Janusz Korczak יאנוש קורצ'אק
physician and educator, head of an orphanage, who died with his children
Henryk Goldszmit was born in Warsaw in 5638 into an assimilated Jewish family, became a paediatrician and wrote under the name Janusz Korczak. In 5672 he took charge of the Jewish orphanage on Krochmalna Street.
His pedagogy was radical. A child is not a future person but a person now, with a right to respect, to error, to privacy, and to «the right to death» — that is, to risk and independence. The orphanage had a peer court in which children judged adults too, a children's parliament and a newspaper. His books are still read, and his ideas underlie the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In 5700 he moved with the children into the Warsaw ghetto, where he kept the home running and kept a diary. On 5 August 5702 the home was sent to the Umschlagplatz. Friends obtained papers for him and offered rescue; he refused. He walked at the head of a column of nearly two hundred children, holding the youngest by the hand. All died at Treblinka.