The deportation of Janusz Korczak's orphanage

On Wednesday 5 August 1942, in the second week of the Great Deportation, the Germans blockaded part of the so-called small ghetto, south of Chłodna Street. Among the buildings whose inhabitants were driven out that day was the building at 16 Sienna Street and 9 Śliska Street, which housed the Orphans’ Home run for thirty years by Janusz Korczak and Stefania Wilczyńska. About two hundred children, their teachers and the doctor himself, by then over sixty, walked across the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz on Stawki Street, from where a goods train took them to the extermination camp at Treblinka. None of them returned.

Among the tens of thousands of people deported from Warsaw in those weeks it was only one transport, yet that procession became one of the most frequently invoked images of the Holocaust in Poland. At the same time it is an event so thickly overgrown with legend that historians are still separating what is attested from what memory has added.

Korczak, or Henryk Goldszmit

In some lists Korczak appears as “Henrik Hersch Goldschmidt”. This is a Germanised and anglicised distortion: Janusz Korczak, paediatrician, educator and writer, was born Henryk Goldszmit and adopted his pen name at the turn of the twentieth century. The name Hersz belonged to his grandfather, the physician Hersz Goldszmit. Before the war Korczak was one of the best-known figures in Warsaw’s cultural life: the author of King Matt the First, the founder of the children’s newspaper Mały Przegląd (The Little Review), the “Old Doctor” of Polish Radio broadcasts and, above all, the co-founder of two children’s homes in which the children had their own court, parliament and newspaper.

The Orphans’ Home for Jewish children, founded by Korczak and Wilczyńska in 1912, occupied a building at 92 Krochmalna Street. When in October 1940 the Germans created the ghetto, Krochmalna Street lay outside its boundaries, and the orphanage had to move to the building of a commercial school at 33 Chłodna Street. During the move Korczak was detained for not wearing an armband with the Star of David and spent several weeks in Pawiak prison. When in the autumn of 1941 the Germans removed further blocks from the ghetto, the Orphans’ Home moved a second time, to the building of the Mutual Aid Society of Commercial and Industrial Employees at 16 Sienna Street, with a second entrance at 9 Śliska Street.

In the sealed ghetto, where people were dying of hunger and typhus, Korczak spent whole days obtaining food, money and medicine for his charges. At the beginning of 1942 he also took charge of the neglected Main Shelter at 39 Dzielna Street, the largest orphanage in the ghetto, where children were dying in large numbers. From May 1942 he wrote a diary at night. On 18 July, four days before the deportations began, the children of the Orphans’ Home performed for invited guests The Post Office by Rabindranath Tagore, a play about a dying boy waiting for a letter from the king. According to the recollections of those present, Korczak later explained that he wanted the children to learn to accept death calmly.

The last days before the deportation

From 22 July 1942 the Germans, assisted by the Jewish Order Service, drove thousands of people to the Umschlagplatz every day. The next day the chairman of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, took his own life because, as he wrote in his farewell letter, he was being required to hand children over to death. From the first days of the operation boarding homes and shelters were being deported; Adolf Berman and his wife later estimated that about 4,000 children from the ghetto’s nearly thirty care institutions ended up in Treblinka.

Korczak knew about the deportations and most probably guessed what they meant. Friends on the Aryan side – according to the recollections of Igor Newerly, his former secretary, most seriously Maryna Falska, who had prepared a room in Bielany and documents – offered to hide him outside the ghetto. Korczak refused, because accepting help would have meant abandoning the children. Popular accounts repeat that he was offered rescue by the Council to Aid Jews, “Żegota”; this is an anachronism, because its predecessor, the Provisional Committee for Aid to Jews, was only formed in September 1942, and the Council itself in December.

The last entry in Korczak’s diary is dated 4 August. In it he describes watering the flowers at the window while a German sentry with a rifle watches him from across the street; he wrote that his bald head in the window made “such a good target”. The typescript of the diary, copied out as it was written by the teacher Henryk Azrylewicz, was smuggled out of the ghetto and a few days later reached Newerly. Hidden in a walled-up cache at the Nasz Dom (Our Home) institution in Bielany, it survived the war and was published in 1958.

