Janusz Korczak is a name I wish everyone could know. A Polish Jewish author, pedagogue, and orphanage director, he refused offers for his own safety during the Second World War and was deported, along with all of the children of the orphanage, to the Nazi death camp Treblinka where he and they were killed in 1942.
Over the years, I have come upon monuments commemorating Korczak and the children at Treblinka, in Warsaw, and at Yad Vashem in Israel.
Janusz Korczak left behind a vast collection of writings and today I picked up How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works.
To my surprise, the first page to which I randomly flipped says:
I am calling for a Magna Carta for the rights of a child. There may be more. I have dug out three basics:
1. A child’s right to die.
2. A child’s right to the present day.
3. A child’s right to be what a child is.
What did Korczak mean? He explains:
There is a notion going around that the higher the child mortality among the proletariat, the stronger the generation that survives and grows up. But no: The poor conditions that kill the weak weaken the healthy and the strong. Whereas it strikes me as true that the more a mother from affluent circles is terrified by the thought of her child’s possible death, the less the child will encounter conditions for becoming an at least adequately developed person physically and a passably autonomous one spiritually. Whenever I see, in a room whitewashed with oil paint, among furnishings varnished white, in a white dress, with white toys, a white child, I get a bad feeling: this room, not a child’s, but an operating room, is where a bloodless soul must grow up in an anemic body.
In the fear of having one’s child snatched away by death, we snatch the child away from life; not wanting him to die, we do not allow him to live. Ourselves raised in the corrupting, helpless anticipation of what will be, we are constantly rushing into a magic-filled future. Lazy, we do not want to see beauty in the present day, in order to prepare ourselves to receive tomorrow morning with dignity: tomorrow has to bring inspiration on its own.
The above text was published in a pedagogical book more than 20 years before his death. Yet, if we wonder about how it is that Korczak could choose to forego his own safety to suffer a tragic death with the children in his care, I think these words of his give insight.
The children’s vulnerability – the fact that they could (and eventually did) die – did not prevent Janusz Korczak from doing what was within his power and did not hamper his love toward them. That is how he managed to live each present day with such integrity, until the end.