Janusz Korczak (actually Henryk Goldszmit) is remembered as an exemplary caretaker of Jewish children in war-torn Poland. 

Henryk Goldszmit became famous in the early 1900s for writing storybooks for children as well as childcare books for parents as a paediatrician. He was in the avant-garde when it comes to promoters of non-violent education in times when hitting misbehaving children was commonplace and generally accepted. 

Goldszmit became known across Poland as Janusz Korczak with the growth of his reputation. 

From the early 1910s, Korczak was in charge of an orphanage in Warsaw, to which he applied his educational philosophy. As the Holocaust Encyclopedia writes, every child in the home had duties and rights, and everyone was responsible for their actions. 

Korczak was also the editor of several newspapers, mostly with a Zionist worldview. He also had radio broadcasts in which he was referred to as the “The Old Doctor.” 

He spent the first years of WWII in the Warsaw ghetto established by the German occupiers. Although he repeatedly had the chance to save his life from deportation to a Nazi German camp during WWII, he decided to stay with the children of his orphanage. 

He was deported to the Nazi German camp of Treblinka extermination camp, where he died. 

Image: Public domain

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen