Good people - Janusz Korczak

 This is the first of a sub-list of people that really struck me as just being good. People who know the difference between right and wrong and always choose correctly.

Now there are a number of living people who I would put on that category too, but so as to not embarrass the living I would just like to add Cro from the recently living. She had a moral compass that was unwavering, even if it was to her disbenefit. That's one reason I am so disappointed by people who can use the lightest pretext to push down the moral scales in their favour. It's not that it's particularly difficult to be good; you just have to really want to do it and follow what you know is right rather than what is easiest or most convenient.

But historical good people are too dead to be embarrassed by this so I will tell you about Janusz Korczak. He was born Henryk Goldszmit in Poland in 1878, and trained as a doctor. Because of the anti-semitism that was common in the country at the time he changed his name to the one by which he is now known, and he began to take a special interest in the care and rights of children.

He wrote several books and was a well-known and early promoter of the idea that children have rights, rather than just being little possessions of their parents, like a car or a wardrobe. He even had a radio programme in Poland in the 1930s promoting these ideas. And he wrote several books for children, the best known of which, 'King Matt', is about a child who becomes king and has to make good choices about how to rule his kingdom.

Korczak became a director in 1912 of the Dom Sierot in Warsaw, an orphanage for Jewish children. He stayed in this role for the rest of his life, trying to use the ideas of empowerment by giving more control to the children in his care. He was quite forward-thinking in many areas, and Art was always a key part of the children's education. 

When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 he stayed with the orphanage as it became part of the Warsaw ghetto. He stayed through changes of building, taking all the children with him to the new location, and providing the stability they needed as all normal life started to fall apart around them

Finally, on 6th August, 1942, when the Nazis arrived to take all the children away to the Treblinka extermination camp, Korczak refused the offers of escape and sanctuary which he had been given - he was after all a nationally-known authority - and he marched out at the head of his squadron of little travellers, head held high and in their smartest clothes. These are quoted as his final words:

"You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this"

The children and Korczak were almost certainly exterminated immediately upon their arrival. 

There are a number of eyewitness accounts of the departure from the orphanage. This is one of them:

Janusz Korczak was marching, his head bent forward, holding the hand of a child, without a hat, a leather belt around his waist, and wearing high boots. A few nurses were followed by two hundred children, dressed in clean and meticulously cared for clothes, as they were being carried to the altar.

— Ghetto eyewitness, Joshua Perle^[20]