Posted on 08/05/2020 7:58:55 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On August 6, 1942, in the Warsaw Ghetto, Polish/Jewish hero Janusz Korczak marched with his orphans to the death trains and into legend. The man, his activities in the ghetto, and above all his famed final walk to the Umschlagplatz, are mentioned in many books and memoirs about the ghetto.
The story of his final days also has been told many times in books for children such as The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak, A Hero and the Holocaust: The Story of Janusz Korczak and his Children, and Janusz Korczak’s Children.
However, one of the former residents of his orphanage said, “I don’t want to talk about the dead Korczak, but the living one.”
The living Korczak’s story is told in Betty Lifton’s award-winning biography The King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak.
Korczak’s real name was Henryk Goldschmidt. He took the name Janusz Korczak (pronounced “ya-nish kor-chok”) for his writing and it wound up taking over his entire life, a la Mark Twain....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Another one is Chiune Sugihara and his wife..They wrote 6,000 visas for Jews to get out through japan..He had asked Japan if he could write the visas and they said no..He wrote them anyway..Because of him,there are 100,000 descendants of those 6,000 Jews...
I never remember hearing this story before. Thank you for posting it.
Thank you for this. It helps put current events in context.
There were a few brave and honorable diplomats in Europe and Asia who helped Jewish refugees escape from the Nazis and evens sheltered them during the war. Raoul Wallenberg was on. He was murdered by the Soviets (either in 1945 or possibly later in a slave labor camp in Siberia).
Some members of the Vatican helped, especially the Catholic Bishop of Southern Italy (I’ve forgotten his name but Sy Rottner made a good film about his bravery). Portuguese officials also helped and even Franco refused to give his Jewish citizens/refugees to the Germans.
Many women sheltered Jewish children and even families (my friend was one such woman, in Poland) so we must NEVER FORGET their bravery and even the sacrificing of their lives to protect the Jews and other victims of Hitler’s Final Solution.
And then there were the Latin American consulates that provided visas (that never arrived) for a huge fee. The hundreds of Polish Jews with questionable paper were held at the Hotel Polski in Warsaw. They were eventually sent to Vittel in France. And evetually from there to the gas chambers.
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