Janusz Korczak

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1. 01

   Seventy years before the UN Convention, Korczak formulated the idea that a child is not an adult in preparation but a person with rights now — including the right to respect, to the present day, and to their own death.

   Cum să iubești un copil · 1919

   Childhood is not a waiting room for real life.

   Korczak, whose real name was Henryk Goldszmit, was a paediatrician, writer and director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. His orphanage ran on institutions we would today call radical: a children's court that also judged the staff, an elected parliament, its own newspaper. The court's code opened with hundreds of articles of forgiveness rather than punishment. The three rights he formulated explicitly are unsettling even now. The right to one's own death — meaning the right to risk, not to be prevented from living by the adult's fear that something might happen. The right to the present day — childhood is not a waiting room for real life. The right to be what one is — not the parent's unfulfilled project. In August 1942, when the orphanage was deported to Treblinka, he was offered personal rescue several times and refused; he went with his nearly two hundred children. That fact is not a biographical footnote to the work: it is the demonstration of the thesis that a child is a person, carried to its end.

   “There are no children, there are people; but with a different scale of concepts, a different store of experience, different drives, a different play of feelings.”

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