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Schwab: Is he like the Mr. Rogers of Poland? Is that the closest thing, of just like, here is a person who just like signifies what it means to care for children.
Yael: That is a great call. Obviously, it’s really hard to make the analog because they did not have children’s programming in the way that Mr. Rogers appeared in that time, though he did have a radio show in the 1930s called The Old Doctor.
Schwab: Interesting. He put on puppet shows for the children. He did plays with them. He let them draw on his bald head with crayons. So he’s Mr. Rogers.
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Yael: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: And I’m Jonathan Schwab. And we’re so excited that we’re back for season five of Jewish History Nerds.
As a reminder, or if you’ve never been here before, we switch off weeks, whichever one of us is leading the episode, takes a story, does the research, and then brings this story to the other co-hosts, to all of our audience. So I have the pleasure of hearing from you today, Yael, and this is an episode I know you have wanted to do for so long.
The person that we’re going to be talking about has loomed large in my life for a very, very long time. I first learned about him in middle school and thought that he sounded like an outstanding human and having the opportunity to research him in depth this week has been a real blessing.
The person that we’re going to be talking about today is a physician, a pediatrician in the Warsaw ghetto named Janusz Korczak. Janusz Korczak was actually his pen name. He was a Polish Jew born with the name Henrik Goldschmidt, but took the name Janusz Korczak–
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: later on in life when he became a writer. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.
Schwab: I’ve heard of Janusz Korczak, but I would not have recognized the name Henrik Goldschmidt, was it?
Yael: Henrik Gulchmit, very few people know him by that name. And it’s interesting that you say that because I was talking to someone about him earlier today and that person said, he wasn’t Jewish, right? And it’s an interesting misconception because he was in fact a Jew, a Jew who was consigned to the Warsaw Ghetto and who ultimately met the same fate as six million other Jews during the Holocaust. But he was also a renowned scholar, physician, man of the world, and he was–
Schwab: Yeah. I’m sure you’re going to get into this, the pen name Janusz Korczak to me doesn’t sound like a Jewish name. Whereas if you said Henrik Goldschmidt, I would say, yeah, that’s a, that’s a Jewish name.
Yael: Correct. So he was a person who very much believed that his Polish identity and his Jewish identity did not need to conflict with one another. And he took the name Janusz Korczak because he believed it sounded so quintessentially Polish. It is actually taken from the title of a book. And the name in the title of the book is Janusz Korczak, and he used that name Janusz Korczak to submit a piece of writing to a contest. And the printer in that contest made a mistake and printed it as Janusz Korczak. And now 100 plus years later, we know this man as Janusz Korczak, born Henrikh Goldschmidt, intending to be Janusz Korczak, but ultimately known to all as Janusz Korczak.
So it was a bit of a comedy of errors there. But yes, it sounds Polish because he wanted it to sound Polish.
Schwab: Right. It’s like, this is like a John Stewart type move, right? Like John Stewart’s birth name is like John, Jonathan Leibowitz or something like that, right?
Yael: Yeah, it’s not, I think, that he was so intent on distancing himself from his Jewish identity. It was more that he was also proud of his Polish identity, which is unusual for Jews.
But Janusz Korczak did not know or he claims to not have known that he was a Jew until he was six years old. So Henrik Goldschmidt was born in either 1878 or 1879. The reason we are not sure is because his father neglected to have his birth registered with officials for some reason.
Schwab: Sounds like his father might have neglected to tell him a couple pieces of information.
Yael: His father was an interesting person. Later on in life, Janusz Korczak will say that he was the son of a madman. His father definitely had struggles, but he was born to a relatively affluent, assimilated Jewish family. His grandfather had been a physician. His father was a lawyer, and he grew up in a very nice part of Warsaw. And I don’t think he was surrounded by too many Jews, and the Jews that he was surrounded by were like him, highly assimilated and highly affluent. When he was six years old, his pet canary died, and he wanted to pay his final respects to this canary, and he buried the canary and he wanted to put a cross on the canary’s grave. I guess he had seen other people been laid to rest, a grave has a cross on it. And his governess or some other nanny, was offended and started crying and saying you can’t put a cross on the grave of this canary because it’s just a canary. It’s not a human. It’s not, it’s disrespectful to put a cross on the grave of such a lowly animal.
Schwab: Yeah, the governess wasn’t saying like, you’re Jewish, how could you put a cross? Was like, look, the canary identified as an atheist its entire life.
