The Old Doctor’s Cipher: The Evolution of Korczak’s Handwriting and His Post-War Decoders

When Pan Misza (Michał Wasserman Wróblewski)—a former ward and staff member of the Orphans' Home on Krochmalna Street—visited his friend from Krochmalna 92, Józek Halpern-Arnon, at Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz in Israel, he was handed a thick bundle of Korczak’s old letters with a request to carefully decipher and type them out. Here is one of those letters from August 1939 after being "decoded" by Pan Misza.

When Pan Misza (Michał Wasserman Wróblewski)—a former ward and staff member of the Orphans' Home on Krochmalna Street—visited his friend from Krochmalna 92, Józek Halpern-Arnon, at Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz in Israel, he was handed a thick bundle of Korczak’s old letters with a request to carefully decipher and type them out. Here is one of those letters from August 1939 waiting to be "decoded".

When Pan Misza (Michał Wasserman Wróblewski)—a former ward and staff member of the Orphans' Home on Krochmalna Street—visited his friend from Krochmalna 92, Józek Halpern-Arnon, at Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz in Israel, he was handed a thick bundle of Korczak’s old letters with a request to carefully decipher and type them out. Here is one of those letters from August 1939 after being "decoded" by Pan Misza.

A 1934 letter from Korczak to the former ward and educator, Józek Halpern-Arnon.
The letter is written in larger, more rounded letters.

It all began with a plea for help. As it turned out, Pan Józek (Yosef Arnon-Halpern) could not find anyone in Israel capable of deciphering Janusz Korczak's handwriting and typing the texts. Because of this, when my father, Pan Misza (Michał Wróblewski)—a former ward and staff member of the Orphans' Home on Krochmalna Street—visited his old friend from Krochmalna 92 at Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz in Israel, he was handed a thick bundle of Korczak’s original letters spanning the years 1932 to 1939. Pan Misza was a fast typist, but more importantly, he had absolutely no trouble reading Korczak’s handwriting. Personally, I don't have any difficulty reading them either, primarily because Korczak’s writing style heavily resembled the handwriting of my father, Pan Misza.

Janusz Korczak himself was most likely acutely aware that his handwritten script posed a monumental, almost insurmountable challenge to others. He knew very well that he wrote illegibly and chaotically, especially when in a rush. This deep awareness of his own graphological limitations directly shaped his daily creative routine. To ensure his texts could actually reach the printing press and be understood by typesetters, the Doctor rarely penned long manuscripts entirely by hand; instead, he preferred to dictate his works. His longtime secretary, Igor Newerly (known as Pan Jerzy), would take down Korczak’s words in shorthand on the spot and later meticulously type them out. Even later, inside the Warsaw Ghetto, his texts continued to be transcribed on typewriters. Without this close, daily secretarial collaboration—born out of the Doctor's own realization that his handwriting was too difficult to read—many of his brilliant pedagogical thoughts might never have seen the light of day.

However, the problem became far more severe in the case of his private correspondence, which Korczak could not dictate and had to write personally—often in a rush, on loose scraps of paper, balanced on his lap, or under poor lighting. When analyzing Janusz Korczak’s letters sent to his friends chronologically between 1932 and 1939, a distinct evolution in his graphology becomes visible.

During this period, his handwriting underwent noticeable changes: the lines became more fluid in places, and certain letters took on much more rounded, almost looped shapes. This evolution of style—likely the result of advancing age, exhaustion, or simply shifting writing habits under the pressure of haste—rendered Korczak’s script almost entirely illegible to outsiders by the late 1930s. It resembled a complex, deeply personal cipher.

It is precisely this evolutionary, rounded, and dense script from August 1939 that is visible in the original manuscript shown above—a letter addressed to Pan Józek at Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz. When this priceless collection of letters became stuck in Israel years later, the prophetic words in which Korczak described a drunk man shouting just a month before the outbreak of war—"Give me the revolver, call Hitler"—remained locked away from the world.

Thanks to this remarkable family connection and Pan Misza’s tytanic work at the typewriter, Korczak’s handwritten cipher was rescued, decoded, and preserved for global archives—standing as an undeniable, material piece of history.

Postscript: In his earliest letters to Józek Halpern (Arnon), Korczak formalizes his greetings, addressing him as "Dear Pan Józek" (Kochany Panie Józku). In the later correspondence, however, the formality falls away, transforming into a deeply affectionate "Dear Józek" (Kochany Józku).