Janusz Korczak (born Henryk Goldszmit, c.1878–1942) is perhaps best known as an educational reformer and the author of Król Maciuś Pierwszy [King Matt the First, 1922], a novel for children that is rarely out of print. But he is remembered mainly for the way his life ended. In 1942, the bloodiest year of the Holocaust, he turned down all offers to rescue him, choosing instead to accompany some two hundred children from his Warsaw ghetto orphanage to Treblinka, where he and they were all gassed. The manner of his death continues to skew notions of who he was and what he wrote. Yet to understand Korczak, as Rachel Feldhay Brenner has argued, “we need to look at his life, rather than his death” (B…
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Citation: Filipowicz, Halina. "Pamiętnik z getta". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 May 2022 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38788, accessed 03 July 2025.]
