Monument in Warsaw to Janusz Korczak’s “Last Walk” as he accompanied his orphans to the Treblinka trains.
Janusz Korczak is a remarkable figure that is surprisingly almost unknown in the United States despite being quite famous in Europe. A children’s author and pedagogue, his books, particularly King Matt the First about a child who becomes a king and rules like a child was as well known among Poles and Germans as Peter Pan was among British children. (while a lot of classic works of children’s literature don’t hold up anymore, this charming work still does, and is highly recommended).
Raised in a formal, upper-class home, he came to envy the street children who were able to play outside, and the rest of his life was spent trying to free children from the unreasonable strictures of adults and to grant them some measure of respect and dignity as individuals. But it was not his writing or child-raising theories that granted him immortality. He was the headmaster of an orphanage of Jewish children during the time that the Jews were being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, an open-aired, barbed-wire prison. As the Nazis squeezed them tighter and tighter the streets became cluttered with the bodies of frozen and starved refugees and children. While dead adults are obviously tragic, there is.a particular twisted horror and injustice that accompanies the corpses of innocent children (or as Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov, “[adults] ate the apple, they can go to Hell, but these little ones!”).
I became teary eyed a number of times while I read about his efforts to retain some of the beauty and charm of childhood in the worst circumstances possible, kind of a real life, less saccharine version of Life is Beautiful. He tried to work with the Jewish Council to set up a sort of hospice care where the expiring children on the street could die in dignity while being comforted by somebody, but it never happened; the needs of the living took precedence, and he exhausted himself begging for scraps so that the almost 200 orphans under his care would have something to eat.
Because of his fame Korczak was granted opportunities to leave or escape but insisted on staying with his children and accompanying them to the very end. While some argue that an appeal to an afterlife is inappropriate in such cases, as if relying on it somehow downplays the seriousness of things like genocide, Korczak himself relied on the afterlife both for himself and his orphans’ emotional well-being.
When one of his friends asked him how he was doing shortly before his final deportation, when virtually everybody was starving and barely hanging onto life, he responded “like a butterfly, that will soon fly to a better world.” In one of his last diary entries he wrote “it is a difficult thing to be born and learn to live: Ahead of me is a much more easy task, to die. After death it may be difficult again, but I’m not bothering about that.”
Near the end when it became clearer what fate had in store for them he had the orphanage put on a play for the ghetto inhabitants. Keep in mind that at the time some of the orphans did not have any memory of a flower or tree.
His children were to act in The Post Office by Rabindrath Tagore, a renowned Indian poet and educator. The play is about Amal, a dying boy confined to his bed in the dark room. Amal longs to wander amid trees and flowers, to hear birds singing and brooks burbling. He believes the village headman when he pretends to read a letter from the King, who promises to visit him soon. Astonishingly the royal physician arrives. Irate at Amal’s isolation, he orders the windows the room thrown open. Amal, his pain gone, falls into a deep sleep. Amals’ fiend, Sudha, the flower girl, asks when he will awaken. “Directly the King comes and calls him,” the physician says as the curtain falls. On July 18 the audience watched The Post Office with rapt attention. The children saw themselves in little Amal, for they too, were in a dark room–the ghetto-longing for freedom and beauty. Sobs filled the room. The Old Doctor sat in a corner in the rear, listening, his eyes “bottomless wells of sadness,” a woman who saw him recalled. Afterward, the guest asked why he’s chosen such a sad play.” Korczak replied that he wanted his children to learn how to welcome the Angel of Death calmly,” just as little Amal welcomes the angel that took him in his sleep.
During his famous last walk, when the children were being rounded up and sent on trains to Treblinka, he had them wear their best clothes and take one of their favorite toys, storybook, or diary. The children carried a flag of King Matt the First with a Star of David on the other side before them; eyewitness accounts had him carrying two children in his arms with another one holding onto his pocket, and a train of children behind. According to the firsthand account/autobiography The Pianist:
He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood. The little column was led by an SS man.
The famous “last walk” has been reenacted a number of times in memoriam, and that is where the documentary history ends, but I would like to believe that, as he accompanied his children into the gas chambers and as the carbon monoxide came pouring in (Treblinka did not use Zyklon B) and it became clear what was happening, that he continued to console his children as much as he could for the ten or so awful minutes before they breathed their last and, in the spirit of Korczak’s own attitude about this, they woke up on the other side with “trees and flowers…birds singing and brooks burbling.”
I haven’t previously heard of Janusz Korczak — but I am glad that I have now.