Abstract
Janusz Korczak was born in 1878 into an assimilated Polish Jewish family in Warsaw.1 Korczak’s father was a lawyer. Unfortunately, his father developed mental illness and eventually ended up in an asylum, deserting his family, or so it seemed to the young boy. Rather like Dickens in Victorian London, social descent brought young Janusz into contact with the poor. Studying medicine, he chose paediatrics and met many Jewish orphans. He decided to dedicate his life to them and not have children of his own. If Janusz Korczak is remembered in the UK today, as he was in a recent novel,2 it is because of the heroic manner of his death. Having dedicated his life to the orphans, he did not abandon them when Poland was invaded in 1939. The Nazis built the walls of the ghetto around the half a million Jews in Warsaw. Although we know of several well-documented offers of relative safety on …
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Schedule a callMore From: The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners
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