What stands today at 47 Volodymyrska Street? Looking at this grand Kyiv building through Google Street View, one's eye is immediately drawn to the Polish and European Union flags flying proudly on the facade. This is no coincidence. Within the very walls that witnessed Janusz Korczak’s grueling educational and medical labors during WWI, now resides the Polish Institute in Kyiv—an official diplomatic institution. The 2012 bronze commemorative plaque, while shielded from the direct street view as it is mounted discreetly inside the entrance archway, stands guard at the gates of this cultural oasis. History has come full circle.
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| The imprint of great history in the heart of Ukraine. The bronze commemorative plaque sculpted by Ivan Hryhoriev on the facade of the tenement house at 47 Volodymyrska Street in Kyiv. It was here, working under extreme wartime conditions with Polish orphans, that Janusz Korczak drafted the foundations of his legendary work "How to Love a Child". However, this address must be clearly distinguished from Maryna Falska's main headquarters, where she ran her Educational Home for Boys on Instytutska Street, where Korczak was a constant mentor. |
The Kyivan Roots of "Nasz Dom": What Official Biographies of Korczak and Falska Conceal
A 1919 military CV, a letter to Hadaska, and the hidden addresses of Volodymyrska and Instytutska Streets unlock a profound secret from 1915–1919.
The collaboration between Janusz Korczak and Maryna Falska is a fascinating subject, as their relationship was born and forged in extreme, wartime conditions. During World War I, fate brought both of them to Kyiv. Janusz Korczak found himself there as a mobilized field physician of the Tsarist Army, working in a military hospital and lazarets near the front. Maryna Falska (then widowed and deeply affected by the loss of her infant daughter) decided to devote herself to caring for the most vulnerable, assuming the directorship of the Educational Home for Boys on Instytutska Street in Kyiv. It was a shelter and boarding house for about 60 Polish boys—mostly war orphans and refugees who had come to the city to learn a trade. Korczak, having short leaves from his hospital work, began to visit this home. Over time, he became its permanent, though irregular, guest and mentor.
Janusz Korczak provided an official, bureaucratic outline of this period in his military CV dated June 15, 1919:
“Called up into the army, for 4 years I was a junior physician at the field lazaret of the 4th Division of the 5th Corps. – Discharged due to illness, for a certain time I was a physician at the shelters for displaced children (Landowners' Union).”
For a modern reader, the fact that Janusz Korczak returned to Poland and the Orphans' Home only in mid-1919—even though World War I formally ended in November 1918—might seem strange. Kyiv during that time, however, became a bloody trap, cut off from the West by the Russian Civil War and the onset of the Polish-Soviet War.
Alongside the official military blockades and railway paralysis, there is another, deeply human hypothesis that could explain the Doctor’s delay—private and romantic matters. In Kyiv, an intimate alliance of two deeply wounded souls was being born. Falska, enduring immense grief over the loss of her baby daughter, found in Korczak not only a brilliant educator but her closest spiritual support. Care for Maryna and the desire to safeguard her fate might have kept the Doctor in Ukraine much longer. It is highly probable that Korczak first helped Falska safely evacuate to Warsaw to begin laying the groundwork for the future Nasz Dom, while he remained behind to fully discharge his grueling obligations to the remaining children.
The true, painful picture of those days is exposed in a letter Janusz Korczak wrote near the very end of his life in the Warsaw Ghetto—addressed to Hadaska (Hadasa Kaufman) on March 25, 1942. This letter, saved from the Orphans' Home after the deportation by my father, Pan Misza, strips away the polished veneer of the Kyivan period. Discharged from the front due to illness, the Doctor, instead of resting, entered the very center of a murderous struggle against chaos, pestilence, and hunger. In his letter to Hadaska, he traveled back in memory to the conditions outside Kyiv.
In his March 1942 letter to Hadaska, Korczak detailed his grueling 16-hour days caring for displaced children in Kyiv amidst severe hunger, cold, and foraging for firewood under dangerous conditions. He also confessed to his personal struggles with biological limits and hunger, noting moments when he had to secretly eat bread to maintain his strength. You can find the full excerpts and letters in the referenced document.
„Powierzono mi cztery internaty dla dzieci zbłąkanych na froncie i wysiedlonych. Rozmieszczone w chałupach i willach pod Kijowem.Mój dzień roboczy trwał 16 godzin. Po ciemku, brnąc po kolana w śniegu, dwa razy obchodziłem teren. – Zakraplałem zaropiałe oczy, jodynowałem zaświerzbioną skórę, opatrywałem wrzody. – Byłem głodny.Głodne były dzieci. Nic prócz ryby suszonej; a drzewo kradliśmy w lesie z chłopcami. Gajowy strzelał do nas śrutem jak na wrony – burżuazyjny jeszcze gajowy w komunistycznym już lesie.”
In a world where children fed exclusively on dried fish, stole kindling, and fled buckshot from a gamekeeper's gun, the introduction of a peer court or self-governance on Instytutska and Volodymyrska streets was no idealistic whim. It was a relentless battle against brutalization and ferality, the sole barrier shielding war orphans from self-destruction.
When Maryna Falska opened the first modest doors of Nasz Dom in Pruszków in November 1919, both carried forward that same pioneering model forged in Ukrainian hunger and cold. The communion of these monumental experiences—both professional and deeply private—rendered their alliance unbreakable, ensuring that the system forged in hunger survived the test of time and eventually moved to its model home in Warsaw's Bielany.
