Page 52 - Witness

“A hundred children, a hundred individuals who are people – not people-to-be, not people of tomorrow, but people now, right now – today.”
Janusz Korczak, until the last moment of his life, dedicated himself to the rights of children. He was one of the first people in history to understand that children were not potential people, not half-adults, but individuals who deserved full respect and dignity each and every day of their lives. Korczak ran orphanages in Warsaw before and during the war, wrote children’s stories, was on Polish radio, and, even today, is a beloved figure in the eyes of many Poles.
Dr. Korczak had one rule that he almost never broke – never lie to children – a rule he was forced to violate one tragic day in August of 1942, when the Nazis ordered him and his children to report to the train station for their deportation to Treblinka death camp. Giving up a number of last-minute chances of escape for himself, Korczak asked the children to prepare for a picnic. They got dressed, grabbed their favorite dolls and other objects, and off they marched through the streets of Warsaw to the cattle cars, in which they were transported to Treblinka and murdered together with some 870,000 souls, almost all Jews.
Today, there are 17,000 jagged stones and markers in Treblinka, many with the names of the Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, but only one stone bears the name of a single person – Dr. Janusz Korczak.
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