Janusz Korczak

Polish-Jewish educator who revolutionized child rights during the Holocaust

Henryk Goldszmit (1878-1942), better known as Janusz Korczak, created the world's first children's republic in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. His Orphanage No. 2 became a living laboratory for democratic education where kids held parliamentary elections and published their own newspaper.

Decades before the UN Convention on Children's Rights, Korczak drafted "The Child's Right to Respect" (1929) advocating for legal protections unheard of at the time. He introduced peer counseling systems and child-led justice courts that inspired modern youth parliaments.

Despite multiple offers to escape the Holocaust, he chose to accompany 192 children to Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. His final march became a symbol of moral resistance, later commemorated in Israel's Yad Vashem memorial. Modern child psychology incorporates his Pedagogy of the Heart principles, making him the unacknowledged father of trauma-informed education.