Both Joanna Olczak-Ronikier in her book Korczak: A Biography (2002) and Magdalena Kicińska in her biography Pani Stefa (2015) stand completely helpless before a fundamental question: why exactly did Stefania Wilczyńska travel back to Warsaw in May 1939? Both authors entirely abandon any rigorous analysis of Stefa’s private and social relations during that period, leaving the reader with a mere two or three banal sentences based on sheer speculation.
Olczak-Ronikier offers two unstable versions. The first—that Stefa was allegedly "alarmed by the Doctor's poor condition" and wanted to "help him pack his bags before leaving"—is rendered utterly naive when confronted with the actual calendar of Korczak’s titanic workload throughout 1938–1939. A man who, at that very time, treats pediatric patients at 8 Złota Street under the telephone number 98-620, broadcasts a 15-episode radio series, publishes books, and writes major essays for the quarterly journal Szkoła Specjalna, does not require a nanny to pack his suitcases.
The second version, heavily favored by hagiographers as an untouchable truth, leans on a supposed "calling of motherhood"—the sentiment that she felt needed by the children at the orphanage—and quotes her legendary words: “My children are in Warsaw. That is my place” (Kicińska 2015). And it is precisely here that the most ruthless, logical historical argument must be deployed.
If we were to uncritically accept this hagiographic myth—that Stefa cut short her permanent residency in Palestine because her heart was breaking with longing for her wards—then her very first, immediate instinct upon landing in Poland in May 1939 would have been to pack a bag and head straight out with them after June 30 (the end of the school year) to the summer camp in Gocławek, to finally embrace those "longed-for children."
Yet the documents, and most importantly Janusz Korczak's Letter No. 14 dated August 2, 1939 (addressed to Józek Arnon), paint a completely different picture. Korczak describes the grueling, daily routine of the Gocławek camp in July in meticulous detail:
“July was charming. 20 new children to decipher [...] I slept in isolation with the children suffering from measles; when completely exhausted I finally had to fall asleep, I would tell myself: 'what a pity, just 10 more minutes...'”
In this entire lengthy, intimate, and granular report, where the Old Doctor alone, exhausted and heavy-hearted, stays awake at night tending to children with measles, there is not a single mention of Pani Stefa's presence! Korczak does not place her at Gocławek because she simply was not there. Furthermore, after over a year of total absence from Warsaw, Stefa encountered an entirely new rotation of wards upon her arrival at Krochmalna Street—meaning she returned to children she did not even know for the most part.
It is a documented fact that prior to her emigration, Stefa had formally closed her chapter at Krochmalna, left her position there, and moved into her own private apartment in the Wola district. Where exactly she stayed in May 1939—given that the legal status of her Wola apartment might have already been altered due to her upcoming Aliyah—remains a blank space that contemporary biographers fail to investigate.
Her journey from Kibbutz Ein Harod to Warsaw in May 1939 was therefore a complex, administrative visit intended for final liquidation, not a sentimental return to the nest. Having received official permission to permanently settle in Ein Harod, Stefa had to personally wind down her Polish property, housing, and tax affairs before the planned autumn departure.
I must reiterate a fundamental truth with absolute clarity: in the summer of 1939, nobody—not the Polish government, not Korczak, and certainly not Wilczyńska herself—anticipated the outbreak of war at that exact moment, on September 1, 1939. Everyone lived with the perspective of a normal autumn. The Doctor's handwritten words in his letter to Gilead on August 22, 1939, stand as the ultimate proof: “I do not want you to write back to me if we are to see each other.” Both educators were fully packed and expecting an autumn flight to Tel Aviv. It was the sudden, brutal explosion of the global apocalypse on September 1 that ruthlessly shifted the climate, permanently sealing the borders and transforming a routine, short administrative visit into a trap with no escape.
