It started as many rabbit holes do. A coaching article, a book, a podcast and then a casual mention of something you hadn’t heard before so you write it down, make a note. A rabbit hole is born.
But this one was different. This one was a story we all should know. How it missed many of us is a mystery, moreover a crime. People like this should never be found in a rabbit hole. They should be found in history books and talks with Fathers of courage and integrity to their sons and daughters. How had this been missed?
His name was Janusz Korczak. (Ya Noosh Kor shack)
He was born in Poland in 1878 or '79 and was named Henryk Goldszmit. His father, a prominent Jewish lawyer in Warsaw, Henryk grew up in a house of privilege and spent hours a day using his imagination to entertain himself. Henryk’s parents kept him away from the ‘poor’ children of Warsaw as they were ‘dirty and unkempt,’ not to be part of his life. But he played with the school janitor’s son and spent time with ‘those’ children, finding them entertaining. His Father didn’t understand how his son could play with blocks for hours at a time or entertain himself with his own stories conjured up in his 6 year old head.
At the age of 11, his father fell ill and was sent to psychiatric hospital where he would die just 6 years later. (For the rest of his life, Henryk would be affected by this- even to the point of not having his own children because the idea of psychiatric illnesses being inherited was the practice of the time) Without his Father, his family’s financial situation soured and he was soon living in the neighborhoods his Parents had once told him to avoid.
He earned money tutoring children and began to write. In one literary contest he put his pen name as Janusz Korczak after a character in another Polish children’s novel. He began to write a column on children’s well being for Polish newspapers at the same time he was going to school and earning a Pediatrics degree. Doctor Korczak began working in Warsaw at a children’s hospital and wrote a book, “Child in the Drawing Room” that gained literary recognition.
In 1912, he teamed up with a woman who would be his partner for life, Stefania Wilczynska. Not a partner in a marriage or relationship sense, but in the care of children as Korczak opened up an orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw: Dom Sierot with Stefania as his assistant. In this home, Korczak put to test his ideas of child rearing and treating them as children, not mini adults. In his book, “How to Love a Child,” Korczak wrote “One of the worst blunders is to think that pedagogy is the science of the child…when it is the science of men”
He arranged for the children of the orphanage to write and publish their own newspaper. They had their own court system and a parliamentary system of government. “Korczak was convinced that if you treat children as respectable people, they themselves will be full of respect for others,” according to scholar Phillip Veerman. (Details of life in the orphanage can be seen in the video, "The Last Korczak Boy.")
Veerman quotes one child who lived in the orphanage. “It is important to note that independent thinking was not stifled in Dom Sierot. Children’s questions were not swept under the rug but were answered. Considering the period when oppression existed in the home, as well as in the country at large, it was quite an accomplishment. The seed of independent thinking planted in Dom Sierot remained with me.”
World War I saw Korczak serve Poland as an army medic but he came back to Warsaw after the war. In 1923, he wrote what would become his most prized literary accomplishment, a book called, “King Matt the First.” It was as widely read in Poland as “Alice in Wonderland” was in the U.S. He continued to write other children’s books and had a weekly radio show on the care and understanding of children. But in 1939, things began to come apart as World War II began.
Korczak enlisted in the Polish army but was denied because of his age. A year later 138,000 Jews of Warsaw, including his orphanage was forced to move from its house into the Warsaw ghetto, a place where the Nazis had detained the Jews to better manage them. It was a place of poverty and hunger. As Korczak and Stefania marched the children to their new home, a guard grabbed a wagon of potatoes. Korczak demanded the guard release them as they belonged to the children. In the dispute, the guard asked Korczak if he was Jewish to which he replied he was, but was not wearing the mandatory arm band required of all Jews in Warsaw at the time. Korczak said, “There are human laws which are transitory, and higher laws which are eternal . . .” He was seized, beaten and jailed by the guards. He spent a month in prison but used the time after his release to regale his children with stories of his imprisonment and his inmates.
