Henryk Goldszmit was born in 1878 in Warsaw. He became a pediatrician, then an author, then a radio personality beloved across Poland. Under the pen name Janusz Korczak, he wrote books about children's rights that were decades ahead of their time. He argued — in the 1920s — that children were not property. That they had a right to be taken seriously. That the measure of a society was how it treated its smallest and most powerless members. He also ran an orphanage.
When the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto, Korczak and his orphanage were forced inside. For two years he kept nearly two hundred children alive in conditions designed to kill them. He begged, bargained, stole, and charmed food and medicine out of anyone who had it. He staged plays with the children. He maintained their classes. He refused to let them understand what was happening to them, which meant carrying the full weight of that knowledge himself.
On August 5, 1942, the Germans came for the orphanage. Korczak was offered escape multiple times. The underground could get him out. A Polish friend had forged papers waiting. He would not go. He dressed the children in their best clothes, gave them their favorite toys, and marched with them in rows through the streets of Warsaw to the Umschlagplatz, where they were loaded onto trains. He walked into Treblinka holding the hands of the youngest children. No one who was on that train survived.
He could have lived. That is the only fact about Janusz Korczak that matters.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."