The World Is Not Outside Me, but Within Me — Janusz Korczak’s Ghetto Diary
One has to stretch out longer arms, to hold every child. One has to raise a larger head, to contain every child’s fear and dream. This sculpture at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, commemorates the Jewish doctor and Polish father of children’s rights, Janusz Korczak, who defended children’s freedom and dignity throughout his life. Until the very last moment before death, he was still stretching out his arms, holding every child’s tears and trembling.
When the Second World War broke out, Korczak and nearly two hundred children from his orphanage were moved into the Warsaw Ghetto. For the sake of the children’s warmth and food, he knocked on every door along the street, begging for food, clothing, and medicine, pleading with priests to let the children play in the church garden. As he fought for every possible resource to care for the children, he tasted the harshness and coldness of human feeling, and endured the despair and loneliness of approaching death. Just as Yad Vashem sets Korczak’s sculpture into a square, recessed stone wall, the form emphasizes that within both concrete imprisonment and invisible confinement, Korczak never gave up breaking through. His struggle to survive at the end of his life, from May to August 1942, and his countless actions to save the children, are collected in Ghetto Diary.
At five in the morning, the children were asleep. Korczak held a pencil. On the table were a piece of black bread and a bottle of water. The pencil left groove after groove on his fingers. He remembered his father calling him “an absent-minded fool”; his grandmother giving him raisins and calling him “philosopher.” He remembered his dead canary, remembered that crying was also a sin, remembered Jews, death… In the first sentence of the diary, Korczak wrote: “Memoirs are a gloomy, melancholy literature.” Then he said: “When you dig a well, you do not begin from the depths. You begin from the top layer, digging out shovelful after shovelful of earth with broad strokes, not knowing what lies below… You make up your mind. You have enough strength to begin.”
Then the pen suddenly turns, and a dramatic dialogue appears. Someone asks, “Old man, what are you doing?” Korczak answers: “You can see for yourself. I am looking for an underground spring. I will find clean, cool water, and let memory flow everywhere.” The person asks again: “Do you want me to help you?” Korczak says: “Oh, no, thank you, my dear. Everyone has to do this alone. Having someone else help will not make the work faster, and no one can do this work for another person. There are other things you may help me with, but if you still trust me, and if you do not look down on me, then let me do this final work myself.”
“This final work” means leaping, at the edge of death, into the moments where life once flowed. Korczak “begins digging from the top layer,” “not knowing what lies below”: that is, he begins from the known here and now, and reaches back into the unknown of the past. The unknown comes from the fact that the ending has not yet been fixed, so every detail of the past becomes an undercurrent swaying freely, without needing to trace its source, direction, or meaning. Once Korczak has been marked as a man about to die, he begins to see with the “gloomy, melancholy” eyes of the dying—eyes able to pierce through fragments where childhood, reality, ideals, and dreams are tangled together, and to find the signs of an entire life.
At the age of five, Korczak wanted to know: “What must be done so that there will no longer be dirty, ragged, hungry children in the world?” At seven, he felt: “I am here. I have weight. I have meaning.” At fourteen, he first thought of educational reform. Korczak said: “The world was no longer outside me, but within me. The purpose of my life was not to make others love me or admire me, but to act, to love. It was not the duty of my surroundings to help me; it was my duty to care for this world, to care for people.” Later, he often dreamed of traveling to China. Now, inside the Warsaw Ghetto, he recognized the meaning of that dream: “It was not that I would go to China, but that China came to me. China’s hunger, the misery of Chinese orphans, the high mortality of Chinese children.”
To solve children’s hunger, cold, illness, and trauma became Korczak’s path toward his own fate. Even after moving into the ghetto, he was still willing to run day and night for the children’s physical and emotional health and happiness. Yet his own aches, emaciation, fluid in the lungs, anxiety, and hopelessness were savagely devouring him at every moment. In his diary, he wrote of his dream: “Tonight several more people died. The bodies of dead children. One in a barrel, another lying on the board in the morgue, skinned, clearly still breathing. A new dream: I am climbing a ladder that could easily collapse, climbing very high, while my father, again and again, stuffs into my mouth a large piece of cake covered in icing and filled with raisins. What cannot fit, he crumbles and stuffs into his pocket.”
