Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit (born 1878 or 1879, died 1942), was a Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, children's author and pedagogue, known as Pan Doktor or Stary Doktor, Mr. Doctor or Old Doctor. He studied medicine at the University of Warsaw, served as a military doctor in the Russo-Japanese War, and then worked as a pediatrician at the Bersohns and Baumans Children's Hospital in Warsaw from 1905 to 1912. In 1911 he became director of Dom Sierot, an orphanage of his own design for Jewish children in Warsaw, and he was an early children's rights advocate who drafted a children's constitution in 1919. When the orphanage was forced into the Warsaw ghetto he moved in with the children, and in 1942 he was murdered with them when the institution was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. This entry records what he held and did; it is not medical advice.