|
CTC Family Guide 
Korczak's Children Family Guide 
A detailed description of the play, including things to do and think about, for parents to share with their families.
Return to Korczak's Children
A Synopsis of the Story
In the darkness just before dawn a man in a long gray overcoat talks with a very small girl. They are telling the story of Professor Zi who lives on planet Ro and has a vast telescope called an astropsychomicrometer. This marvelous device projects spiritual rays that can create peace and order everywhere in the universe...except one place. It can not touch that restless planet earth. Morning comes, and it is time to begin the day.
Inside the orphanage it is time for breakfast, a lean time in the Warsaw Ghetto. Janusz Korczak, watches Madame Steffa oversee the preparations. Korczak intervenes when two girls fight over a potato. They must settle their dispute in the Children’s Court, a jury system run entirely by the children themselves under Korszak’s supervision, and designed to bring moral order and a sense of dignity and responsibility to the lives of children.
Later in the morning the entire staff searches for two missing children. Suddenly the two culprits run in from outside safe and sound - and excited! They have been out all night long first reading, and then making copies of The Post Office, a play they would like the children in the orphanage to perform. Korczak must reluctantly refuse. It is too hectic to add rehearsals of a play to life in the orphanage. At this moment two members of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council which runs the Warsaw Ghetto for the Germans, visit Korczak and issue a warning. Korczak has been calling attention to himself and the children by buying things from smugglers. (It is the only way he can get necessary items, like shoes.) It is dangerous business to be noticed. When they leave,. Korczak tells the children to go ahead with their play. Perhaps it is defiant, but it will give the orphanage and the Ghetto a common project.
Under the direction of Esterka, a former child of the orphanage, rehearsals for The Post Office cause many squabbles. Who should play which part? What does the play mean? How should this scene go, or not go? Esterka, now a teacher and a member of the Jewish Resistance, struggles to keep order.
When the smuggler, Szulc, and Adek, the young boy who assists him, come to the orphanage to sell shoes and butter and other necessaries, Korczak asks them to add colorful pieces of fabric to the list. The children need it to create costumes and props for their play. Suddenly Major Kepp, a member of the German Gestapo, arrives and the meeting is over. Kepp claims to be an admirer of Korczak’s writing, but the true nature of his visit is a warning. There is talk of emptying the ghetto and moving all the Jews to work camps.
Children’s Court holds a session. Several cases are tried and resolved fairly, and thoughtfully. Adek, the smuggler’s boy arrives with beautiful fabric for the play, and the children are delighted. Before long, though, the older brother of one of the little girls comes in. He lived at the orphanage once, but now he lives and works with a labor group and has come to take his sister to be with him. Korczak urges him to let her stay in the shelter of the orphanage, but the young man will not. The children must say their goodbyes. Now Korczak learns that Szulc has disappeared. He has probably been arrested or killed, so Korczak offers Adek a place here in the orphanage with the other children. As night falls Korczak realizes that the forces of chaos and horror outside the walls of the orphanage are growing and will not be kept away much longer.
Yet another visitor comes to the orphanage the next morning. During rehearsal Newerly, a non-Jewish supporter of Korczak’s from outside the ghetto, tells him that there are many rumors of deportations of Jews from the ghetto. No one has ever returned from a work camp, or even been heard from again. Newerly is frightened for Korczak and offers him false identity papers so that he can escape. Korczak will not even consider leaving the children. Later that day when a stranger, an Evaluator, barges in and begins measuring the size and capacity of the building, it becomes all too apparent that the danger is immediate.
The evening of the play arrives. The whole Ghetto community gathers to see the children perform the The Post Office, and it is a huge success, and thrilling for the children. Late in the night as the children sleep, Korczak catches Adek leaving the orphanage with books and medicine he has stolen. The other children wake up and organize their court immediately. Theft is a serious crime. Theft in their midst is so serious that they decide Adek should be handed over to the police. Korczak argues for banishment, as he knows the children’s sentence would result in Adek’s death. Korczak watches Adek leave the orphanage knowing that even hiding from the police, the boy is quite possibly safer outside the orphanage than inside it.