Shadow seeps into every inch of reality and dream. Faced with broken conditions of survival and a shattered inner state, Korczak carried mercuric chloride and morphine tablets in his pocket. If life were to be ravaged by war, gun barrels, or other violence, he would poison himself, saying goodbye to life with dignity under his own free will. Korczak in the ghetto is like the photograph of a relief sculpture held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Although the relief depicts the familiar subject of “Korczak embracing children,” the sculpture’s surface is composed through the cutting and reassembling of geometric shapes: a headless Korczak holds a boy’s head with one severed hand, while another severed hand holds a girl’s head. The collage-like form of the sculpture, together with the stern material and lines of the stone itself, profoundly presents how Korczak used his own fragmentation to hold up the children’s wholeness.
Fragmentation is the true image of Korczak’s life, and so fragmentation naturally enters the pulse of writing in Ghetto Diary. Its loose, broken structure mixes different times, spaces, and scenes. Between passages of memory and reflection, he often marks the exact moment of writing, as if forcefully pulling himself back from the infinity of the past into reality. After all, with death approaching, survival in the cracks leaves no room for indulgence, and no room for dreams. He had to rationally force his heart, again and again, back to reality, to solve the immediate predicament. Thus the intensity of his emotion supports the emergence of each story and its sudden stopping, while his thoughts can no longer unfold in long, meticulous development. There is no time left. Korczak no longer imagines a possible future; he pragmatically opens up the possibilities of the present.
And yet he cannot help thinking of death, cannot resist smuggling a wish at the feet of death. In the diary, Korczak asks himself: “Do I have one year left, one month, or one hour? I want to die consciously, lucidly. I do not know what words I will say to bid farewell to the children. I long to tell them, and want to tell them only this: that they have complete freedom to choose the path they will take. Ten o’clock. Gunshots: two, several, two, one, several. Perhaps my window just happened not to be properly covered?”
“That children have complete freedom to choose the path they will take” sounds like Korczak’s final words, and also like the deep blessing he left to this world. Even though his final diary and essays are filled with shattered, interrupted, muddy speech, his idea of empowering children remained whole and clear throughout his life’s actions and writings: we adults cannot, because we are afraid children will be taken away by death, take children away from life itself. We give children many burdens so that tomorrow they may become a person, yet we do not give them the rights they should already have today as a person.
In How to Love a Child, Korczak tells us: children have the right to demand that others take their sorrow seriously, even if that sorrow is only over a lost little stone. Children have the right to demand that others take their wishes seriously, even if the wish is to go for a walk on a cold day without wearing a coat. Children have the right to demand that others take their seemingly absurd questions seriously. In When I Am Little Again, Korczak also asks us to respect children’s ignorance, respect their failure and tears, respect their secrets and hesitations, and respect their process of coming to know the world. Respect is, in truth, a blessing for children to move toward their own freedom; it is returning to children the “right to live.”
In August 1942, German soldiers deporting Jews opened the gates of the orphanage. Korczak told the children to put on clean, beautiful clothes, as if they were going to take part in a grand parade. On the road of arrest, the poet Władysław Szlengel, who witnessed the scene, said: “They wore clean clothes, as if strolling in a garden, enjoying the Sabbath.” Korczak did everything he could to remove fear from the children’s hearts, to bring them calm and joy. Korczak and the children walked out of the Warsaw Ghetto together, boarded a hot, crowded cattle car sprinkled with quicklime, and were sent to a Nazi extermination camp. Along the way, Korczak was offered refuge several times, but he repeatedly refused the chance to be saved alone. He said: “One must not abandon one’s own children.” In the end, he and the children died together in the gas chamber.
The Korczak memorial in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery preserves the moment when Korczak and the children walked toward death: Korczak moves forward against the wind, holding the child against his chest with one hand, and taking the hand of the child behind him with the other. Korczak’s face shows no fear. Aside from the subtle ripples raised by the wind, his clothing holds up his calmness and righteousness with perfect composure. The block-like, interconnected carving makes it seem as if the garments of Korczak and the children are joined together, sharing the same body. It is just as Korczak once said: “The world is not outside me, but within me.” He linked his own fate to the fate of the children, to the fate of the world, and from this came the responsibility and courage to bear a shared community. He could not abandon the children, because to abandon the children would be to abandon himself. If the road ends in no way out, then let the joined hands scatter fragrance over death.