Top Photo: Left: Postcard of Janusz Korczak, published in Warsaw in 1933. Wikimedia Commons. Right: Monument to Janusz Korczak at the Jewish cemetery in Wola in Warsaw, Poland. Adrian Grycuk / Wikimedia Commons

Among the 17,000 stones standing as a symbolic cemetery at the Treblinka memorial, only one bears the name of an individual: “Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldzmit) i Dzieci (Children).”1  

A pediatrician and educator, Korczak ran orphanages for Jewish children in Poland and was an early advocate for children’s rights—a revolutionary philosophy at the time. In 1942, when the Nazis rounded up the children in his Warsaw Ghetto orphanage and sent them to the death camp at Treblinka, Korczak refused to leave their side. He was murdered alongside his pupils shortly after arriving at Treblinka. Reflecting on his death, Władysław Szpilman wrote in his memoir, The Pianist, that “Korczak’s true value was not in what he wrote but in the fact that he lived as he wrote. … [H]e had devoted every minute of his free time and every złoty he had available to the cause of children, and he was to be devoted to them until his death.”2 

Stone at Treblinka memorial commemorating Janusz Korczak and children. Wikimedia Commons

Before World War II

Born on July 22, 1878, as Henryk Goldszmit to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) Korczak took the name he would forever be remembered by during an 1898 literary contest the young writer entered. The name was the fictitious lead character in a novel by well-known Polish novelist Jozef Kraszewski, but according to biographer Betty Jean Lifton, “The noble character of the fictional Janasz Korczak, a poor orphan of gentry lineage, must have appealed to Henyrk. … Janasz turns his fate around by patience, honesty, and self-control.” The Polish-sounding pseudonym also likely broke down some of the barriers that came with being Jewish in Poland at the turn of the 20th century.3 

Korczak studied pediatric medicine at the University of Warsaw, and after serving in the Russo-Japanese War, Korczak decided to become an educator, joining the Orphan’s Aid Society in 1908. In 1911, he founded the Dom Sierot orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw. According to Yad Vashem, “About one hundred children lived in the orphanage. [Korczak] established a ‘republic for children’ with its own small parliament, law-court and newspaper.” 4 

He based the idea of the children’s republic on the belief that children were people of today, not just people of tomorrow. As Lifton explains, “Korczak believed [children] are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals, not as masters and slaves. They should be allowed to grow into whatever they were meant to be: the ‘unknown person’ inside each of them is the hope for the future.”5

Postcard of Janusz Korczak, published in Warsaw in 1933. Wikimedia Commons

World War I suspended Korczak’s orphanage work when he was drafted to oversee a field hospital in Ukraine. Resuming his work at the orphanage after the war, Korczak expanded his educational influence. He was an active member in four social organizations, started collaborating with Polish educational institutions for teachers, and became a lecturer at the Free Polish University. He also cofounded a second orphanage called Nasz Dom in Pruzków, near Warsaw.6  This productive period also saw Korczak publish several books, including King Matt the First and How to Love a Child, both of which enjoyed wide readerships.7 In 1937, Korczak was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature for his work, a marker of his growing prestige as an educator and author.8  He also started a widely broadcast radio program, though it was later shut down due to rising antisemitism in Poland. In fact, after several trips to Palestine under the British Mandate during the 1930s, Korczak had all but made the decision to emigrate. However, the outbreak of World War II destroyed those plans. 9

The Warsaw Ghetto

The onset of World War II fatefully altered the trajectory of Korczak’s life. In 1940, Dom Sierot and its 150 children were resettled inside the Warsaw Ghetto, along with the rest of the city’s Jewish population.10  However, Korczak refused to wear the white band with the Star of David that Jews had been required to wear. One day, Korczak arrived at Gestapo headquarters to complain about a German sentry who had confiscated a cart of potatoes he had tried to bring into the ghetto. The Gestapo officer listening to the complaint noted that Korczak was not wearing the star, informing Korczak that he would be arrested. Korczak responded defiantly: “There are human laws which are transitory, and higher laws which are eternal…” He was cut off as he was seized by guards, beaten, and thrown into a prison cell. 11 Upon being released a month later, the children of the orphanage, excited to see Korczak, asked why he shouted at the Germans and if he was scared during his ordeal. Korczak reportedly replied, “On the contrary, they were afraid of me. The Germans are always afraid of anyone who yells louder than them.” When the kids asked what it was like in prison, Korczak said, “Wonderful,” and then broke into a dance.12

Janusz Korczak with children and teachers in from of Dom Sierot orphanage. Treblinka Museum

Though defiant in the face of the Gestapo and brave before his charges, the prison stay had deeply impacted Korczak. Soon thereafter, he blocked one of the entrances to the orphanage and installed blackout curtains to help guard against further German intrusions. He was determined to safeguard his children against the barbarity he recognized in their German oppressors. By many accounts, he also was left physically weakened by his incarceration—a doctor found he had fluid in his lungs and told Korczak this was a sign of heart failure.13 

Defiance in the Face of Death

Despite several offers to hide in safety on the “Aryan side” of Warsaw, Korczak refused to abandon his children. Instead, he begged for food, going door to door to ensure his pupils did not starve like many other ghetto inhabitants. He also tried to maintain the types of activities that made his orphanage so special on the outside—allowing the children to have a say in their own governance, performing plays, and telling stories.14 

