Stone in honor of Janusz Korczak
Individual stone honors
Janusz Korczak
The photo above shows a stone in the
symbolic cemetery at Treblinka which was placed there in honor
of Janusz Korczak, the only person to have his name on a stone.
There are 17,000 stones in the symbolic cemetery and 700 of them
represent the Jewish communities in Poland that were destroyed
in the Holocaust. Most of the stones are small and have no writing
on them. In the foreground of the photo is the stone for the
victims from the town of Staszow in Poland.
Korczak was a pseudonym for Dr. Henryk
Goldzmit. He was a teacher and a social worker who ran an orphanage
in Warsaw. He also did a weekly radio show for children, and
wrote a series of children's books in which the central character
was a boy king named King Matt. In July 1942, he turned down
the opportunity to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, and instead
accompanied his orphans to Treblinka where he was murdered in
the gas chamber along with them. The bodies of the 800,000 murdered
Jews were at first buried inside the camp, but were later dug
up and burned in order to destroy all evidence of what happened
at the Treblinka death camp.
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum, Korczak marched along with his 192 orphans to the Umschlagplatz
in Warsaw when the Jews were ordered to report for deportation
to the East. One child was carrying the flag of King Matt with
the Zionist flag on the other side of it. The Zionist flag is
now the blue and white flag of Israel.
This page was last updated February 2006
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