Janusz Korzcak monument at Yad Vashem
I saw this monument at Yad Vashem (Israel's Holocast Museum and Research Center) this week. I'd seen it before, but this was my first time actually knowing the story behind it. You can read about Janusz Korscak on Wikipedia, but I was introduced to him through a phenomenal podcast episode on Jewish History Nerds.
Janusz spent a live utterly devoted to children. He studied (and created) pedagogy around them. He wrote books for them and about how to raise them. He ran an orphanage and he refused to abandon his orphans, even when he was given several chances of escaping death. He is literally the only Jew I've ever heard of from the Nazi period whom was given repeated chances of opting out, simply because he was so beloved even by the Polish public, but he refused to take it. As far as we know, he went to death side by side with his orphans. He taught them to dress well and hold their heads up with pride even to their deaths in Treblinka.
A current "living memory" exhibit at Yad Vashem displayed remarkable objects that were miraculously preserved. One is an armoire in which a girl had hidden while her friend locked her inside. A Nazi stabbed the armoire with a bayonet, but the girl was able to to crouch low enough inside to survive.
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| Armoire with bayonet hole |
It's painful to carry the memory of a people -- very much including children -- who were deliberately rounded up and murdered. It's sickening to come home to a headline of people being harassed. It's downright disgusting that the justification for the harassment is dripping in moral superiority. We get to hurt you "because of children."
There is one thing that all three of these images teaches me -- Janusz.the armoire. French Jews running through Barcelona. --
We will protect our children.
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