Yael: Well, but what happens, you kind of jumped the gun there,
Schwab: You said he was from an affluent family. sounds like there’s a lot of staff. So, quite affluent.
Yael: There’s a lot of staff around for the beginning up until he’s 18. And the janitor’s son comes and says, you can’t put a cross on that canary’s grave because the canary is Jewish. And he’s like, what are you talking about? And he’s like, you’re Jewish. Your canary is Jewish. And that is the first time that Korczak remembers. Finding out or acknowledging that he was a Jew, it was not a part of his life up until that point in time.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. So being a Jew is so tied up in death and tragedy for him.
Yael: Correct. And ultimately that will follow him to the end of his life.
Schwab: And that, yeah, foreshadows the end of his story.
Yael: So he is a good student, very bright boy. He is educated by governesses and then later at a gymnasia. And his father passes when he is 18 years old. It’s unclear whether or not his father took his own life. He definitely struggled with mental illness. It’s not 100% clear what mental illness that was and whether or not it was caused by external factors, perhaps syphilis.
There are a few theories about that, but the family’s fortunes turned subsequently once his father passed. And, you know, they were forced to sell a lot of their belongings. They were forced to move to a much less affluent area. And the staff, certainly the number of staff diminished.
I do find it interesting that his pet was a canary because the first thing I thought of was the canary in the coal mine. And Janusz Korczak very much was a canary in the coal mine in terms of what would happen to many of the people who risked their lives to save other Jews. So I apologize. Where did I leap off? He went to medical school. His grandfather had also been a physician. But his entire life he had really been drawn to children.
And as a child, he was particularly drawn to the adults who treated him as an equal. It wasn’t that he was drawn to adults and felt that his company was beyond children. It was that he felt that children were worthwhile beings. He said, we need later on, he becomes a very, very well-known authority on both the medical and emotional treatment of children. And one of the main things he is known for is that we treat children like human beings, not human become-ings.
Schwab: Ooh, I love that.
Yael: I know, isn’t that really powerful? Isn’t that really great? Yes, I found his statement about treating children as human beings, not human become-ing, to be so evocative and beautiful.
Schwab: That’s so great. Did he write that in English or that’s excellent translating?
Yael: That is a translation. I don’t think he wrote anything in English. He was a prolific writer. He wrote several novels. He wrote several books about child rearing. And he also wrote one of Poland’s most famous children’s books, which is a book called King Matt the First, which I have read is as beloved to Polish children as Winnie the Pooh and other real stalwarts of children’s literature and is still in print in many languages. And according to our friend and education lead, Dr. Henry Abramson, King Matt the First is one of the first books known to us to be written from a child’s perspective. Because Korczak was solely focused on the well-being and the inner life of the child. And King Matt was a young child who becomes king upon his father’s passing and then struggles with the day-to-day business of running a kingdom.
Schwab: Hmm, interesting. So it’s like one of those children’s books, like Winnie the Pooh, like a children’s book that’s really successful because it, because in so many, like it is written very deliberately for children. Like there’s something that really resonates with its young readers.
Yael: Yes.
The copies of it that I’ve seen and the illustrations, and maybe I even read this somewhere, it gives me Where the Wild Things Are vibes. Like King Matt has this Max from Where the Wild Things Are aura about him where he, you know, he is the ruler of his domain.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yael: Anyway, Korczak, prolific, prolific writer. He writes his first novel before he is sent off to war in the Russo-Japanese War in the early 1900s. I should note at this point that during Korczak’s childhood, Poland has been divvied up among three large empires, where he’s living, he is under the Russian sphere of influence. And the Russians really did try to Russify, there’s no other way to say it.
The Poland of Korczak’s youth was… Basically the Russian Tsar at that time was commanding the Polish people and drafting the Polish people into the Russian army for the Russo-Japanese War. And Korczak is sent on what is known as a hospital train very, very far east between Harbin, China and Manchuria in the way, way east of Russia. It was a horrific experience for him, but one of the things that he did take away from it was the fact that children, you know, are the biggest victims of war.
Schwab: Hmm, hmm, wow, yeah, yeah. But like that is an idea that still is very much present today, the idea of like child victims of war, yeah.
