Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish Jewish pediatrician, children's author and pedagogue born in 1878 or 1879. He was known as Pan Doktor, the Mr. Doctor, or Stary Doktor, the Old Doctor, and was an early advocate of children's rights, drafting a children's constitution in 1919. For many years he worked as principal of an orphanage in Warsaw. When the orphanage was forced to move into the city's Jewish ghetto he moved in with his orphans, despite pleas from friends to flee the country. In the Nazi deportation campaign of August 1942 the entire population of the institution was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp, where he was murdered.