From National Book Award Finalist Albert Marrin comes the moving story of Janusz Korczak the
heroic Polish Jewish doctor who devoted his life to children perishing with them in the
Holocaust. Janusz Korczak was more than a good doctor. He was a hero. The Dr. Spock of his day
he established orphanages run on his principle of honoring children and shared his ideas with
the public in books and on the radio. He famously said that children are not the people of
tomorrow but people today. Korczak was a man ahead of his time whose work ultimately became
the basis for the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Korczak was also a Polish Jew on
the eve of World War II. He turned down multiple opportunities for escape standing by the
children in his orphanage as they became confined to the Warsaw Ghetto. Dressing them in their
Sabbath finest he led their march to the trains and ultimately perished with his children in
Treblinka. But this book is much more than a biography. In it renowned nonfiction master
Albert Marrin examines not just Janusz Korczak's life but his ideology of children: that
children are valuable in and of themselves as individuals. He contrasts this with Adolf
Hitler's life and his ideology of children: that children are nothing more than tools of the
state. And throughout Marrin draws readers into the Warsaw Ghetto. What it was like. How it
was run. How Jews within and Poles without responded. Who worked to save lives and who tried to
enrich themselves on other people's suffering. And how one man came to represent the conscience
and the soul of humanity. Filled with black-and-white photographs this is an unforgettable
portrait of a man whose compassion in even the darkest hours reminds us what is possible.
