Kaytek the Wizard

by Janusz Korczak

  “How much life there is on Earth that no one knows about!”

  But Kaytek is wrong. People do explore the bottom of the ocean and its secrets, and they write countless books about it. As a heroic explorer, man reaches every corner of the globe through his thoughts, words, and deeds. He encompasses the stars, the past, and the future.

  I want to see the North Pole, says Kaytek.

  No sooner has he spoken than a magic carpet carries him away.

  He passes forests and fields – then he sees nothing but stunted bushes and moss. He sees reindeer, strange birds called penguins,* polar bears, whales, and seals.

  Finally he can see nothing but snow and icebergs and Eskimo settlements. What strange people! They love their homeland and its lifeless white plains.

  Kaytek blinks because the brightness is so dazzling – there is pure white silence, a sharp wind, and a sun that doesn’t warm. The wind is cruel, and there are deep crevasses, abysses made of ice.

  Silence.

  Hush!

  Here is someone’s sled, a broken sled.

  Inured to the climate, Kaytek walks across the snowdrifts. Tiny needles of cold air sting him like mosquitoes.

  He looks around him, scanning the white plain.

  Silence.

  Hush!

  He sees a sign left by man: a solitary mound of stones. Between two of the stones there’s a faded flag fluttering. This is the grave of a fearless man.

  Kaytek stops and bares his head.

  Hush!

  He hears a voice, quietly saying:

  “Be alert! Be disciplined! Be brave.”

  Kaytek replies in a whisper.

  He raises his hand and says:

  “I promise.”

  * * *

  *Penguins are actually only native to the Southern Hemisphere.

  Translator’s Afterword

  Translator’s Afterword

  “Who would you like to be when you grow up?” Janusz Kor­czak asked a class of boys. “A wizard,” one of them replied. The others started laughing, and the boy felt embarrassed, so then he said: “I’m sure I’ll be a judge like my father, but you asked who we’d like to be.” That was in 1929, and four years later Kaytek the Wizard was published, the story of a wayward boy who develops extraordinary magical powers.

  Janusz Korczak is a household name in Poland, but this remarkable man really deserves to be far better known to the wider world, as a writer and as a pioneer of children’s rights.

  Who was Janusz Korczak?

  Janusz Korczak was the pen name of Dr. Henryk Goldszmit (1878–1942), a pediatrician and child psychologist who famously ran a central Warsaw orphanage for Jewish children, using his own innovative principles. He not only wrote books for children, but also about children, in particular how they should be treated by adults.

  As an educator, he was one of the first defenders of children’s rights. In the words of Marek Michalak, Poland’s official Ombudsman for Children since 2008, Korczak “very clearly stressed that children are not just the object of care and concern on the part of adults, but that they have their own subjective existence because – as he justified it in a simple way – ‘there aren’t any children, there are just people.’ ” Describing him as her hero, writer and academic Eva Hoffman says Korczak’s “educational beliefs were informed less by theory than by large-minded humanism. He believed in the full dignity of children . . . and their need for love and respect.”

  On gaining his medical diploma in 1905, Korczak worked at the Berson and Bauman Children’s Hospital in Warsaw, an institution that provided free health care for Jewish children. After serving as an army doctor in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, in 1909 he became head of the city-center orphanage established by the Help the Orphans Society. As Eva Hoffman puts it, “he ran it like a microcosmic democracy.” The children not only helped with domestic chores on work shifts for which they were paid, but had their own parliament and court. If anyone broke the internal legal code – including Korczak and the few other staff members too – their case was “tried” and a suitable penalty applied, though forgiveness, fairness, and leniency were the defining features of this justice. The orphanage also had its own newspaper. So the orphans learned not just practical skills for life and how to be responsible citizens, but ethical values, such as love, sympathy, respect, and how to act for the common good.

  Korczak managed to exercise these principles in difficult circumstances within the atmosphere of prejudice against Jews that prevailed in inter-war Poland. Society was divided, with Jews at best treated as second-class citizens, and at worst abused, making it doubly hard for the orphans to find their way in life. Raising money for the orphans and for deprived children to go on summer holidays in the countryside required a constant effort to which Korczak was entirely devoted throughout his life.

  Perhaps the most enduring fact about Korczak is that when the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939 and forced all the Jews to live in ghettos, he never abandoned the two hundred children in his care. The diary he wrote in the final months of his life, when the orphanage had been moved into the Warsaw ghetto, is poignant proof of his total dedication to them. Despite extreme conditions in the overcrowded ghetto, where starvation and typhoid were a constant threat and people were dying in the streets, Korczak refused to yield to the Nazi determination to deprive the Jews of their humanity, and continued to organize every possible sort of intellectual and spiritual provision for the children, such as concerts, plays, talks, and discussions of philosophy.