5 or 6 August?

The date of the deportation is not certain. In witness accounts 5 August appears most often, 6 August somewhat less frequently, and other days occasionally. The ghetto chronicler Abraham Lewin (PL) noted on 7 August that “yesterday” Dr Korczak’s orphanage had been taken from the small ghetto with the doctor at its head, but he did not see the procession himself. 6 August is also given by, among others, Luba Blum-Bielicka and Irena Sendler. In favour of 5 August are the regularity of the last diary entries and the fact that almost all witnesses remember a hot and sunny day – and according to Warsaw weather records 5 August was warm, whereas 6 August was cooler with passing showers. The researcher Agnieszka Witkowska, who in 2010 collated and compared the witness accounts, judged 5 August the more probable date, and most studies, including those of the Jewish Historical Institute, adopt it too.

The procession to the Umschlagplatz

In the morning, at around ten, the children were already standing on the pavement in front of the house on Sienna Street, lined up in fours. The inhabitants of the small ghetto were first herded into Grzybowski Square, where, according to Luba Blum-Bielicka, head of the nursing school, tens of thousands of people gathered. Korczak is said to have told her then that he had “obtained a special wagon for his children”. From there the column went along Żelazna Street, over the wooden footbridge across Chłodna Street into the large ghetto, and then along Leszno, Karmelicka, Dzielna and Zamenhofa Streets towards the transfer square. Covering several kilometres through crowded, blockaded streets must have taken several hours. Together with the Orphans’ Home, the boys’ boarding home on Twarda Street with its directors and the girls’ shelter at 28 Śliska Street with its director, Broniatowska, were taken that day; the carers went to their deaths together with their charges.

Witnesses saw the procession at different points and described it very differently. Władysław Szpilman, in his memoir published in 1946 as Śmierć miasta (Death of a City) and known today as The Pianist, wrote that Korczak had told the children they were going to the countryside, and that when Szpilman met them on Gęsia Street the children were singing, a small musician was playing for them, and Korczak was carrying the two youngest in his arms and telling them something amusing. Stanisław Szulfried, an employee of the labour office on Leszno Street, saw Korczak walking in the middle of the column with one child in his arms and another holding his hand, and beside him the tall, slender Stefania Wilczyńska. Irena Sendler remembered the procession marching in fours “briskly, evenly, with dignity”.

The account most often cited is that of Nachum Remba (PL), a Judenrat official who rescued whomever he could at the Umschlagplatz. He remembered a scorching day, the children seated by the wall at the edge of the square and their boarding of the wagons in fours, with Korczak at their head: “It was not a march to the wagons, it was an organised, mute protest against banditry!” Remba suggested that Korczak go with him to the Judenrat to ask for intervention. He refused, because he “did not want to leave the children even for a minute”. Remba’s account was preserved by Emanuel Ringelblum in his chronicle; Ringelblum also noted that Korczak had this time, too, provided the children with several barrels of water for the journey. The writer Yehoshua Perle (PL), whose text survived in the ghetto’s underground archive, described Korczak walking with his head bowed, hatless, in high boots, holding a child by the hand, and behind him two hundred cleanly and carefully dressed children, led as if to a sacrifice.

A quite different picture was left by Marek Rudnicki (PL), then fifteen and later a graphic artist in Paris, who walked beside the column from Sienna Street all the way to the gate of the square. According to him there was no singing, no saluting and no proudly raised heads, only “a terrible, weary silence”; the sick Korczak “dragged one foot after the other, somehow shrunken”, and the children, first in fours and then any old how, walked as if in a trance. Jerzy Lewiński, an officer of the Jewish police, remembered the procession similarly: Korczak was dejected and walked with a stick. Joanna Olczak-Ronikier cites this stark version in her biography of Korczak as a counterweight to the exalted descriptions.

