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The backdrop of the first war afforded Korczak time to think and reflect in writing How to Love A Child and perhaps this time served that good end. Hwere are some of my thoughts in reviewing this passage:
- The times of the conflict were horrendous and Orthodox Jewry were certain it bespoke of Gog of Magog and the coming of Messiah.
- The usual chaos and mayhem of war dissheveled Korczak's care and plan for his orphans and Izaak Eliasberg was conscripted and able to raise funds.The number of children increased and needed care and Korczak desperately needed and sought funding and the bank would only lend him half of the 5000 rubles he had in private account.
- He sought out his publisher, Jakub Mortkowicz for the hundred rubles he had left with him for a rainy day and he happily gave him the funds, and offered to look in on his mother.
- Mortkowicz, an assimilated Jew, attracted the finest writers to his firm because of his high standards in publishing. His wife, Janina (as talkative as her husband was taciturn), published Korczak´s stories in the children´s journal, In the Sunshtne, that she edited with Stefania Sempolowska It was a tightly connected literary world, and Mortkowicz, unlike the bank, did not hesitate to give his celebrated author the hundred rubles he needed. He even offered to look in on his mother during his absence His world came tumbling down, the tight literary world of his comfort, and out of that zone he was dislodged.
- While Korczak reassured the orphans, Stefa reassured him, even though she felt overwhelmed at being left with complete responsibility for the children, whose numbers had swelled to one hundred and fifty. A few months before the outbreak of the war, she had fulfilled her dream of sending her beloved Esterka Weintraub to college in Belgium, and she would not consider Korczak´s suggestion that Esterka be asked to return. Stefa's heroic stance for the greater good of the orphans was later displayed after the death of her daughter Esterka from typhus. she managed to even then put that behind her sufficiently to function ,albeit in a reduced emotional capacity for the children, due to her bereavement.
- She stayed at Stefa´s side for the next two years, working night and day under the difficult conditions of the German occupation, even carrying sick children on her back to the hospital. Esterka's heroic stance was evident also as was her unselfishness for the good of the orphans.She died in the typhus epidemic later and that event completely decimated her mother Stefania Sempolowska .
- Korczak's conscription as a doctor in the Czar's imperial army : Korczak was assigned to a divisional field hospital on the Eastern front. This brutal war, through which he slogged in his heavy Russian uniform and high military boots as the armies of Russia and the Austro- Hungarian Empire swept back and forth across the defenseless villages of Eastern Europe, was to impress on him that men march to "a clock with only one hand-the sword." Not even men, but "an orgy of devils in intoxicated procession. " And for what?
- Korczak always saw the world in universals and he saw the whole world as suffering which perhaps created within him an empathy for them and especailly for the for the devils of the orgy he wrote about. "And suffering does not make men noble, not even the Jews."
- The leassons are learned after the events of suffering. Amid this morass of human suffering he began to wite How to Love A Child. He conceived of the work as the " synthesis of the child" gleaned fronm his half year in Paris -his experiences as a pediatrician. Some conclusions he reached were to reverberate even to this days in medical and pyschological practice: 1.How to Love a Child was originally to be only a short pamphlet for parents and teachers, but perhaps because it was a long war the manuscript grew to hundreds of pages. One of its main theses is that you cannot possibly love a child-your own, or another´s -until you see him as a separate being with the inalienable right to grow into the person he was meant to be. You cannot even understand a child until you achieve self- knowledge: "You yourself are the child whom you must learn to know, rear, and above all, enlighten." You are that child and must achieve self-knowledge to even understand the child you are and have reared.
2. You must see the child as a separate being with unalienable rights which Korczak was later to list in a special part of his writings.
3. Korczak, the artist, speaks mystically, comparing the child to a piece of parchment covered with hieroglyphs, only some of which the parents will ever be able to decipher: "Seek in that stranger who is your child the undiscovered part of yourself," The pediatrician urges common sense, warning that a baby´s development cannot be measured like other things in society. "When is the proper time for a child to start walking and talking? When he does. When should his teeth start cutting? When they do. How many hours should a baby sleep? As long as it needs to." Behind all of Korczak"s assertions are the honed reflections of a child psychologist who was one of the first of his time to recognize the importance of infancy in human development. The child he conceives of as a mystical being always developing at his own pace and the child maintains a limited although sufficient control even at these early stages of his self-determination.
4. The temperaments of the child. ." But though their temperaments might be different, each was attempting to prevail over unknown powers, to probe the secret of the mysterious world which was delivering both good and bad messages. "The infant runs its affairs within the scope of its available knowledge and meansboth of which are meager. . . . It does not know yet that the breast, the face, and the hands comprise a unit-the mother."
5. The baby may not have mastered words yet, but it speaks in "the language of facial expressions, the language of images and emotional recollections." Its every new movement is "like that of a pianist for whom the proper frame of mind and absolute self-control are essential to be able to play." The child emerges as both the benefactor and the victim of its mother´s love, with the author intervening like a guardian angel on its behalf He is equally wary of teachers, whom he consoles one moment-"You will always make mistakes because you are a human being, not a machine" -and chastises the next- "Children love laughter, movement, playing tricks. Teacher, if life is a graveyard to you, leave the children free to see it as a pasture."
Note the language of the child as referred to above. The last phrase boldened here is truly a classic phrase.
