Although it's December, today is not for frantic festive prep. It's December 7th, so I write about remembering, and about honor.


A new exhibit opened yesterday at London's Jewish Museum. It honors Dr. Janusz Korczak, the man Betty Jean Lifton's recent book calls, "The King Of Children", and with all the reason in the world.

The children huddle together, their eyes hollow with fear and hunger as they await deportation to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

Their hands reach up, clamouring for comfort from the kindly doctor. He will not desert them. They will die together.

The haunting painting of Dr. Janusz Korczak surrounded by doomed orphans from the Warsaw Ghetto bears poignant witness to his ultimate sacrifice at a new exhibition which opened at London's Jewish Museum on Wednesday.

The Polish doctor, writer and educator was a fervent advocate of children's rights whose credo was posthumously adopted by the United Nations in its Convention of the Rights of the Child in 1989.

UNESCO declared 1979 "The Year of Janus Korczak" to coincide with the International Year of the Child and the centenary of his birth. He died in Treblinka along with the orphans in 1942.

The haunting deportation canvas in the exhibition is by Israeli artist Yitzhak Belfer, who was born in Poland in 1923 and was raised in Korczak's Warsaw orphanage.

From the Jewish Virtual Library, a bit of history:

In 1912, Korczak established a Jewish orphanage, Dom Sierot, in a building which he designed to advance his progressive educational theories. He envisioned a world in which children structured their own world and became experts in their own matters. Jewish children between the ages of seven and fourteen were allowed to live there while attending Polish public school and government-sponsored Jewish schools, known as "Sabbath" schools. The orphanage opened a summer camp in 1921, which remained in operation until the summer of 1940.

Besides serving as principal of Don Sierot and another orphanage, Nasz Dom, Korczak was also a doctor and author, worked at a Polish radio station, was a principal of an experimental school, published a children’s newspaper and was a docent at a Polish university. Korczak also served as an expert witness in a district court for minors. He became well-known in Polish societyand received many awards. The rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930's restricted only his activities with Jews.

Continued ...