Yael: Yes, that’s certain that, you know, people come into this world completely subject to their parents’ whims and to the whims of their governments and their leaders, and there’s nothing they can do about it. And one of the things that Korczak is known for is that it is an adult’s job to keep the world of a child sacred. It is an adult’s job to give the child autonomy, to let the child live a full life, but that children are fully formed beings and they’re not just there to be taken along for the ride, which I think is what he saw during the Russo-Japanese War.
He actually, you know, a young child in Harbin, China taught him, I believe, some dialect of Chinese to a certain extent. And he felt like adults can learn from children, children can learn from adults. There is a parity there. And it doesn’t have to be the top down relationship that we’ve always thought about. And that’s the pedagogy that Korczak is really known for throughout the developmental pediatric world.
He comes back from the war and he is extremely well known from the publication of his first novel. He doesn’t even realize how well known he is. So he comes back and all of a sudden he’s Janusz Korczak. Henrik Goldschmidt is no longer. He is a famous author, Janusz Korczak. He continues to publish. He continues to practice medicine, though he finds that in practicing medicine in the hospital space, he is not able to treat the whole child the way that he would like to holistically. Like he was very much a man ahead of his time.
And I know they say, you know, never meet your heroes. And, you know, you and I have talked about him many times in the past, and he always loomed large in my head. And in reality, and I don’t think a lot of Jews know this, he looms large in the world. He is compared to Mother Teresa. He is known as the King of the Children. Pope John Paul II called him out as a paragon of morality and organized religion.
Schwab: Wow. Pope John Paul II was Polish. Yeah.
Yael: And he is on Polish–was Polish. He’s on Polish postage stamps and statues. He’s extremely, extremely well known there. Interesting thing that I hope we have time to get into is that he’s known there very much as a patriotic Pole. He is not known there as a Pole who was led to his death and killed because he was a Jew.
Schwab: Right, the part of this story is not, and Holocaust victim, it’s all the great things he did, yeah.
Yael: So this takes us a little bit ahead, but one of the things I find fascinating about Korczak in general at this nexus of Polish and Jewish identity, which is only able to flourish because of the time period when post-World War I Poland becomes independent, Poles know and appreciate Janusz Korczak for the life that he lived. Jews know and appreciate Janusz Korczak for the death that he died.
Schwab: Yeah, do you feel like we as Jews, like, don’t do enough of thinking about the entire life before? Like, is this one of those things where like we only see him as a victim of the Holocaust and that and we don’t see all the things that came before that and the reverse, right?
Yael: I do think we know and appreciate Janusz Korczak as a rightful hero because and I don’t think I’ve said this yet so for those of you unfamiliar with him this is will be the first you will hear of what he is mainly known for the fact that he accompanied 200 orphans to their deaths in Treblinka despite the fact that he was offered safe passage out of the Warsaw Ghetto. That is what he is mainly known for in the Jewish world.
Schwab: Right, yeah, that’s the story I’ve heard of. He had a chance to leave, but he wouldn’t abandon his kids and he went with them to the gas chamber.
Yael: And the way in which he went with them is very much in line with his pedagogical theories and the way he lived his life. It’s just important to me, I think, we look at the lives that were lived before they were taken away.
Schwab: And especially if we’re under, like if we appropriately are going to admire him for that heroic act, putting it in the context of like, it wasn’t this one moment, that’s what his whole life had been about, right?
Yael: 100%. He sacrificed his life for children. And what is unique about him is that that would have been true even if he had never been taken to his death with those children. Exactly, exactly. And he was asked at one point, how many children do you have? And he said 200. His choice not to marry or have biological children was because he was saving himself, his energies for all of these other people in his life that needed him. We will obviously never know the truth of that, but he gave of himself so fully.
We skipped ahead a little bit, so I want to go back to what happened when he returned to Poland.
Schwab: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
He comes back from war.
Yael: He’s a rock star. People know who he is. He’s working as a physician, but he is also trying–is he like the Mr. Rogers of Poland? Is that the closest thing of just like here is a person who just like signifies what it means to care for children.
Yael: That is a great call. Obviously, it’s really hard to make the analogy because they did not have children’s programming in the way that Mr. Rogers appeared in that time, though he did have a radio show in the 1930s called The Old Doctor.
Schwab: Interesting. Mm-hmm.
Yael: He put on puppet shows for the children. He did plays with them. He let them draw on his bald head with crayons. He lived with them in the orphanage. That’s where we were about to get to is.
Schwab: So he’s Mr. Rogers. Wow. Yeah.
