Holocaust Poem of the Day: Without Rest

“It has been a long time since I have blessed the world.

I tried to tonight. It didn’t work.” – Janusz Korczak

With eyes that rebuked sleep,

the doctor peered over

the piles of sleeping rags.

The dust-frosted window

framed the ghetto’s stove--

the weather, a cold oven,

baked a pan of water the

day before. The children’s

heavy slumber breaths

dripped off the walls.

Last night’s journal pages

floated in a smeared cloud,

the paper thicker than the roof.

No glow echoed

through the window--

the moon extinguished 

since occupation began.

A young boy rolled over,

opened his swollen

shadowed eyes, and

watched Korczak think

from across the room.

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.