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| Paulina Appenszlak photo from her pre-war journalist card and Pan Misza (Michal Wasserman Wróblewski) in September 1944, when in the Polish Army after liberating Praga. |
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| Korczak´s wartime memoirs. On October 1, 1943, in the pages of the Jerusalem political and literary biweekly „W drodze” (Year 1, No. 13), one of the absolute first post-mortem memoirs appeared, written by the prominent Warsaw journalist Paulina Appenszlak (left). Exactly half a year after Appenszlak's text, as a Polish officer with a rifle in his hand, Korczak´s co-worker, Pan Misza (Wasserman Wróblewski) published an article in „Nowe Widnokręgi” (April 15, 1944, Year 4, No. 8) subtitled "Memoirs of the Last Years of Life"). |
Writing about Janusz Korczak in the realities of the 21st century is inevitably burdened with post-war pathos, monumental hagiography, and myths that have accumulated over decades. The common narrative is often dominated by the sheer drama of the deportation to the Treblinka death camp—the final journey through the streets of the sweltering Warsaw Ghetto and the boarding of the cattle cars at the Umschlagplatz. Meanwhile, much earlier, during the ongoing Second World War and the Holocaust, when the smoke over the extermination camps had not yet cleared, two unique articles were published. They were written by people who knew the Old Doctor personally and intimately, alongside the stark realities of the ghetto and the daily struggle for the survival of the children in the Orphans' Home.
On October 1, 1943, in the pages of the Jerusalem political and literary biweekly „W drodze” (Year 1, No. 13), one of the absolute first post-mortem memoirs appeared, written by the prominent Warsaw journalist Paulina Appenszlak. She had managed to leave Poland in the very first days of the German occupation. After reaching Tel Aviv, deeply moved by the first horrific news of the ghetto's liquidation, she began writing down her memoirs, which soon became the foundation for the first wartime biography of Korczak, titled „Doktór pozostał” ("The Doctor Remained", Tel Aviv, 1944). In her 1943 Jerusalem article, sketching the grim reality of the Orphans' Home, Appenszlak made a profoundly honest confession about the moral paralysis and distance she, as a mature woman and editor, felt before the Doctor's austere, monastic gaze in Warsaw. She remembered him as a secular monk whose attic room on Krochmalna Street resembled a monastic cell, and whose silence acted upon adults as a living pang of conscience.
An almost identical portrait, though painted from a completely different frontline perspective, was sketched by Michał Wróblewski („Pan Misza”). Pan Misza's wartime fate has been meticulously documented in other chapters of this book; at this point, the crucial fact is that after his dramatic escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, he joined the ranks of the 1st Polish Army. Exactly half a year after Appenszlak's text, as a Polish officer with a rifle in his hand, Pan Misza published an article in Moscow's „Nowe Widnokręgi” (April 15, 1944, Year 4, No. 8) subtitled „Wspomnienia z ostatnich lat życia” ("Memoirs of the Last Years of Life"). Much like the Jerusalem publicist, Pan Misza opened with the dramatic question: “Monk or hermit?”, unerringly invoking the same ascetic archetype of the Doctor in his working green apron. As an educator at the Orphans' Home and an eyewitness to Korczak's struggle for existence, he provided the official, harrowing number of 239 murdered children of the Orphans' Home—a number he had systematically reported earlier to the CENTOS organization, which managed the allocation of funds, food, and medicine for the orphanages inside the ghetto.
At the exact same time his account of the "Monk" was being printed in Moscow, Pan Misza was holding a weapon as a frontline soldier. As the only witness-educator to survive and enter the ruins of the capital with the army, he must have felt an unimaginable shock. A few months earlier, in September 1944, he had personally stood on the grounds of the Różyczka Colony in Gocławek, and subsequently, on January 17, 1945, in front of the burned-out, empty building of the Orphans' Home at 92 Krochmalna Street. These memoirs show how, during the very same tragic period, from two opposite ends of a warring world, the exact same Korczakian truth demanded a voice through the mouths of a journalist and a soldier.
Parallel to these tragic accounts of the Doctor's death, persistent rumors of his alleged survival circulated throughout occupied Europe and beyond for nearly three years. An example of this wartime hope, which fed on the lack of precise information, is the New York publication of the English translation of King Matt the First (Matthew the Young King), prepared by Marian Kister, the owner of the pre-war Warsaw publishing house „Rój”. In January 1945, during the very same days Pan Misza was entering the ruined streets of Warsaw, an unconfirmed, sensational dispatch from the Overseas News Agency reached New York. It claimed that the Polish underground had managed to rescue Korczak from the death train at the last moment and that he was hiding safely in liberated Lublin. Deeply moved by this news, Kister made an immediate decision: he ordered the distribution of the already completed book to be halted and had a special, blue page pasted into every copy, addressed to the American reader. The content of this note expressed a fragile, desperate hope that the Doctor had survived, according to news from one of the press agencies. Today, we know that this was merely a tragic illusion of the era of the furnaces.
The full texts of these historical documents and the records of the wartime press from 1943–1945 form an invaluable, raw foundation upon which the reconstruction of those days rests.