Yael: Um, he comes back, uh, 1905-ish from the war. By 1910, he has connected with philanthropists in Warsaw to build an orphanage from scratch. He designs this orphanage with wide open spaces. He knows that children need space and air. He takes the children to the country in the summer, very much like a fresh air fund equivalent.
Schwab: Yeah. And it’s a Jewish orphanage, non-Jewish orphanage, any, just a Polish orphanage.
Yael: So this first orphanage that he starts as a Jewish orphanage, he is eventually involved in the opening of non-Jewish orphanages as well. He travels the continent to visit other model orphanages to see what the state of the art is with respect to raising children in the best way possible. This actually really reminded me of an episode that you led a few seasons ago on Bertha Pappenheim, who was the mother of social work, I believe in Austria or Germany.
Schwab: Yes. In Austria, right? In Vienna, I think.
Yael: So very much around the same time of Bertha Pappenheim, of the settlement house movement in the United States, of Jacob Reiss.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Right. And she also had a lot of ideas of like orphanage is and making sure the orphans had a chance to go to the opera, right? Because like they needed to be enriched like through the arts. Yeah.
Yael: 100%. So Korczak took all of this a step further. The name of the orphanage was, it was called our home. It was not supposed to be a way station for them. And he really treated the children as fully formed autonomous figures. They had a children’s newspaper.
Schwab: Wow.
Yael: They had a court where every week, children would judge other children for infractions that you know they would write up these little summonses for infractions you bullied me you stole my food you did x y or z
Schwab: Mm-hmm. That’s great. They’re empowered to be real agents in their own community and have a stake in it. I love that.
Yael: Exactly, and a panel of their peers would then judge them. It’s really fascinating. I mentioned something before about not wanting to meet your heroes and being obsessed with this figure for a long time. And I think the research that I did here comes out on both sides of that argument.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yael: On the one hand, there is so much more to Korczak than I ever could have imagined. Like this man was involved in everything. He was a scientist. He was weighing the children every day, taking their heights every day to make sure that physically they were thriving in addition to emotionally thriving. He chose really complex and interesting pieces of dramatic work for them to perform. One of them was by a famous Indian playwright that they performed right before the deportations. He encouraged the older children in the orphanage to stay on as leaders to the younger children in the orphanage. He had a lot of theories, had a lot of ideas, he studied.
Schwab: Yeah. Is there a but coming? Is there like a, and like, here’s a more complicated, here’s the thing that, that colors our view.
Yael: He was also a dark and complicated person. He had a very, very dry wit. And I also took the time to read his memoir written in the ghetto in the months before he died. And I don’t think the darkness and the complexity of his writings can be solely attributed to the fact that it was written in the ghetto during a very dark time. We have earlier writings of his, many journals for many, many years and many recollections from people who knew him that he found life complicated from the beginning. First, his father’s mental health was a real challenge to the family.
Schwab: Hmm. Yeah. And it sounds like we don’t know. like we know that his father had some sort of challenges, but we don’t know exactly what they were.
Yael: We don’t know exactly what they were.
Schwab: I’m, I’m curious while we’re speculating wildly, I’m curious how much of that also factored into the fact that he had no biological children of his own. I imagine it’s hard if you have a very complicated father to be a father yourself is not a simple decision.
Yael: Certainly, 100%, both from an emotional perspective and also from a physical standpoint. He was not sure if there was a genetic component to what his father struggled with.
Schwab: right. But yeah, so difficult father, precocious child who like just sees the darkness and difficulty of the world. And then he devotes his life to saying like, do we help children? do, yeah.Yael: Just as an aside, to give you a sense of how dark and dry he was while presenting this Mr. Rogers facade to the world, there is a speculation that he may have thought that his father had syphilis, which is certainly possible, which untreated can cause numerous neurological deficits. And there are some who speculate that because of that, he may have associated bad things with the notion of sex and therefore never married or entered into a long-term romantic relationship.
Schwab: interesting. It sounds like he might have in his life benefited from talking to another Jew who was like, and it’s by the name of Sigmund Freud. Like he would have had a lot of stuff to work out on a therapist’s couch.
Yael: This is a handwritten note that I’m going to read from my notebook right now that says, if I were a Freudian, I’d wonder what this all stems from. So yes, a hundred percent.
Schwab: Was that, you were gonna make that joke? Hmm. Yeah.
