders, soldiers and national institutions, but also of educators who widened the moral borders of humanity. Korczak’s place in Moreshet rests on his lasting contribution to the understanding of childhood, human dignity, democratic education, children’s rights, Holocaust memory and the Jewish and Israeli consciousness of responsibility. He taught that even when the world collapses, the adult is judged by whether he remains faithful to the children entrusted to his care.