Despite the means to, Korczak continued to live at the new house with his children. He became a bit of a social pariah as he was constantly asking the wealthy friends and associates he knew for money to feed his children, all the while taking on more orphans as the war continued producing them. He wrote of the time, “That restless spark which is Earth is again in ferment. Disorder, disquiet, negative emotions predominate, reign. Miserable, painful, impure is their life over there. Its disorders upset the current of time and of impressions. . . . "
He was also offered more than once chances to have papers forged so he could escape to the other side of Warsaw for safety. He asked about his children, 179 at the time. When it was clear they all could not be relocated with him, Korczak refused the offer.
Korczak’s fame as a writer and pediatrician was minimalized by the war and by 1942, as the Warsaw ghetto was being emptied, it became clear that the Nazis would be coming for he, Stefania and his children soon. While some concentration camps were work camps, Treblinka II was an extermination camp. Prisoners were killed with poison gas and their bodies buried in mass graves. Korczak knew his fate and the fate of his children. Again he was offered chances to come over to the Ayran side of Warsaw but refused. Not without his children
On August 6, 1942, the SS came for Korczak, Stefania, 11 other staff and 192 orphaned children. He wrote in his book, “Ghetto Diaries,” the following: “It is a difficult thing to be born and to learn to live. Ahead of me is a much easier task: to die. After death, it may be difficult again, but I am not bothering about that. The last year, month or hour I should like to die consciously, in possession of my faculties. I don't know what I should say to the children by way of farewell. I should want to make clear to them only this- that the road is theirs to choose…freely.”
Early that morning, the SS gave Korczak and his children 15 minutes to gather their belongings. He came outside and his children lined up in rows of four. He walked to the front of the line and clasped the hands of the two middle children, Stefania a row behind him They began to march toward the train station. The children sang songs and marched with their heads up. The procession through the Warsaw streets was of great concern to the rest of the ghetto. If they had Korczak, then no one was safe. One witness wrote, “I remember seeing Janusz Korczak walking with the children and many other people. There were many Germans around them. When I came home and saw my dear parents, I started crying because I knew this would probably be the end for all of us.”
Four by four, they arrived on the train platform. A guard passed a note along to Korczak as they waited. He recognized Janusz as the author of his favorite children’s book growing up. He had permission for Korczak to return home but not the children. He refused to leave their side, saying, “You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this.”
In author Joshua Perle’s eyewitness account, he wrote, “A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak.”
Days before his march, Korczak wrote in his diary, “The spirit feels a longing inside the narrow cage of the body. Man feels and ponders death as though it were the end, when in fact death is merely the continuation of life, it is another life. You may not believe in the existence of the soul, yet you must acknowledge that your body will live on as green grass, as a cloud. For you are, after all, water and dust.”
Some may ask why this rabbit hole has found its way into a coaching blog. The idea of integrity and courage that persisted throughout his life and trials are plainly evident. But the way in which Korczak treated his orphans calls to us how we should, perhaps, be coaching. The idea of giving children the freedom to learn, the idea of not treating children as mini adults on the playing and training field; these were the essence of how Korczak related to young people.
In 1959, The United Nations General Assembly created a Declaration of Children’s Rights, many of them taken from the pages of Korczak’s writings. Those include, “The child has the right to respect, The child has the right to optimal conditions in which to grow and develop, The child has the right to live in the present, The child has a right to make mistakes, The child has the right to fail, The child has the right to be taken seriously and The child has the right to be appreciated for what he/she is.”
Simply put, if we ever get away from these tenets, we should turn in our whistles. We are done.
Perhaps the best explanation is the rabbit hole itself. In our never ending search to be better coaches, better parents and sons and daughters, we find these rabbit holes. Do they lead us to a fifteen minute gallery of social media tweets or of someone who we can look up to, that changed lives, which lived for others.
Unlike Janusz Korczak, that choice is ours.