Schwab: He also changes his name so that he’s not bearing the name he inherited from his father.
Yael: That’s true. 100%. I didn’t even think about that. And so they think that maybe that’s why he didn’t enter into a romantic relationship. Though, if you read some of his writing, he says that he doesn’t have time for girls because girls are silly. And all that happens from associating with girls is that they get pregnant, a nasty habit. He calls it a nasty habit, which is weird for someone who is so engaged in the lives of children that he would call getting pregnant a nasty habit, he also insinuates that he…
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Also, writing off an entire gender.
Yael: Yeah. He also insinuates that he did at one point get a girl pregnant. So it’s not it’s not clear that all of this is speculative. He had a woman who worked with him at the orphanage named Mrs. Steffa, who I want to talk about, Stefania Vilchinska. And I want to talk about her because she was just as critical a caretaker to the children as Korczak was. It is also insinuated that she may have been in love with him. I just want to give you a sense of how deep the drama goes here.
Schwab: But I also feel, I mean, just understanding who he is as a character, I imagine that he had a cult of personality around him and that anybody who interacted with him was very drawn to him.
Yael: Some people thought he was not the nicest guy. Not children, adults. He didn’t have the same kind of tolerance for adults that he had with kids.
Schwab: He was like better at relating to children than to adults. Yeah, right? Like we all know people who are like that.
Yael: People like that, yeah. Because I think that he really believed that adults really messed up the lives of children and that they were not deserving. They were not deserving of the same care and respect as children were deserving of. Yeah, so it’s interesting. Definitely a complicated, complicated fellow in more ways than one, but a tremendous hero in also more ways than one.
Schwab: Yeah. And what we haven’t spent that much time talking about, and this might be the next thing, is how important or present was his Jewish identity in all of this? he was not religious or observant, it sounds like in any.
Yael: No, it comes and goes in waves. He finds religion to have some kind of utility sometimes, but it’s not for him. And he gave…
Schwab: I’m sure, I don’t know, probably a lot of his educational philosophy has a lot to do with like the, right? Religion is, like rigid and constraining and often doesn’t make great spaces for children. So I, I’m imagining he was not the most like passionate advocate of religious practice.
Yael: It’s a great segue because he gave all the children who came into the orphanage the choice of whether or not to remain religious.
Well, that’s very, sounds like his style of empowering them and saying you can choose this.
Yael: Right. And those who wanted to stay religious were encouraged and were given the resources that they needed. Kosher food, observance of Shabbat was fostered within the home. But if they didn’t want it, he wasn’t going to impose it upon them.
Schwab: Right. He was respecting their agency and their choice and not imposing religious practice or imposing not religious practice.
Yael: So that was a key part of life in the orphanage, the children’s home, let’s call it, because that is the name that they really wanted to give it. It was a world for children. They made their own religious decisions. They made their own judicial decisions. They reported to each other on one another. They learned they existed in a space in which their whole selves were respected. There were orphans who later in their lives came back and said, you didn’t prepare us for the real world.
And that is something we are struggling with, those who aged into their teens went out and saw what was going on in the world and saw how real people interacted and came back and said, you failed us. That particularly came to a head with a lot of the young people who ended up associating with the Bolsheviks and came out of the orphanage not knowing a trade, not being able to make a living and then deciding that maybe capitalism wasn’t for them.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Mm But it sounds like they also grew up in a mutual aid communal type of living. it’s the orphanage to socialist activist pipeline. We’re all familiar with it.
Yael: Yes. Again, when we go back and talk about the other social movements that were being fomented at this time, these kids could have all been newsies. The newsies would have benefited from being taken care of by Janusz Korczak. They also put out their own newspaper. I know you’re familiar with newsies because I know that the Yeshiva University Dramatic Society put it on in your time. Real throwback.
Schwab: Wow, that’s a real, real throwback.
Yael: There’s so much here. Korczak continued to write. He wrote books on child rearing. He did not grow up in a Zionist home, he did travel to British Mandatory Palestine twice during the 1930s and was much more taken with it than he thought he would be and found that the kibbutz schools and those educational environments that were taking root in Palestine for the Jews were really great and jived really well with what he was trying to accomplish. But, you know, obviously, as he was someone killed in the Holocaust, the Israelis very much took ownership of him. And the Poles, who, as I mentioned, treat him like a saint, but don’t talk about the fact that he was killed for being a Jew.