Myths and what we do not know

Stories have grown up around the last journey of the Orphans’ Home that reliable sources do not confirm. The most enduring has it that at the Umschlagplatz a German officer, a reader of The Bankruptcy of Little Jack, recognised Korczak and offered him his freedom, which he refused. There is no direct witness to this; Lewiński called the story a fabrication, and historians at the Jewish Historical Institute regard it as most probably a myth. It is true, on the other hand, that people in the Judenrat tried to save Korczak himself and that he rejected such attempts. Szpilman’s account that Korczak had to beg the Germans for permission to go with the children is also uncertain. Descriptions vary of the green banner of the Orphans’ Home, modelled on King Matt’s flag, which according to some accounts was carried at the head of the procession; Rudnicki did not remember it at all. Even the exact number of children is unknown: the figure most often given is 192 or about 200 children, and from a dozen or so to about twenty staff, among them – besides Wilczyńska – Natalia Poz, Róża Lipiec-Jakubowska, Róża Sztokman-Azrylewicz and Sabina Lejzerowicz.

Only four members of the Orphans’ Home survived: the teacher Misza Wróblewski and three older boys who on the day of the blockade were working at a labour post on the Aryan side.

Treblinka

It is often stated that Korczak and the children died at Treblinka “the same day”. This is unlikely to have been the case. Trains from Warsaw usually left in the afternoon and, because they gave way to military transports, travelled through the night and most often reached Treblinka the following morning; people in the overcrowded, sealed wagons, without water, were already dying on the way. On arrival they were driven out onto the ramp, ordered to undress and herded into the gas chambers, where they were killed with engine exhaust. In August 1942 the camp, under the command of Irmfried Eberl, was taking in more transports than it could “process”, and chaos reigned.

There is no testimony at all about what happened to Korczak, Wilczyńska and the children after their arrival. They were almost certainly murdered soon after they arrived, in the gas chambers, most probably on 6 or 7 August. The account of a Treblinka prisoner, Chaim Sztajer, given in Australia in 1980, of carrying out of a chamber the body of a man surrounded by children, refers, according to him, to September 1942, and historians treat it with caution. In 2015 a court in Lublin, on the application of a foundation that wished to make Korczak’s works available in the public domain, declared 7 August 1942 to be the date of his death; previously the legally binding date had been the notional one of 9 May 1946. As early as 1943 rumours circulated in Warsaw that the wagon with the children had been uncoupled and that the Old Doctor was wandering with them from village to village. They had no foundation whatsoever.

Memory

The first literary record of the procession was the poem by Władysław Szlengel “A Page from the Deportation Diary”, dated 10 August 1942, in which Korczak walks “straight at the front, bare-headed”. The poem circulated in the ghetto; Szlengel was killed during the uprising in April 1943. After the war the image of Korczak leading the children to the Umschlagplatz was fixed by memoirs, by monuments in Warsaw and Jerusalem, by Andrzej Wajda’s 1990 film Korczak and by the stone bearing his name among the symbolic stones at Treblinka. Historians point out, however, that the legend of the heroic procession, understandable as it is, has obscured on the one hand the plain truth of that day – a sick, exhausted man and terrified children – and on the other the fate of thousands of other children and their carers who went to their deaths in the same weeks without witnesses.

Place in the history of the war

The deportation of the Orphans’ Home was a small part of the great operation in which, by 21 September 1942, the Germans deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka 253,742 people according to their own figures, and nearly 300,000 according to other estimates. Children had no chance at all in this operation: they could not obtain “numbers for life” or work in the shops, and so almost the entire young generation of the ghetto perished in the summer of 1942. The operation was in turn part of Operation Reinhard, in which by 1943 some 1.5–1.8 million Jews were murdered, most of them from the General Government. The experience of the Great Deportation, in which even a famous and respected man could only accompany his children on the road to death, convinced the surviving young people of the ghetto that the only answer was armed resistance; the Jewish Combat Organisation had been founded in July 1942. In January 1943 its fighters for the first time resisted deportation with weapons in hand, and in April the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out.

After the war Korczak’s surviving pupils and colleagues carried his ideas to Israel, Poland and the whole world. In 1978, the centenary of his birth, Poland proposed the drafting of an international convention on the rights of the child; the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations in 1989, is often described as Korczak’s legacy.