“Love your child unconditionally, even when they are mediocre, unhappy or have grown up. Enjoy speaking to them while you can, because your child’s presence in your life is a feast that will not last forever,” is one of Janusz Korczak’s commandments, formulated by a man who became a legend during his lifetime, a classic children’s author, educator and founder of the children’s rights and full equality movement. Known as the Old Doctor, Korczak, real name Henryk Goldschmidt, adhered to the idea of every child’s right to be the way they are, to be treated with respect, to make mistakes, to freely express their thoughts. He called himself “a doctor by training, an educator by chance, an author by vocation and a psychologist by necessity.” He directed and supervised two orphanages in Warsaw, Our Home and Home for Orphans, where he created a “children’s republic” with children’s parliament, community court, and a newspaper... It was Korczak, who, despite having a chance to escape, decided to stay with his charges until the end and perished with them in the Nazi death camp at Treblinka in 1942.
The Polish Sejm honored the 70th anniversary of the outstanding educator and author’s death by proclaiming 2012 as the Year of Janusz Korczak, with its motto being Korczak’s maxim “There are no children, just people.” The Korczak Days were held in Kyiv from November 13 through 20, allowing the Kyivites to watch Korczak, a film by Andrzej Wajda that got a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, to attend It Happened So: Facts and a Few Fables about Janusz Korczak’s Life, a lecture by poet, translator, and literary critic Marianna Kyianovska, to go on a tour of the Korczak Museum, located at the Klov Lyceum No. 77, to look through the Ukrainian translations of his works, to see Korczak-themed posters exhibition, etc.
The Korczak Days ended with the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the outstanding educator and a true man. Created by the sculptor Ivan Hryhoriev, it has been placed on the wall at 47 Volodymyrska Street. Having been drafted as an army doctor and assigned to a hospital in Kyiv, Korczak lived there in 1918 while working on How to Love a Child, a fundamental pedagogical work of his. The President of Ukraine’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Yurii Pavlenko noted at the unveiling ceremony that most of the propositions to be found in this work went to form the basis of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN on November 20, 1989. Thus, yet another “spiritual link” appeared on the map of Kyiv that connects Ukraine and Poland.