Schwab: He’s a Polish national figure up until about 1939. And then it’s unclear what happened after that.
Yael: He was prone to wearing his Polish military uniform around the ghetto, which really, really, really annoyed the Nazis, because he fought in two and a half wars for the Poles, raised to be a proud patriotic Pole.
And, you know, it’s a complicated, his story takes a complicated turn because on the one hand, it’s a knee-jerk reaction for us to say at the end of the day, didn’t matter. The Poles didn’t care because he was a Jew. But honestly, that’s not 100% true in his case. He was offered the opportunity to leave the Warsaw Ghetto multiple times on the strength of his name and reputation.
Schwab: And that’s from Poles, right? It’s not because the Nazis weren’t.
Yael: By Poles. From Poles. Yeah. you know, it’s not, it is not across the board, you know, again, we often say you can, as a Jew, you can assimilate with the best of them. You can rise the ranks with the best of them. At the end of the day, to an antisemite, you’re always going to be a Jew. We have an exception in this case. And I wonder, you bring this back, I wonder that if he had never changed his name, if that would be the case, because he gave himself this quintessential Polish title.
Schwab: Interesting, yeah, if Henrik Goldschmidt would have ever been this Polish figure to the same degree. Yeah. And then does he getting to like that thing, like, does he write about, do we understand why didn’t he leave? We like the general story, I think we know, but like, does he say, why is it that he’s…
Yael: Yeah. So. He, it was an adult, an adult’s role to never abandon a child. So we have alluded to it many times and I apologize that this may, this podcast may have taken the tone of someone who already knows the end of the story. So I apologize if that has happened, but what ultimately does happen is the Jews of Warsaw are ghettoized. The orphanage is forced to move into the ghetto. There were underground classes. There were underground plays that children put on a play just days before they were deported.
Schwab: He didn’t just go with them. He continued the experience. To him, and even though I’m so curious, like what he was thinking, but like, he understands what was coming and was his perspective like, well, we need to continue, even if these children do not have lives ahead of them. This is what childhood looks like and this is what we need to do.
Yael: Exactly. It’s clear from his memoirs that he knows something bad is coming. He knows that deportation to the east, which is what they were being presented with, was not in fact deportation to the east, but was in fact a trip to Treblinka, which was a death camp where most people did not survive 24 hours. It wasn’t a work camp. It wasn’t a place where he could have hoped to survive for several months. That simply was not in the cards.
So after ending up in the ghetto, the orphanage did continue to function. He was doing his best to keep up the quality of life for those children for as long as humanly possible. Up until the very end where he, you know, they are told there is going to be this deportation. He is offered passage out. He declines it. He goes with Stefania and the 200 orphans dressed up, dressed nicely.
She had actually gone to university in Belgium, which was extremely, extremely rare for women in those days. And they walked with the children, neatly dressed, in two lines, from the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz, which was the railroad junction in Warsaw where people were taken away by cattle car.
Schwab: Thank you. That’s for our listeners, translating what the Umschlagplatz is, unfortunately, that is a word I know. I know what a Umschlagplatz is. I have been to the Warsaw Umschlagplatz.
Yael: You didn’t need it? Sadly. Same, I have as well. It is sad how much of this is so deep in my bones and how much of it I’ve known for so long. One of the things that I think about instinctively and this is so disconcerting, is Miss Clavel from Madeline walking with her 12 little girls in two straight lines.
Schwab: Mm hmm. That’s what I was saying with the two straight lines, right? And they’re always in perfect order. And yeah.
Yael: Yeah, and the smallest one was Madeline. And that is something that gives me so much joy, those Madeline stories, and are so pure and beautiful. And I take that and I juxtapose it with the sadness of these children marching to their deaths, but the way in which Korczak enabled them to have their dignity and their last moments of purity and hope.
We do have firsthand accounts of people in the ghetto watching this happen. There is so much art of him out there.
Schwab: Yeah, the visual image that I have, I don’t remember if it’s in Poland or at Yad Vashem, but a very evocative sculpture that I don’t remember what it looked like, but some way of showing that he was sort of just like protecting children, like either his arms are over them, something like that.
Yael: Yes, there is a sculpture in Yad Vashem. There is a sculpture in Warsaw. There are sculptures in other places around the world of many of just a larger figure huddled around these small children, protecting them, protecting them from the world and protecting them, protecting them from their fate in some way. You know, what? What would have been gained by them knowing what was coming?
