Beloved doctor & humanitarian Janusz Korczak was born July 22, 1878
Janusz Korczak, Polish pediatrician, educator, children’s author and humanitarian was born July 22, 1878 in Warsaw.
Korczak was a highly respected and deeply loved doctor who dedicated his life to helping and protecting children. He established two orphanages in Warsaw, later moving them to the Ghetto when the Nazis invaded.
Janusz Korczak was the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish Jewish doctor and author. Goldszmit first gained fame in the early 1900s writing storybooks for children and childcare books for adults. Born into a highly assimilated Polish Jewish family in Warsaw in the late 1870s, Goldszmit trained as a pediatrician. He developed groundbreaking views on raising children, urging adults to treat them with both love and respect. As his reputation as an author grew, Goldszmit became known throughout Poland as Janusz Korczak.
Janusz Korczak | Holocaust Encyclopedia
When the soldiers came for the children and his staff, he refused offers of sanctuary from the Polish underground. He didn’t flee, instead stayed with his children, traveling with them to Treblinka, were he was murdered by the thugs in uniform.
Dr. Janusz Korczak and Children
Issued in 1978 by Poland
Designer: Tadeusz Konarski
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[
Last year’s stamp of the day featured William Lyon Mackenzie King.