  An eye-witness account by the pianist Władysław Szpilman describes the tragic final procession of Korczak and the orphans across the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz, from where the transports left for the death camps: “He told the orphans they should be happy, because they were going to the countryside…. When I ran into them on Ge˛sia Street they were walking along, singing in chorus, beaming . . . and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest, also smiling, in his arms, and telling them something amusing.” “He was true to his convictions to the very end of his life,” says Michalak, “when along with the children in his care, he died in the gas chamber at Treblinka concentration camp.” It happened in early August 1942.

  Korczak the writer

  Korczak left behind a large written legacy including books on education – the most famous of which is How to Love a Child (1918) – stories, plays, essays, letters, and of course novels and stories for children. The best known is King Matt the First (1922), the story of an orphaned prince who inherits his father’s throne at a very young age. Despite the efforts of his ministers and other adults to prevent him from being more than just a figurehead or to save his country from war, King Matt boldly runs away to fight at the front and wins the love and admiration of his people. But when he tries to reform the country according to principles of fairness and generosity, letting the children run everything while the adults go back to school, his utopian experiments end in disaster. At the end of the story he loses a second war, and is forced into exile on a desert island. In a series of exciting episodes that make entertaining reading, Matt goes through recognizable stages of development, rebelling against the adults to gain his independence, learning how to be an adult himself, and forging an identity through relationships with others and some difficult experiences.

  King Matt the First ends sadly, and so does its sequel, King Matt on the Desert Island. Korczak’s children’s books do not hide the realities of life from their readers, but often confront them with the sort of problems that life presents, including unfair treatment from adults, the hardships of poverty, and the demands of working for a living. Kaytek the Wizard is a fine example of how Korczak’s novels for children were not only designed to entertain, but also to educate.

  The sources of inspiration for Kaytek the Wizard

  Kaytek the Wizard aimed to be the answer to every child’s dre
am of freeing him or herself from the endless control of adults, and then shaping the world to his or her own designs. From the very start Korczak based the book on suggestions made by children with lively imaginations about how they would behave if they had magical powers. For instance, he had come across educational methods at a school for “morally neglected” delinquent boys, where the students were asked what they would do if they were invisible. “If I was invisible I’d play tricks on policemen,” said one boy, “I’d take his gun and kick him.” “I’d go to the movies for free,” said another. But a different boy said: “If I was invisible I’d help everyone . . . I wouldn’t play tricks or make people sad.”

  Their replies are recognizable in the behavior of Kaytek, who sometimes uses his magic powers to do people favors, and sometimes to cause willful mischief. Like them, Kaytek is a troubled boy, a little rascal who can’t conform and please the grown-ups, however hard he tries. As the psychologist characterizes him in Chapter Eleven, “he is not evil, but he loses his temper very easily. When he does something bad, he’s sorry, but he refuses to take the blame . . . everything quickly bores him . . . . He’s impatient, he lacks discipline, and he’s a prankster – those are his shortcomings. He has a good heart – that is his virtue.”

  Kaytek probably owes some of his character to one of Kor­czak’s favorite children, a boy called Adas´ Piekołek. At the orphanage, Adas´ came to symbolize the type of troubled child who was highly intelligent but naughty and wayward. Like Adas´, Kaytek is restless and bored, but also full of natural curiosity, fascinated by mysterious and unusual discoveries. Like Adas´, Kaytek is from an impoverished background. Kaytek’s father has problems finding work, and the boy knows what it is like to go without. Thus Kaytek is a hero with whom Korczak’s original readers could identify.

  “Every child should be able to find a book that is close to his heart,” said Korczak. But he also believed that literature should give guidance. Just as King Matt finds out that being king involves huge responsibility and that his decisions can backfire on him, so Kaytek discovers that his powers have limits and that misusing his magic spells can do harm and cause sorrow. He also learns that good intentions can be misunderstood: when he tries to make the world a better place, his efforts are met with suspicion and then physical attack. “Korczak wants to give children rights, to put them in charge of themselves and the world,” writes literary scholar Hanna Kirchner, “but at the same time he implies that first there must be a tough lesson in self-discipline.”

  Besides including ideas from the children’s own imaginations, Kaytek the Wizard also features many allusions to their favorite adventure and fantasy stories, as well as to popular culture of the day including movies, comics, and the tabloid press. Kaytek’s parents read him Ali Baba and Little Red Riding Hood, and he also refers to traditional Polish legends about Madey the robber chief and Boruta the devil, for instance. There are plenty of familiar images from fairy tales, such as the Cap of Invisibility and the seven-league boots. There are also scenes and characters that parody the contemporary world, for example the session of the League of Nations, the scenes on the ocean liner, and characters such as the spiritualist, and the astronomer who talks about aliens.

  Some phrases in the book sound extremely politically incorrect to the modern ear, but would not have been considered unusual when the book was written, such as pejorative references to black people as cannibals or apes, and to Jews as inferiors. Wishing to remain faithful to Korczak’s original text, the publishers have chosen to leave these phrases as they were written.

