GHETTO DIARY (Pamietnik z getta)

Diary by Janusz Korczak, 1978

Janusz Korczak's Ghetto Diary is remarkable both for its eloquence and for its insight. In the diary, which was published in English translation in 1978, Korczak's devotion to the orphans of the Warsaw Ghetto reveals itself in a number of ways. What was most disturbing to him was that the sight of dead children had become part of the ghetto landscape. He recalled, for instance, a group of youngsters playing in the ghetto streets, while nearby the body of a dead boy was lying in the gutter. "At one point," he wrote, "they note the body, move a few steps to the side, go on playing." The dead boy lying in the street added to Korczak's vision of dead children, until his nights were haunted by a nightmare: "Bodies of dead children. One dead child in a bucket. Another skinned, lying on the boards in the mortuary, clearly still breathing." When dead children became commonplace, children were no longer children. Korczak underscores this overturning of existence when he comments that his orphanage has turned into a home for the elderly. Thus, Korczak realizes a definitive dimension of the Nazis' extermination project: they set out to annihilate not only children but also the very image and essence of the child.

Devoted as he was to the children, Korczak incorporated texts from their diaries into his own. In keeping with his lifelong commitment to make the children heard, Korczak demonstrated the profundity of the children's outcry by including lines from their notebooks such as this one: "A widow sits at home and weeps. Perhaps her older son will bring something from smuggling. She does not know that a gendarme has shot her son dead." Here is another example: "That siddur [prayer book] which I want to have bound is a souvenir since it belonged to my brother, who died, and it was sent to him for the day of his bar mitzvah by his brother in Palestine." In these passages Korczak shows that during the Holocaust the tearing of the essence from the child was a tearing of the child from mothers and brothers, from prayers and memory. Restoring the outcry of the child by adding it to his own outcry, Korczak attempts to restore at least the testimony to that tearing.

As he indicated in the entry for July 15, 1942, Korczak also shared his diary with the children: "The children moon about. Only the outer appearances are normal. Underneath lurks weariness, discouragement, anger, mutiny, mistrust, resentment, longing. The seriousness of their diaries hurts. In response to their confidence, I share mine with them as an equal." Sharing his diary with the children, Korczak shared both the responsibility and the helplessness in the face of the death that surrounded them. In an entry from July 1942, for example, he wrote, "There are problems that lie, like bloodstained rags, right across the sidewalk. People cross to the other side of the street or turn their eyes away in order not to see. I do the same." As Korczak's diary assumes a confessional tone, his humanity and his humility unfold to the extent that his sense of shame deepens. His greatest shame was that he remained alive in the face of so much death, as he saw the finest human beings among the first to fall. Indeed, he knew that when children died before their elders, the world had been turned on end. Perhaps this was where the Nazis attained their most devastating victory: deeming the very life of the Jew to be criminal, they led the Jew to feel guilty for being alive.

And yet this assault on life's substance made Korczak's daily testimony to life's dearness a matter of even greater urgency. Hearing shots fired, for example, as he wrote on the night of 21 July 1942, he wondered whether his windows were sufficiently blacked out to hide his "crime" of writing. "But I do not stop writing," he asserts. "On the contrary: it [the shooting] sharpens (a single thought) the thought." Lamenting what the Nazis had made of life, Korczak remained committed to the dearness of life. In the world created by the Nazis, however, the person who persisted in being a witness to life was often condemned to death for his persistence. So it happened with Korczak. Although in one of his last entries he struggled in vain to bless the world, he did not act in vain when he joined the children in the sealed train to Treblinka. The man who was a spokesman for the children of the ghetto lived by his words and died by them.

—David Patterson