Schwab: Which is interesting because that does seem, I don’t know, like it a little bit goes against what his philosophy, although he said some of the graduates of the orphanage felt not prepared, but it sounds like treating them like adults, making them part of the lives they’re in, but I don’t know, within limits. Then there are some things that they’re not told or not, you know.
Yael: Right. Right. don’t and I don’t know exactly what was communicated to them And I don’t know how much information that we’re getting from other people in the ghetto. Children were really, really critical to the functioning of life in the ghetto outside the confines of the orphanage. Children were the ones who were able to sneak through the walls of the ghetto and bring food in and bring supplies in. It is said that without the smuggling of the children, the people in the ghetto would not have lasted nearly as long as they did. So it is fitting that this figure, amazing figure in the world of children’s rights and children’s appreciation was centered in the Warsaw Ghetto, place that only was able to exist as long as it didIt’s a really hard story because on the one hand, it has heroics and it has the feel good aspect of someone who appreciated children for who they truly are. And it obviously has a tragic ending.
I did promise myself that I was going to take a few minutes to talk about Stefania because when you read and or hear from some of the orphans, Korczak was very much like a father to the children and like a father, maybe a pre-millennial father. He went to work and then he came home and he was with them after he came home. But Madame Steffa was with them all the time, 24 hours a day tending to their needs and maybe less acclaimed than Dr. Korczak, who one can say was deserving of that acclaim because of his scientific and educational accomplishments in addition to what he did at the end of his life, but she also went with the children.But she shouldn’t be written out of the story. She was there too. And it’s a and she went with them also, like was also part of the tragic ending.
So, yeah. An outstanding, astonishing person who gave of herself as much to those children and who also went to her death with those children. So I did want to acknowledge her as well.
As you know, there are so many unsung heroes throughout Jewish history and all of history who have taken it upon themselves to shield children from physical and emotional danger.
In a prior season we spoke about Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Aish Kodesh, who was a rabbi who gathered his congregation together in the Warsaw Ghetto, also went with his followers to their deaths despite being offered a path out. Very similar story.
Schwab: Hmm, I had forgotten that that was an element of his story too, yeah.
Yael: And we talked about the emotional resistance involved in his continuing to speak each week and draft these sermons that entwined what was going on in the ghetto with the weekly Torah portion and how his his sermons work were preserved by Emmanuel Ringelblum who created the Oneg Shabbos archive, which was meant to document life in the ghetto and that we are very lucky, two thirds of which seems to have survived.
Schwab: You can go back and listen to that episode. It’s a really great episode from all the way back in season one.
Yael: And there are very similar elements in this story. There is the spiritual, emotional, educational resistance of continuing to live and continuing to raise children so that they can become adults. And unfortunately, Korczak’s 200 orphans never got there, but he made sure that their lives, as short as they were, were as fulfilled as possible. And that is an important piece of resistance.
Korczak and his children were killed at Treblinka. At Treblinka, there are stones organized today as a monument, and most of the stones have the names of countries, places where the Jews were from who were killed there. There is only one stone at the Treblinka Memorial that has a name on it, and that one stone says Janusz Korczak and the children. Underneath Janusz Korczak, it says in parentheses, Henrik Goldschmidt.
I find this memorial fascinating in so many ways. One of which is the fact that Janusz Korczak would have centered the children over himself. it was a part of who he was, but the person that brought the children to Treblinka with him was Janusz Korczak, was the esteemed pediatrician, social scientist, educator who got to where he was as this Polish member of high Polish society. The Jew, Henrik Goldschmidt, may have also been a self-sacrificing, may have also given of himself to save Jewish children, but not from on high the way that the Pole was.
Schwab: I was going to ask, having done all of this, do you think we should be, should we be saying, for this podcast or as Jews, we should be referring to him as Henrik Goldschmidt, you know, like we should be, but it sounds like, like it’s a really important part of who he is, is the fact that he was this figure in addition to a person.
Yael: And it was a choice. It was, yes. And that’s, I want to go back to what I said earlier about how the Poles celebrate him for how he lived and the Jews celebrate him for how he died. I think the fact that we do remember him as Janusz Korczak gives us the opportunity to also celebrate him as he lived and what he accomplished and the fact that he would have been a hero to children around the world, regardless of how he came to his end.
Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
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This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: And by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rivky Stern. Thanks for listening. See you next week.