The Orphaned Self: The Work and Life of Janusz Korczak

"War is an abomination. Especially because no one reports how many children are hungry, ill-treated, and left without protection," Janusz Korczak wrote in 1905 after his conscription as a medical officer into the Czar's Imperial Army during the Russo-Japanese War (Lifton 41). Though either ignored or consigned to the margin of historical trauma, children are nevertheless expected to become socialized in the patterns of their civilization, with the result that they inevitably repeat its neuroses. Up to the last moment of his life, Janusz Korczak worked to overcome the literal and felt abandonment of the child by educating children in their personal rights and ethical responsibilities.

Betty Jean Lifton enables the specialist and general reader to comprehend the significance of the life and work of this difficult and good man. Mark Bernheim introduces young readers to Korczak's story. Korczak's King Matt the First, a novel for children, is to a great extent an autobiographical fantasy. Korczak's search for meaning through his life's work sprang from a profoundly felt inner sense of deprivation. A summary of his life is insufficient, but does provide the reader with a thread through the complex and suggestive material offered in the three works under review.

Janusz Korczak was born Henryk Goldszmit on July 22, 1878 or 1879 in a Poland nonexistent as a nation and divided among three empires. His father, Josef Goldszmit, a nonreligious Jew, scholar, and prominent lawyer in Warsaw, provided his wife, Cecylia Gebicka, and their children Henryk and Anna, with the affluent "life of the drawing room" until he experienced a succession of mental breakdowns between 1884 and 1889 that eventually led to his death, perhaps by suicide, and left his family in much reduced circumstances. Years later, during a visit to England in 1911, Korczak decided "with sudden clarity that the son of a madman, 'a slave who is a Polish Jew under Russian occupation,' had no right to bring a child into the world," a realization that made him feel as if he had " 'committed suicide' " (65-66).

His intellectual, professional, imaginative, and creative life-work developed and expressed itself through a double persona: there was Henryk Goldszmit, the medical student who lived with his widowed mother, and Janusz Korczak, the writer who based his first novel, Children of the Street, on his observations of the Warsaw slums and his second, Child of the Drawing Room, on a boy who tried to conform to his parents' idea of him until he felt he "lost his soul." When he returned from the Russo-Japanese War, he found his literary fame often disrupting his work at the Warsaw Children's Hospital where parents of his private patients were eager to meet the doctor who wrote novels. After seven years, he decided in 1912 to give up medicine in order to found and to administer the Orphans' Home for Jewish children (laws prohibited an integrated orphanage), dedicated to the physical and psychological well-being of children.

Conscripted again to serve as a doctor in World War I and, immediately following that, in the Polish-Soviet conflict, he had to leave the fledgling institution under the care of Stefania Wilczynska, "Madame Stefa," his talented co-worker and loyal supporter. He emerged from the turmoil of the First World War with the manuscript How to Love a Child. The end of the Polish-Soviet War (and the beginning of Poland's independence) left him orphaned—his mother died of typhus, caught while she nursed him for that disease. He felt he had killed her. The possibility of suicide remained always with him, even during the productive decade beginning in 1920.

His education of children included the teaching of self-governance through the establishment of a republic...