The next morning as the children once again prepare for breakfast, a child tells Korczak that Esterka has been arrested. Major Kepp arrives on the heels of this news, and Korczak implores him to use whatever influence he has to secure Esterka’s release. Kepp must tell Korczak, then, that the Germans have rounded up all the radicals, not just Esterka, and that groups of them are being shot in the police yard. The news is very bad. The Chairman of the Jewish Council has killed himself in the night after receiving orders to evacuate the ghetto. This is the last moment Korczak will have to escape. Kepp wonders if the doctor remembers him - years ago as a boy, he was an orphan in one of Korczak’s orphanages in Poland. He has a car parked in the alley and has come to help Korczak escape. A whistle blows, doors are flung open and a Nazi official enters with three armed soldiers. The official sends Major Kepp away and tells Korczak that he has five minutes to muster his charges - 171 children and 6 adults - into the courtyard of the building. They are to be taken to the train station. The teachers gather the children, the soldiers scour the building, and find one last tiny child they carry with them. As they leave, the children beg Korczak to tell them the story again and yet again, of Dr. Zi, Planet Ro, and the telescope that emits rays of peace.
| THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY |
 In The Post Office is a gentle allegory about death that celebrates hope, especially the hope of a child. In it, a very sick little boy has been told by his doctor that he must stay inside his room. An amazing pageant of people from all walks of life pass by his window, until finally last of all, comes the king’s postman. He brings with him not only a letter from the king, but also death.Korczak asks several children what the play means, and each has his or her own meaning. Quite likely, you will too. |
|
| BY THE PLAYWRIGHT, JEFFREY HATCHER |
Janusz Korczak was born Henryk Goldszmit in Poland in 1878. He was a doctor, an author, a teacher, and the founder of one of the most progressively minded orphanages in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. He was Polish, a highly assimilated Jew in cosmopolitan Warsaw. And he died in the concentration camp at Treblinka in 1942, along with every one of his orphan children.
Korczak’s Children is a play for children. It is not for the very young, but it is for children old enough to understand. Children are the weakest and most innocent victims of war, often by way of what is now called “collateral damage,” but the deaths of Korczak and his orphans was not the result of stray shells or bullets. Their deaths were coolly deliberated. It is an atrocity, part of the world’s history and the history of children. And while there is everything to mourn in the story, it is also a testament to goodness, decency and the determination of Korczak and his children. |
|
| WHAT WAS THE WARSAW GHETTO? |
|
In 1940 the Nazis ordered that “Jewish residential quarters” were to be set up in Warsaw. The Ghetto occupied less than 3% of the city and yet was used to hold over 30% of the population. More than 100,000 non-Jewish residents were forced to move out, and twice that number of Jews were moved in. Walls topped with jagged glass and barbed wire were built around the area (at the resident’s expense), and very little food, water, and necessary items, like soap and matches, were allowed in. Of the 450,000 Jews who lived there, only three quarters survived to be deported to concentration camps like Treblinka. This was the site of Korczak’s orphanage. |
|
| RELATED RESOURCES |
BOOKS : There are many good books which introduce children to the Holocaust through the experiences of other children. Here are some very good ones for children 8 and over:
Behind the Bedroom Wall, by Laura E. Williams. A German girl discovers her parents are hiding a Jewish family’s home and wrestles with what she should do about it.
Child of the Warsaw Ghetto, by David A. Adler. The story of one of the boys who lived in Korczak’s orphanage.
The Devil’s Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen. A modern Jewish girl, bored with her family’s Seder traditions, is transported through time to a ghetto in 1940’s Poland.
Elizabeth, by Clair A. Nivola. A picture book about a girl in Germany who leaves behind a doll when she flees the country, only to find it later in America.
Fireflies in the Dark the Story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the Children of Terrezin, by Susan Goldman Rubin. An art teacher’s collection of work done by children living in the Terezin concentration camp.
I Am A Star - Child of the Holocaust, by Inge Auerbacker. The story of hiding from the Nazis.
My Secret Camera - Life in the Lodz Ghetto, by Frank Dabba Smith. Photographs taken secretly by Medel Grossman while he lived in the Lodz Ghetto.
Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry. A Danish family resists German orders and smuggle a 10 year old Jewish girl out of the country.
WEBSITE :
This site is about Janusz Korczak, born Henryk Goldszmit in Poland in 1878. http://korczak.com/Biography/kap-1who.htm |
|
Return to Korczak's Children
|
