A doctor who was slaughtered with his 200 children

Index Home

Each postage stamp is a window, not only to its glorious but also to its gory past. I came across one such 1978 postage stamp from Germany, on 100 years of Janusz Korczak, a doctor from Warsaw, Poland. Janusz was born in 1878 as Henryk Goldszmit. Twenty years later, he chose Janusz Korczak as his pen-name for a literary contest.

A writer, who had penned books for children, became a child-specialist when he completed his medical studies in 1904. World knew his literary skills, when he published his novel “Child of the drawing room” in 1905. This partly biographical book is about a lost childhood. No wonder that his 1919 book How to Love a Child was about child rights, and how to realise ones dreams.

Janusz Krozack set up an orphanage

In 1911-12 Janusz became director of an orphans home in Warsaw. He was back after a short stint as a military doctor during the first world war. This was his ‘republic’ where more than 100 children had their own parliament, court and even a newspaper. He also started a radio broadcast under the name “the old doctor”. He was a communicator and an educator for many.

Second world war and holocaust

Janusz Korczak was a Jew, and in 1939 Germany invaded Poland. All jews in Warsaw were confined to a ghetto. The walls that seperated the ghetto and the city, were also paid for by the Jews. The life in the ghetto was a struggle, marred with shortages of food and medicines. While Janusz was offered an exception from the ghetto, he refused. He chose to live on with about 200 children in his orphanage. Three years later in 1942, Nazi Germany started working on its final plan, of exterminating all Jews in the ghettos. On 5th August the same year, German police reached the orphanage and ordered it to be emptied.

Next day Janusz and his colleagues prepared all the children for the last march. All the children dressed in their best clothes, and marched out of the orphanage. Janusz was leading, with youngest one in his lap. The march, went through the narrow lanes of the city. Janusz, his collegues and 200 children were made to walk for about 4 hours, to the railhead (Umschlagplatz). All were silent and well composed. They knew that they are walking into their death.

Treblinka death camp

Treblinka was a secret extermination camp, built sixty miles north of Warsaw, deep inside the woods. This was the final destination of many Jews from Poland and neighbouring areas. Janusz and his 200 children, were all bundled up in railway wagons and on 7th August 1942, offloaded in Treblinka. When a Nazi soldier at Treblinka offered to spare Korczak from extermination, he refused and remained with his children until the end. On the same day, all of them were led to the Gas chambers, never to be seen again.

Władysław Szlengel was a poet, and an inmate of the Warsaw ghetto. Witness to the last march of orphans, he wrote:

‘Today I saw Janusz Korczak,
As he walked with the children in the last procession.
And the children were in really clean clothes,
As if they were going in a walk in the gardens on Sunday …
Someone dashed up with a paper in his hand,
“You can go back … there’s a card from Brandt.”
Korczak shook his head silently,
How could he get into those unfeeling heads
What it means to leave a child alone?’

Szlengel and his wife also died in Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, killed by the German police after an uprising.