During my initial research, I also travelled to Warsaw to visit the Warsaw Korczak museum in Poland, the Korczakianum Centre for Documentation and Research, which is housed in a room of Korczak’s original orphanage on Krochmalna Street, now Jaktorowska Street, where I was given a tour and talk by Agnieska Witkowska-Krych. I visited the new POLIN Museum of Jewish life in Poland, and read accounts of pre-war Jewish Warsaw by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Ewa Bratosiewicz, a guide to Jewish Warsaw, supplied answers to various queries through Roman. Roman was also in contact with Barbara Engelking, and I referred to her book, The Warsaw Ghetto, written in conjunction with Jacek Leociak, extensively to recreate the details of the ghetto.
Warsaw was all but razed to the ground in the war. The medieval centre is an almost perfect reconstruction that is in fact no more than 50 years old. The ghetto and many of the Jewish areas are now gone, covered by Soviet-era housing estates and modern office buildings. It is possible, however, to find parts of the wall and original buildings, and to reconstruct the area mentally by walking through from historical locations on a map. The Nozyk Synagogue and Grzybowski Square are still there, along with a few original buildings from the ghetto years.
My next big question after completing the first stages of research was, how do you write a book about the Holocaust?
I began by producing a manuscript so plainly factual that it was difficult to read, and so, following the advice of my agent Jenny Hewson and editors at Corvus, Sara O’Keefe and Susannah Hamilton, I re-wrote the book as a newly imagined novel, fully evoking the scenes and giving myself the same allowances as a filmmaker recreating a historical story. I was very grateful for all their advice and their willingness to stay with the project and put so much work into this book.
I decided to keep to the documented facts about Korczak and the war years and fill in the missing background details such as food and transport from research. I also used details from film reconstructions such as those in The Pianist, where Polanski went to great pains to provide accurate historical details based on his own memories of the Krakow ghetto. I watched Andrzej Wajda’s 1990 film about Korczak for its wonderful poetic evocation. The Nazis were also avid film documenters of the Warsaw ghetto and this material is available online.
Janusz Korczak was a pen-name, acquired when he became a famous writer in Poland. Born Henry Goldszmit, in 1879, he was the son of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and his wife, who mixed freely with both Polish and Jewish friends in fin de siècle Warsaw. Korczak did not realise he was Jewish until his canary died when he was five, and, burying it in the courtyard, was told by a Polish boy that he couldn’t put a cross on the grave because it was a Jewish bird. Poland in those days was divided between three superpowers; Germany, Russia and the Habsburg Empire. Korczak’s first taste of school was at a Russian establishment where the beating reduced him to nervous terror and this memory led to his lifelong quest to give the child a voice and foster a better understanding between children and their carers. Korczak’s beloved and brilliant father died in the Tworki Lunatic Asylum when Korczak was just 17, and Korczak’s impoverished mother and sister relied on his income as a tutor, while hoping he would soon graduate as a doctor. Korczak later became a sought after paediatrician, also famous for his novels charting the lives of the street children he worked with in his spare time – when not dodging the Tsar’s police for his involvement in the seditious ‘Flying University’, whose groundbreaking lectures on observational psychology had Korczak enthralled. Eventually, he decided to follow his heart and leave medicine to work full time with children at a neglected orphanage which was being run by a remarkable young woman called Stefa Wilczynska. He and Stefa formed a life long partnership dedicated to children. After WW1, Korczak also opened a home for Polish orphans in Warsaw with Maryna Falska as housemother.
Poland gained independence after WW1. The following decade was a golden time for Korczak’s expansion of the kingdom of the child. He wrote and lectured expansively, on and for children, made child-centred broadcasts, founded a children’s newspaper and served as a court advocate for teenage delinquents. But with the advent of the economic depression in the 1930s, a fascist spirit spread through Europe, and as a Jew in an increasingly nationalistic Poland, Korczak’s work was curtailed.
