"The Germans began loading the train...There was still room for more inside. Urged on by whips, more and more were packed in. Suddenly the brute in charge ordered the children to be brought forward. Korczak was at the head. I'll never forget that sight until the end of my life. The heads held high, a silent protest against the murderers. All the Jewish police saluted them and snapped to attention.
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"Korczak stood at his full height as he stepped into the boxcar. Carefully he helped the others climb in...They waited with dignity for the doors to be closed and sealed, then for the train to start up. The last recorded sight of him, then as in his whole life, was of a solitary man comforting the children."
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These were the words of a member of Warsaw's Jewish police in 1942--forced by the Nazis to facilitate the loading of Jews destined for death. This cattle car contained ghetto youngsters from the orphanage founded 29 years previously by author, educator and pediatrician Janusz Korczak [Yanush Kor-Jacques].
Although he was offered a chance for survival, Korczak, in order to ease the anxiety of his charges, chose to accompany them to certain death. Initially a pen name of Henryk Goldszmit's, he assumed this name and died with it.
Mark Bernheim's book about Korczak, "Father of the Orphans," discussed the book with this reporter. He told of the difficulties encountered in his research. Although the pedagogical and humanitarian sides of Korczak are well known in Poland and Israel, American research facilities contained little information about this obscure hero.
While researching the book, Bernheim received many anecdotes and pictures from people who had been residents of Korczak's orphanage before the Nazis invaded Poland.
"I don't make it too horrible or too gruesome," he said, because the book is aimed at younger readers.
After a brief introduction to Korczak and the children, Bernheim flashes back to Korczak's birth in 1878. The Goldszmit's were well-to-do non-religious Jews, successfully assimilated into the Polish mainstream--or so they thought. From that point, events progress in a linear fashion.
Henryk's father, an attorney, encountered anti-Semitism and became mentally ill. He started to hallucinate while recuperating at home.
Dramatizing the scene, Bernheim describes what happened as Henryk's father, lying in bed, asks his 11-year-old son to come enter the bedroom.
Murmuring, he told the boy, "Listen to me carefully. I may be sick now, but I can see some things I wouldn't admit for a long time. I must warn you. Be on your guard always. Life is war and you never know when the real battle is going to start. Many people want to hurt us. Sometimes they only laugh and if you laugh back, they'll go away. But there are much worse ones. They are really dangerous. They aren't content with making fun, no--they want to hurt...
"They are evil. They only want to hurt those who do good. And this is the worst: They rule the world. They make the laws for their good, not ours...They've beaten me Henryk. I can't fight them any more."
Soon thereafter, his father was committed to a mental institution where he died. Because of the costs of treating his father, family possessions were sold, servants let go and the family became impoverished.
"Part of that comes from (Korczak's) diaries," Bernheim said. "Part of it comes from me...because so much about (his life as a child) was destroyed in the war...When I actually sat down to write the book and I needed more details about it--you invent...
"It's a historical biography," he said. "You do as much research as you possibly can and...then you research the period."
In his grief over the ensuing years, Henryk secretly wrote poems, a novel and a play. After entering medical school under a miniscule quota for Jews, he submitted his play to a literary competition. Under the Polish-sounding pseudonym of Janusz Korczak, he was awarded an honorable mention.
After receiving his medical degree, he continued a dual career as pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit, an assimilated Jew who ran two children's orphanages, and famous Polish writer-radio personality Janusz Korczak.
During the 1930s Korczak made two trips to Palestine. Just before the Nazis invaded in 1939, he decided the children and orphanage should relocate to Jerusalem--however, by then it was too late.
"He was going to divide his time," Bernheim said. "He was an idealist...a lot of Jews thought they could work with the Germans."
"Father of the Orphans" takes the reader to that infamous 1942 march from the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage to the railroad yard--a point at which Bernheim became stumped.
"How am I going to write that last chapter?" he recalled. "How am I going to describe cramming them into the gas chamber? How am I going to do this?"
Bernheim decided his description would be "very spare and very factual and very unemotional...What could I say? That everything was OK; that they were in heaven with their parents?
A Father to Orphans
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Nov 10, 2011 23:13:14
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