Janusz Korczak's Last Moments

Last Moments of Janusz Korczak is a scene drawn as much from the artist's imagination as from his own experience, as he recalled that camp crews sometimes did not hide the machinery of extermination discreetly enough from the prisoners' eyes. In the centre of the composition you can see the physiognomy of Korczak in the binoculars, who is clutching his head in terror. Celnikier, a pupil of the Orphans' Home run by Korczak at Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, recalled his last visit there in October 1939 as follows: [Korczak] did not support our departure [from Warsaw to Białystok]. In his opinion we should have stayed where we were. He still believed in German culture. I don't know if he thought for a moment, this Freud of child psychology, this great pediatrician and writer, the symbol of the Jewish father, that with his own hands he would be collecting hundreds of dying children in the hell of the Warsaw ghetto and that in the end he would end his journey with his orphans in the ovens of Treblinka. The scene of Korczak's death, depicted on Celnikier's engraving, shows the tragedy of a man who, barely at the beginning of the war, believed in German culture.

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