Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit[1] (22 July 1878 or 1879 – 7 August 1942),[2] was a Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, children's author and pedagogue known as Pan Doktor ("Mr.

[12] As his family's financial situation worsened, Henryk, while still attending the gymnasium (the current 8th Lycée in Warsaw [pl]), began to work as a tutor for other pupils.

[12] In 1896 he debuted on the literary scene with a satirical text on raising children, Węzeł gordyjski (The Gordian Knot).

Some of his descriptions of the summer camp for Jewish children in this period and subsequently were later published in his Fragmenty Utworów and have been translated into English.

He served again as a military doctor in the Polish Army with the rank of major during the Polish-Soviet War, but after a brief stint in Łódź was assigned to Warsaw.

In 1939, when World War II erupted, Korczak volunteered for duty in the Polish Army but was refused due to his age.

In July, Janusz Korczak decided that the children in the orphanage should put on Rabindranath Tagore's play The Post Office.

On 5 or 6 August 1942, German soldiers came to collect the 192 orphans (there is some debate about the actual number: it may have been 196) and about one dozen staff members to transport them to the Treblinka extermination camp.

Korczak had been offered sanctuary on the "Aryan side" by the Polish underground organization Żegota, but turned it down repeatedly, saying that he could not abandon his children.

Joshua Perle, an eyewitness whose wartime writings were saved in the Ringelblum Archive,[19] described the procession of Korczak and the children through the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz (deportation point to the death camps): Janusz Korczak was marching, his head bent forward, holding the hand of a child, without a hat, a leather belt around his waist, and wearing high boots.

In another version, the officer was acting officially, as the Nazi authorities had in mind some kind of "special treatment" for Korczak (some prominent Jews with international reputations were sent to Theresienstadt).

Korczak's evacuation from the ghetto is also mentioned in Władysław Szpilman's book The Pianist: He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful.

At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms.

The foundation won the case in 2015 and subsequently started to digitise Korczak's works and release them as public domain e-books.

[29] Korczak often employed the form of a fairy tale in order to prepare his young readers for the dilemmas and difficulties of real adult life, and the need to make responsible decisions.

In the 1923 King Matt the First (Król Maciuś Pierwszy) and its sequel King Matt on the Desert Island (Król Maciuś na wyspie bezludnej) Korczak depicted a child prince who is catapulted to the throne by the sudden death of his father, and who must learn from various mistakes: He tries to read and answer all his mail by himself and finds that the volume is too much and he needs to rely on secretaries; he is exasperated with his ministers and has them arrested, but soon realises that he does not know enough to govern by himself, and is forced to release the ministers and institute constitutional monarchy; when a war breaks out he does not accept being shut up in his palace, but slips away and joins up, pretending to be a peasant boy - and narrowly avoids becoming a POW; he takes the offer of a friendly journalist to publish for him a "royal paper" -and finds much later that he gets carefully edited news and that the journalist is covering up the gross corruption of the young king's best friend; he tries to organise the children of all the world to hold processions and demand their rights – and ends up antagonising other kings; he falls in love with a black African princess and outrages racist opinion (by modern standards, however, Korczak's depiction of black people is itself not completely free of stereotypes which were current at the time of writing); finally, he is overthrown by the invasion of three foreign armies and exiled to a desert island, where he must come to terms with reality – and finally does.

It is emphasised that Pasteur, destined for world-wide fame, started from inauspicious beginnings - born to poor working-class parents in an obscure French provincial town and attending a far from high-quality school.

As repeatedly emphasised by Korczak, Pasteur's achievements, both in childhood and in later academic and scientific career, were mainly due to persistence (as hinted in the title), a relentless and eventually successful effort to overcome his limitations and early failures.

Korczak spoke against corporal punishment of children at a time when such treatment was considered a parental entitlement or even a duty.

Not only adults but anyone who is older and stronger can cruelly demonstrate their displeasure, back up their words with force, demand obedience and abuse the child without being punished.

The original was re-erected at the boarding school for children with special needs in Borzęciczki, which is named after Janusz Korczak.