A Light in the Darkness: Prologue–Part I

After people were gassed, the Nazis buried and later disinterred and burned their bodies.

Since every child is worthy of respect, it follows that every child is inherently precious, “a person born to be free.”

Children are people in their own right, not merely adults in the making. Adults must cherish them for themselves, not as living material to be sorted, shaped, molded, counted, cataloged, managed, regulated, regimented, bullied, programmed, trained, directed, commanded, worked, and indoctrinated.

In 1940, the Nazis caged Polish Jews in ghettos, segregated walled-in sections of cities meant as the starting point on the road to extermination.

When herded with his children into the Warsaw ghetto, the Old Doctor could have escaped with the help of gentile (non-Jewish) friends.

That other story raises profound questions. How could Germany—one of the modern world’s most cultured and advanced nations—have murdered millions of innocents?

Yet most psychiatrists who have studied him agree that Hitler was not crazy, at least not in the clinical sense.

Racism can be manifest in different ways and to different degrees.

Racism as an ideology, or worldview, is most sinister. As used in this book, the term ideology refers to a set of beliefs held as the master key to how human affairs work. Ideology makes every action fall into its proper place, like the splinters of a shattered mirror magically rejoined. An ideology explains all that has happened with people, is happening now, and will happen in the future. It is also a textbook on how to live, work, think, play, educate, and, yes, reproduce.

Thanks to Józef’s lucrative law practice, they lived in an elegantly furnished apartment in an upscale neighborhood.

Józef spent years in and out of mental hospitals. Family visits were an ordeal. Henryk heard screams and curses and saw wild-eyed people trussed in straitjackets, long-sleeved canvas garments used to bind the arms as a means of restraint.

An untitled poem, dark and brooding, captures his mood at this time.

Warsaw had the Old Town, a district dating from the Middle Ages, with grim tenements lining the Vistula River.

After receiving his medical degree in March 1905, he began his residency in the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital, which, though funded by Jewish charities, served all children.

The small orphanage that the organization already funded occupied a ramshackle building and was run by a poorly trained staff.

“I am,” she said, “neither an accomplished speaker nor a prolific writer. I can only work hard, though slowly and cautiously.”

In 1920, Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet dictator, invaded Poland, the gateway to Western Europe, as the first step in a world revolution. “The road to worldwide conflagration will run over the corpse of Poland,” he declared.

Korczak explained that he aimed to instill, by example, the attitude that all honest work is honorable.

The Court must defend the conscientious and hard-working that they should not be annoyed by the careless and idle.

The Court must see that there is order because disorder does the most harm to the good, the quiet and the conscientious.

Dom Sierot’s director believed in the innate goodness of children and in their ability to improve if given a chance and the proper guidance.

“He is a child who has not given up yet, but does not know who he is. A punitive sentence would adversely influence his future sense of self and his behavior. Because it is society that has failed him and made him behave this way, the Court should not condemn the criminal but the social structure.”

After finally crushing resistance in AD 135, Roman legions slaughtered much of the population and banished most of the survivors to lands across the Middle East and Europe. Jews call that event the Diaspora, or scattering.

It was said that Jews were children of Satan, demons who poisoned wells and spread plague. Supposedly, Jews were also vampires, using the blood of murdered Christian children when making matzo, the flat bread eaten during Passover, the festival celebrating the Israelites’ flight from Egyptian slavery. To this very day, the “blood libel” persists in some parts of Europe and the Middle East.

Mass hysteria ignited pogroms, organized assaults against a defenseless group of people. Before the rise of Adolf Hitler, the worst anti-Jewish pogrom occurred in 1648–1649, when mobs massacred more than a hundred thousand Jews in Poland and neighboring Ukraine.

Religious Jews, especially, refused to assimilate, to integrate into society by adopting its language, customs, and attitudes.

Most Polish Jews lived in a shtetl, a small town where they usually outnumbered gentiles. A traveler described a typical shtetl as “a jumble of wooden houses clustered higgledy-piggledy about a marketplace...with its shops, booths, tables, stands, butchers’ blocks.”

Young boys attended heder, an elementary school for Jewish children, and older boys attended yeshiva, a Jewish school of higher education.

Men wore a black caftan, a long-sleeved, ankle-length tunic, over their trousers, and a black skullcap called a yarmulke under a broad-brimmed hat.

Religious men did not shave; long beards and side curls twisted behind their ears signified piety.

They walked to neighborhood public schools, where instruction was entirely in Polish. As noted by Itzchak Belfer, a former resident of the orphans’ home, Dom Sierot “was run along secular lines.”

In 1936, Cardinal August Hlond, head of the Catholic Church in Poland, issued a pastoral letter titled “On Catholic Moral Principles.”

London’s Jewish Chronicle described Polish Jews as “a helpless minority sunk in squalid poverty and misery.”

Sholem Asch, an eminent Jewish writer based in New York, was appalled. Polish Jews were being slowly “buried alive,” Asch noted.

A British visitor called Jewish Warsaw “a teeming city of wretchedness.”

However, in the 1880s, the Turks allowed Zionists to set up their first kibbutz, or farming settlement. Then, as now, all property belonged to the kibbutz. In return for their labor, settlers received food, housing, education, and childcare instead of wages.

As an assimilated Jew, he thought his Polish brethren belonged in Poland, not struggling to adapt to so alien a place as Palestine.

Dejected and angry, Korczak took a time-out with another six-week visit to Ein Harod.

Korczak expressed his fears in a 1931 play titled The Senate of Madmen, which he called “a black farce.” To be sure, its mood was so dark that the play closed after only a few performances.

Barbaric sports, pagan dances and lewd songs are here again....The times [are] bad, my boy: Sadness, crime, premonitions of things to come.