  One of the biggest targets for Korczak’s satire in this book is Hollywood. Korczak often took the children in his care to the cinema, and on the way home they had lively but serious discussions about the cowboy and other adventure movies they had seen. He wrote about the value of well-chosen movies as a source of knowledge and experience for children. There is evidence to imply that he hoped Kaytek the Wizard would be made into a movie. However, he was not a fan of the then new Disney movies, and criticized the studio for showing children terrifying images. Kaytek’s experiences of Hollywood, where he is treated like a prisoner, illustrate Korczak’s generally critical view of Hollywood as a place that exploited its talented child stars.

  How Kaytek was written

  The story took several years to form in Korczak’s imagination, and clearly underwent change while it was being written. As becomes obvious in Chapter Eighteen when the author addresses the readers directly, Korczak consulted the orphanage children throughout the creative process. The memoirs of a colleague named Czesław Hakke confirm this: “For many evenings . . . the Dear Doctor invited the children after supper to read the next chapter of his book. I was a witness to some of these meetings between the author and his future readers. After reading an extract, they started to discuss if it was all right, or if something needed to be changed. Generally the children accepted Korczak’s exploits, but there were also critical voices, and conclusions that some events should be ‘corrected.’ Sometimes Korczak justified a particular situation, saying it had to be like this and not different, and sometimes he agreed and made a relevant note.”

  The book was originally published in episodes in a children’s newspaper. The fact that the chapters most obviously written in consultation with the orphanage children are incomplete implies that the text may already have been at proof stage when it was discussed with them, so there was no opportunity for major rewriting. However, when the entire story was published as a book it retained the original text, so perhaps Korczak wanted the children’s contribution to be evident. Unfortunately no information has survived to tell us about Kaytek’s adventures in the original draft which the children found so terrifying that they asked Korczak to remove them. We shall also never know if the story ever had an ending.

  Kaytek the Wizard in English

  Although this is the first translation of Kaytek the Wizard into English, a number of Korczak’s books have appeared in English and other languages. Kaytek has previously been published in German, Spanish, Hebrew, and most recently French.

  In the Polish original, Kaytek’s name is “Kajtus´,” the diminutive of the name Kajetan, which is the Polish equivalent of the Roman name Caietanus, which still exists in Italian as Gaetano. As this name only exists in English as the very esoteric Cajetan, it was hard to select a suitable name for him in this translation that English-language readers could recognize. After experimenting with various options based on alliteration and other Polish saints’ names, I followed the French translators’ example and chose another diminutive of Kajetan, “Kajtek,” with the spelling changed to the more manageable “Kaytek.” In fact the hero is called Antek (short for Antoni), but is nicknamed “Kajtus´” by a passing soldier in Chapter II. The soldier calls the child “Kajtus´” because in the era when the book was written, the name was used as a general form of address for any little boy, but regrettably, I could find no better way to convey this nuance in translation.

  The language of Korczak’s writing is very rich, ranging from lively, realistic dialogue to poetic, dream-like descriptions. Kaytek’s speech would have sounded perfectly natural to his original readers, including slang phrases that were current in the early 1930s. I have aimed to make the translation accessible to modern readers but without introducing anachronisms. I have also kept all the Polish features of the story, including the Warsaw settings, cultural, and historical references. This has meant adding some footnotes which may look a little academic, but which I hope the readers will find helpful.

  I would like to thank Joanna Olczak-Ronikier for letting me read her biography of Janusz Korczak in manuscript, and to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to the French translators Malinka Zanger and Yvette Métral, whose translation, Kaytek le Magicién, was very helpful to me.

  – Antonia Lloyd-Jones, London, April 2011

  References

  Eva Hoffman, My Hero: Janusz Korcza
k, “The Guardian,” London, 9 April 2011.

  Hanna Kirchner (ed), Janusz Korczak – pisarz, wychowawca, mys´liciel (“Janusz Korczak – writer, educator and thinker”), Instytut Badan´ Literackich PAN, Warsaw, 1997.

  Janusz Korczak, Dzieła (“Collected Works”), Vol. XII, Oficyna Wydawnicza Latona, Warsaw 1998, introduction entitled Geneza utworu (“The Genesis of the Work”) by Józefa Bartnicka.

  Janusz Korczak, King Matt the First, translated by Richard Lourie, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1986.

  Ivan Michałak, 2012 Rokiem Korczaka? (“Will 2012 be Korczak Year?”), Polish Book Institute website, 10 February 2011.

  Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Korczak: Próba biografii (“Korczak, An Attempt at a Biography”), Wydawnictwo W.A.B., Warsaw, May 2011.

  About the Author

  Janusz Korczak (1878-1942) was a pediatrician and child psychologist who famously ran a Warsaw orphanage on innovative educational principles. Korczak left behind an extensive written legacy. His works include books on education, plays, and essays, in addition to his classic King Matt the First and other novels for children. The Polish Parliament declared 2012 as The Year of Janusz Korczak, marking the 70th anniversary of his death in the Holocaust and the 100th anniversary of the founding of his orphanage for Polish Jewish children.