Yet, by 1941, ghetto life was becoming dire, especially as diseases like typhus raged in the cold winter months. Emaciated children not from the orphanage lay begging and dying on the ghetto’s streets, and according to Lifton, “Sometimes Korczak knelt beside the dying children, trying to transmit some warmth from his hand to their emaciated bodies, whispering a few words of encouragement, but most of them were already beyond response.”15  Such sights broke Korczak’s heart, and as the calendar flipped to 1942, the fight to survive and the fight for his orphans only ratcheted up. In his diary, he tracked the steady decline in the body weights of his children, and, as a doctor, he too recognized that his own fatigue and deterioration were signs of malnutrition that came with receiving less than 800 calories per day. 16

But Korczak did not stop, and, if anything, the horrific conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto only made him push on harder. “To take on more than was humanly possible was Korczak’s way of spiritual resistance,” writes Lifton. “He held to his principle that if he kept the order of his house, the ritual of his day, he would succeed. Perhaps the war would end, and the Germans would be defeated. Until then, the fact that his children were well and active, did not get typhus or tuberculosis, that the orphanage did not have to be disinfected, was a point for life against death, for good against evil.” 17

On July 18, 1942, Korczak’s orphans performed what would be their final play, entitled The Post Office. In the play, a sick boy confined to his room longs to fly to a distant land with a doctor leading him by the hand. According to Lifton, “It was clear from the hushed silence at the end of the play that Korczak had succeeded in providing the adults as well as the children with a sense of liberation from their present lives.” When asked why he chose this play, Korczak reportedly said that he wanted to help the children accept death. 18

Indeed, word of resettlement and fears connected to the growing death toll in the ghetto had spread in recent days. On July 22, 1942, the first cattle cars appeared in the Warsaw Ghetto and the first trains left for Treblinka, carrying thousands of people to their deaths. On August 6, 1942, the Nazis descended on Korczak’s orphanage to deport him, his co-workers, and the nearly 200 orphans of Dom Sierot to Treblinka.19  Korczak’s diary, which was smuggled out by a friend after he had been deported, included these among the last lines he ever wrote: “It is a difficult thing to be born and learn to live. Ahead of me is a much easier task: to die. After death, it may be difficult again, but I am not bothering about that. … I should like to die consciously, in possession of my faculties. I don’t know what I should say to the children by way of farewell. I should want to make clear to them only this—that the road is theirs to choose, freely.” 20

By all accounts, Korczak’s march toward the loading platform that August day was an act of stoic heroism when, as he led his children into the cattle cars that would take them to be murdered at Treblinka, Korczak did not waver in fulfilling his mission to his orphans. Warsaw Ghetto poet Władysław Szlengel, whose poems were later found in the Oyneg Shabes Archive, immortalized the moment:

    Today, I saw Janusz Korczak
    As he and the children took their last walk.
    Dressed in clean clothes
    As if on a garden stroll to enjoy the Shabbat.

   The face of the city turned anxious
    Like a torn and defenseless giant.
    Empty windows searching the streets
    As in eye-sockets vacant and lifeless.

   And the children lined up in orderly fives,
    Not one pulled out from his line.
    Orphans, these – with no chance
    Of a bribe and reprieve.

   Janusz Korczak marched forward with no hesitation
    Bare-headed, eyes focused, gaze firm.
    A little child clutched his one pocket
    With two more held safe in his arms

   Someone approached at a run,
    Document in hand, he proclaimed:
    Sir, Herr Brandt here has signed your release!
    At which Korczak simply marched on in disdain.

   All his life he had spent
    Creating some warmth in their world,
    How now could he leave them to go
    The last road in their lives all alone. 21

• 1

  “Janusz Korczak – Biography,” Muzeum Treblinka, accessed July 5, 2025, https://muzeumtreblinka.eu/en/informacje/biography/.

• 2

  Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-45 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1999), 19.

• 3

  Betty Jean Lifton, The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 32.

• 4

  “Janusz Korczak,” Yad Vashem, accessed July 12, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/education/educational-materials/lesson-plans/janusz-korczak/korczak-bio.html. Timeline before quotation is also from the same site.

• 5

  Lifton, 62.

• 6

  “Janusz Korczak – Biography,” Muzeum Treblinka.

• 7

  “Janusz Korczak,” Yad Vashem.

• 8

  “Janusz Korczak – Biography,” Muzeum Treblinka.

• 9

  “Janusz Korczak,” Yad Vashem.

• 10

  “Janusz Korczak,” Yad Vashem.

• 11

  Lifton, 265.

• 12

  Lifton, 266.

• 13

  Lifton, 267.

• 14

  “Janusz Korczak,” Yad Vashem.

• 15

  Lifton, 290.

• 16

  Lifton, 302-305.

• 17

  Lifton, 305.

• 18

  Lifton, 320. 

• 19

  “Janusz Korczak – Biography,” Muzeum Treblinka. 

• 20

  Janusz Korczak Diary, Ghetto Fighers’ House Archives No. 12808, 1942, 73, accessed via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/diary-of-janusz-korczak/collection/medical-care-nazism-and-the-holocaust.  

• 21

  “An Appreciation of Janusz Korczak through Two Poems and One Monument – A Lesson Plan for Teachers,” Yad Vashem, accessed July 15, 2025, https://www.yadvashem.org/education/educational-materials/lesson-plans/janusz-korczak/korczak-lesson-plan.html.