Korczak was an early pioneer of child welfare and psychology. As a young man at the beginning of the twentieth century, Korczak had looked around and begun to ask why so many children were unhappy. There were vast numbers of slum children in Warsaw, neglected and unloved. Even the children of the rich seemed frustrated and resentful in spite of their material plenty. It was as if adults had forgotten what it was like to be a child. Adults had to learn to communicate with children and speak their language again. It was a lesson he understood from experience. As a young doctor in training, he wanted to heal not only children’s physical ailments, but also their souls and lives. Determined to make children’s lives happier on his first summer camp for slum children, he set out armed with a full knowledge of books on children, a bag full of games, good intentions and a carnation in his buttonhole. The week was chaotic. Korzcak found himself at odds with the boys, shouting at them to go to sleep and even resorting to threats. Ashamed and confused, he decided to ask the boys what they thought was going wrong. It soon became clear that his one-size-fits-all policy on childcare was missing the mark with such a wide variety of children who all had different needs for sleep, food, clothes sizes and interests. He realized that only by really listening to and knowing the children could he begin to devise creative ways to lead them towards who they were meant to be as people. Each child was a person to be respected in terms of their thoughts and feelings – that and a hefty dose of pre-planning for a group of 30 boys. The next summer, with lists, schedules and a lot of effort made in getting to know each boy, he and the children had a wonderful summer in the country. He realized that childrearing was about knowledge from failed attempts, an on-going quest to find out what works for an individual. ‘I want everyone to know and love this state of “I do not know” when it comes to raising children – so full of life and dazzling surprises.’
For this reason, Korczak always put respecting and getting to know a child far higher than relying on books by child experts – although they were useful. ‘No book, no doctor can replace your own careful observation of a child.’ Mothers and fathers should trust their instinct about their own child, based on years of watching and getting to know who their child is.
And above all, he saw childrearing as a relationship, not an exercise in control. The adult was charged with the responsibility of the child’s safety and happiness, but this meant accountability, not a free pass to lose one’s temper or be unfair for one’s own convenience. He loathed physical punishment, viewing it as wrong and completely ineffective. He understood that an adult has to be a grown up – ‘before you start laying down the law to children and bossing them about, make sure that you have brought up and educated the child inside yourself.’ And he saw no merit in treating childhood as if it were a mere preparation for the more important time of adulthood. ‘Children are people today, not people tomorrow. They have the right to their cup of happiness.’
He taught children and adults to treat each other with empathy. He was quite happy to point out to a child that he was busy working or reading or simply tired, and that the child could perhaps amuse themselves for a while – while always remaining close at hand and in sight for help and comfort if needed.
He taught social responsibility through the court of peers where children brought their grievances against each other and debated the rights and wrongs of each case, considering the feelings of others and so developing a sense of justice and fairness. Punishments were mostly written warnings.
Korczak knew that children take comfort from the religion they were raised in and gave both Jewish and Christian children the chance to pray or go to services if they so wished. He wasn’t a practising Jew but had been brought up in the tenets of the
religion, and though he did not follow a specific creed, he believed in a loving God and read widely from wisdom literature. His religion, he said, was the sacred duty to protect children. He believed that a child belongs to itself and that it is the duty of not only parents but the whole community to care for the children in their midst. He had no children of his own yet he was father to hundreds of children. Korzcak firmly believed that children held the world together and that the basis of nationhood was not an ethnic or cultural group, but the decision of a people irrespective of creed or race to come together to care for their children. He understood that where nations decide not to care for the child then civilisation is on the verge of flying apart, which is precisely what happened when the Nazi Reich decided to murder thousands of children in 1942, in Warsaw, in Poland, and across Europe. There can be no greater contrast than this terrible decision compared to Korczak’s will to protect the rights and happiness of his children, even to the very end when he accompanied them to the death camp.
Korczak’s message is as pertinent today as it ever was, both in how we define a nation, and in how we raise children who are independent, happy, loved and loving. Perhaps the best observation about Korczak comes from a child in care who was given some of Korczak’s sayings to read: ‘I wish all parents could read Janusz Korczak, because then children would be happier.’
This book is dedicated with thanks to my own children and my husband who lived with Korczak’s story for so many years, and to Roman, and all the family and children of Misha and Sophia, with great thanks for sharing their story for the next generation, and also to Niura’s daughter Tessa Valabregue and her family. Above all this book is for Korczak and for all children, everywhere.
The Good Doctor of Warsaw Page 26
