Holocaust Poem of the Day: Teaching His Children

“Everyone should know how to sketch in pencil what he wants to retain in memory. Not to be able to do that is to be illiterate.” – Janusz Korczak

In a sadly stern low voice

the doctor pried

splintered ineloquence

from his parched throat.

King Matthew’s words

failed to pass his tongue.

He was only able

to retain their attention

for an hour each day.

The children were getting older;

they were now the orators

telling one another stories.

Accounts they told

were without morals--

they were the recited

records of the ghetto.

Korczak knew he was slowly

losing his children.

Before occupation, the children

were disciplined for pencils

chewed in boredom.

Now, sounds of gnawing wood

were ignored. The doctor knew

that it could be the only thing

they would have to eat that day.

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.