The New Opportunities in Korczakian Documentary Research. Love and Friendship Among Pupils in the Orphans’ Home

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to show an example of the new opportunities in Korczakian research. They have arisen due to the development of digital history and recently donated or hitherto unused archival resources. The article also adopts the perspective of deepening the knowledge of those aspects of the Korczak research field that is not directly related to Janusz Korczak, his biography and pedagogy. I consider it important to explore the topics and biographies of people around Korczak, not only Stefania Wilczyńska, but also children, educators or staff. The more complete the picture of Korczak’s universe, the better we will understand the multidirectional influences and connections between individuals and topics. My ambition was also to introduce non-Polish-speaking researchers to Korczak source materials that are rarely translated from Polish. My preliminary research, based on almost unknown sources from the archives of Lohamei Ha’Getaot in Israel (Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives), served as an example of how to take advantage of new opportunities. I adopted a microhistorical approach and analyzed personal documents, primarily letters of the pupils of the Orphans’ Home from 1938/1939–1941. The content of the sources made it possible to look at love and friendship relationships among the teenagers in the Orphans’ Home. I also discuss the topics of love and friendship in the pedagogical context of Janusz Korczak’s approach. Their intimate stories complement the knowledge of the history and functioning of the Orphans’ Home that we get from Korczak’s writings, Wilczyńska’s texts and other documents. In turn, the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills that can be captured in the sources I examined allow us to assume that also in the aspect of love and friendship relations, we can capture the positive impact of the Orphans’ Home on its pupils.