Janusz Korczak
Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit[1] (22 July 1878 or 1879 – 7 August 1942),[2] was a Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, children's author and pedagogue known as Pan Doktor ("Mr. Doctor") or Stary Doktor ("Old Doctor"). He was an early children's rights advocate, in 1919 drafting a children's constitution.
Janusz Korczak
c. 7 August 1942 (aged 64)
Children's author, humanitarian, pediatrician, child pedagogue and defender of children's rights
After spending many years working as a principal of an orphanage in Warsaw, he refused sanctuary repeatedly and stayed with his orphans when the entire population of the institution was sent from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp during the Grossaktion Warschau of 1942.[3]
Korczak is commemorated in a number of monuments and plaques in Poland, mainly in Warsaw.[33] The best known of them is the cenotaph located at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery, which serves as his symbolic grave. It is a monumental sculpture of Korczak leading his children to the trains. Created originally by Mieczysław Smorczewski in 1982,[34] the monument was recast in bronze in 2002. The original was re-erected at the boarding school for children with special needs in Borzęciczki, which is named after Janusz Korczak.[35]
However, the Janusz Korczak Monument in Warsaw set up in the Świętokrzyski Park in 2006 is not only the largest but also, due to its very convenient location, the most frequently visited by school trips and tourists monument commemorating Korczak. Every year, around June 1, on Children's Day, trips from Warsaw schools go to the monument.[36]
Due to decommunization policies, the Nikolay Bauman street in Kyiv, Ukraine was renamed after Korczak in 2016.[37]
A minor planet, 2163 Korczak, is named after him.[38]
In 2023, the Janusz Korczak hospitalization unit in the Department of General Pediatrics and Pediatric Infectious Diseases of the Necker-Enfants Malades hospital at the Assistance-Publique Hôpitaux de Paris in France was created.