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HENRYK GOLDSZMIT, M.D. a.k.a. JANUSZ KORCZAK

At Treblinka, the Nazi death camp where more than 800,000 Polish Jews were exterminated, a stark monument stands in an incongruous pastoral setting. Arranged around a large central sculpture are large jagged rocks, 17,000 in all, which resemble broken grave stones. Each represents a destroyed Jewish community. Only one memorializes an individual -- the pediatrician, Henryk Goldszmit, better known to the world by his pen-name Janusz Korczak (pronounced Kor - chock).

Born in Warsaw in 1878 into a family of wealthy assimilated Jews, his father a lawyer, his grandfather a physician, the boy was brought up almost ignorant of his heritage. The family were advocates of the Haskala which encouraged Jews to become part of the secular world. When he was age eleven, his father developed mental illness and the family fortunes declined. From an early age Henryk had heightened sensitivity for the plight of the underdog with particular empathy for children. He wished to become a writer, but his family prevailed upon him to follow a more practical career.

Henryk was one of the few Jews to be accepted for medical studies at the University of Warsaw from where he graduated in 1905. Impatient with his training, he considered most of his professors to be pompous, insensitive men who seemed detached from the suffering of their patients. As a student he gave free medical aid to the indigent and later when in practice, he was a kind of medical Robin Hood who took fees from the rich and charged only a token amount to the poor because as it is written in the Talmud, " an unpaid doctor is of no help to a sick man." He continued his training in pediatrics both in Berlin and Paris where he studied with famous physicians such as Virchow, Marfan and Charcot. During the Russo-Japanese War he served in field hospitals and wards in the Ukraine and in Manchuria.

Simultaneous with his medical work, Goldszmit began to write poetry and fiction, always with strong moral and idealistic themes. When asked whether the two careers were compatible, he replied, "Being a doctor didn't interfere with Chekhov's becoming a great writer. It deepened his creative work. To write anything of value, one has to be a diagnostician." As a second year medical student he entered a play that he had written about mental illness in a literary competition under the pseudonym, Janusz Korczak. Although it only won an honorable mention, the name stuck and for the next four decades he led a double life -- Dr. Henryk Goldszmit, the pediatrician and child psychologist and Janusz Korczak, the author of popular children's books and champion of the rights of children.

His most famous book, King Matt the First (1928) was a parable that was beloved by generations of European children and was translated into twenty languages. In it the little prince Matthew inherits the crown of a mythical country and sets himself the task of righting all the world's wrongs. The land is governed by children while adults are sent back to school and they succeeded for awhile, before scheming adults prevail and banish Matt to permanent exile.

Korczak believed in the basic decency of children and treated them with absolute respect. A prolific writer, he described his methods in How To Love A Child which noted that since children are relatively uncorrupted they should demonstrate more responsibility than adults. In 1910 he decided to give up both his successful pediatric practice and his literary career to become the director of an orphanage. He justified his decision to leave medicine since the orphanage, in effect, would serve as a laboratory where he could develop his educational system based on objective observations. "What a fever, a cough, or nausea is for the physician, so a smile, a tear, or a blush should be for the educator."

With a devoted colleague, Stefa Wilczynska, he opened an orphanage for Jewish children and nine years later in 1920 another for Catholics. In these "children's republics" he experimented with his progressive ideas by allowing the children to govern themselves with as much independence as possible. Disinterested in personal affairs, he lived a monastic existence, never married and performed the most menial tasks such as mopping the floor, making beds, ironing handkerchiefs or cobbling shoes. Every morning at 6:00 A.M. he emptied the chamber pots wearing a green smock; more than once he was mistaken for a janitor.

From 1926 to 1939 Korczak edited a weekend supplement to a popular newspaper that was entirely written and edited by children thus providing them with a national voice. About 10,000 letters a year were received including articles, essays, news and poetry. During this same period Korczak was offered his own weekly radio program. The officials insisted that he adopt still another pseudonym since they didn't want to be accused of allowing a Jewish educator a chance to shape the minds of Polish children. Believing that it was better to seize the opportunity anonymously than not at all, he agreed to be called the "Old Doctor". It was said that on his popular program he spoke to children as if they were adults and to adults as if they were children.

As political conditions deteriorated Korczak and Stefa visited Palestine where they were intrigued with kibbutz life. They were tempted to emigrate with the children, but circumstances would not permit and with the German take-over of Poland, the tragedy of Polish Jewry began to play out. The orphanages were closed and Korczak and two hundred of his charges, along with about 400,000 other Jews were forced into a walled ghetto. The wall was eleven miles long and encosed one thousand acres. There he resumed his medical practice, but limited to 184 calories a day and enduring inhuman conditions, the victims of the Warsaw ghetto began to starve. For nearly two years Korczak and Stefa did their best to provide food and encouragement and to create an environment of normalcy, but conditions deteriorated inexorably.

Friends from the outside arranged a plan for him to escape, but Korczak chose to remain with his children. "You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this," he said. In his diary he wrote: "Our bodies may live forever in green grass or a cloud - we just don't know....What we can know is this: Our children, and theirs, may go on...I would only like to be conscious when I die. I want to be able to tell the children "Good-bye" and wish them freedom to choose their own way."

On Korczak's sixty-fourth birthday, the authorities were informed that large shipments of people would be sent daily to Treblinka. The end had come. August 6, 1942 was the date chosen for liquidating the orphanages and stray children. Korczak felt that there was no need to tell the children what was happening and had his staff say that they were going for a treat in the country and to take a few toys along. They marched out of the building, heads held high and carrying their flag that Korczak had designed - green with white blossoms and the blue Star of David. The following are some eye-witness accounts:

"Slowly they go down the steps, line up in rows, in perfect order and discipline, as usual. Their little eyes are turned towards the "doctor," they are strangely calm, they feel almost "well." Their "doctor" is going with them, so what do they have to be afraid of? They are not alone, they are not abandoned....The children are calm, but inwardly they must feel it, they must sense it intuitively, otherwise how could you explain the deadly seriousness in their pale little faces? But they are marching quietly in orderly rows, calm and earnest, and at the head of them is Janusz Korczak....".

"When I met the procession...all the children were singing together. Korczak marched with two of the youngest children in his arms. Their faces were also smiling, apparently he had been telling them funny stories....".

Singing to the accompaniment of a little fiddler, they walked in double file in the hot sun the two miles to the collection site, their wooden shoes clattering and thousands of faces silently watching.When they had to climb seventy steps over the ghetto bridge to get to the Umschlagplatz some of the smallest children stumbled or needed to be pushed. Many jeering Poles yelled "Good-bye Jews." At the assembly point the children were counted, and then their yellow armbands were snipped off and thrown into the center of the courtyard. A policeman remarked that "it looked like a field of buttercups."

The last recorded sight was that of a solitary man comforting the children.

Korczak, the martyr, became a legend and a new rallying cry in the ghetto was "Remember Korczak's orphans" as if only now did every Jew realize that they were next. Just two weeks after the orphanage was evacuated, the Warsaw resistance movement began. Janusz Korczak/Henryk Goldszmit stands with Albert Shweitzer and Mother Theresa as one of the finest examples of selflessness and caring for others in human history.

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