6. Note his field hospital stay and homesickness at Tarnipol in 1917.
7. Korczak's experience with the boy Stefan. How did he happen to notice Stefan? Perhaps the boy was standing apart from the others. Perhaps their eyes met in an unexpected glance of sympathy. Soon they were deep in conversation. When Stefan mentioned that he would like to learn a craft of some kind, Korczak told him about the carpentry shop in his hospital compound. No sooner had he asked the boy if he would like to come along with him, to learn carpentry and how to read, than he regretted it. He had violated his own dictum that one should never spring anything suddenly on a child This candid revealing of Korzak's regret of springing suddenly learning carpentry and reading ,and that he violated his own dictum would be overcome by his reluctance to frustrate the boy by false hopes.
8. As he had noted in his journal, he was used to working with children in groups of one hundred. His every word influenced a hundred minds, his every step was watched by a hundred pair of vigilant eyes. if he failed with some, there were always a few he had reached. He never had to fear "utter defeat." He used to say that working with only one child was a game not worth the candle; he spoke contemptuously of teachers who left group projects to work privately, dismissing them as being in it only for the money or for better personal conditions..This is the classic dilemma OF total failure with one child is better than limited failure attained with a group of children.
9. Stefan's mother had died when he was seven. He couldn´t even remember her name-only that blood came out of her mouth when she coughed and that she didn´t come back from the hospital. As for his father, he might have been killed in action by now-or he might still be at the front, or in a POW camp. For a while Stefan had lived with his seventeen- year-old brother in Tarnopol, and then with some soldiers until he was taken off to the municipal shelter where Korczak found him. Stefan's story is so typical of many war orphans ending up in the municipal shelter.
10. In the orphanage, sickness often meant extra trouble and could cause tension in the house, but Korczak noted that Stefan's discomfort drew them together, as it does a family. He propped the boy up in bed like the king ofthe roost. To enable Stefan to do his writing exercises, Korczak carefully secured the inkpot in an old can that Walenty had previously converted into an ashtray. Then, balancing the can in a large box that he emptied for this purpose, he put a supporting pillow on one side and another box on the other side. As Stefan thanked him with a smile, it occurred to Korczak that a boarding home could not afford such a luxury. He also realized that when he was with a large group of children, a smile was too subtle a signal to notice. Only now did he see it as an important signal deserving study.
11. As Stefan tried to correct his own sentences>> without quite knowing how to get them right, Korczak was struck with the thought that a child is endowed with a "rammatical conscience" that may be hindered by the teacher´s complex explanations: The child´s mind-a forest in which the tops oftrees gently sway, the branches mingle, and the shivering leaves touch. An adult .even with good intentions may unhinge a child's mind.
12. Stefan's slyness and gliding over his book. Stefan stumbled along awkwardly the first week, but then it was as if he felt the "vibrations." He glided over the book as smoothly as he tobogganed outdoors, negotiating the obstacles with a determination that he had not shown before. He had managed to "transfer the risk of sport to learning." Yet the boy was sly-he knew how to manipulate his mentor. He tried to cheat at checkers, to avoid some of his lessons. He took a cannon shell to the workshop without asking permission and resorted to lying when questioned about it.
13. Chidlren perceive common words with a different meaning than adults.
How to Love a Child
The outbreak of the Great War put an end to the
geranium plan. AllofWarsaw was in a state of chaos that August of 1914: refugees
crowded into the city from outlying areas and people rushed to hoard food and
supplies. The Orthodox Jews at the lower end of Krochmalna were certain that
this was the final battle between Gog and Magog, after which the Messiah would
come. Expressing a secular version of the same sentiment, Korczak hoped that a
pure world would emerge from this conflict. He could not know when he was
conscripted once again for medical duty with the Czar's imperial Army that it
would be four long, bloody years before he would see either a new world or his
orphans again.
It was a tragic war for the Poles. Mobilized by all three
occupying powers-800,000 in the Russian army, 400,000 in the Austrian, and
200,000 in the German-they were put in the intolerable position of fighting
against each other. Even their leaders were divided as to which was the greatest
enemy: Russia, Germany, or Austria. Those who joked cynically that the only way
for Poland to be reunited would be for all three countries to be defeated did
not really believe that this was exactly what would happen.
Korczak rushed
about as frantically as everyone else, trying to make arrangements for Stefa and
the orphans while he was away. Izaak Eliasberg, also conscripted, would not be
there to raise funds. Donations to the home had fallen off while the number of
children needing care had increased. When the bank refused to give him more than
two hundred and fifty of the five thousand rubles in his private account,
Korczak sought out his publisher, Jakub Mortkowicz, for the hundred rubles he
had left with him "for a rainy day" in happier times he had often joined
Warsaw´s cultural elite in the room behind the bookstore in Mortkowicz´s office
and had cappuccino and cream cake with them at the Zemianska, a popular literary
caf‚ which shared the same courtyard on Mazowiecka Street.
Mortkowicz, an
assimilated Jew, attracted the finest writers to his firm because of his high
standards in publishing. His wife, Janina (as talkative as her husband was
taciturn), published Korczak´s stories in the children´s journal, In the
Sunshtne, that she edited with Stefania Sempolowska It was a tightly connected
literary world, and Mortkowicz, unlike the bank, did not hesitate to give his
celebrated author the hundred rubles he needed. He even offered to look in on
his mother during his absence.
Korczak did not find it easy to say goodbye
to the orphans. Until then, it had been they who left him when they were old
enough to go out into the world. He had braced himself for those farewells, and
turned his attention to the newcomers. But now he was the one leaving, and at a
time when they needed him most.
While Korczak reassured the orphans, Stefa
reassured him, even though she felt overwhelmed at being left with complete
responsibility for the children, whose numbers had swelled to one hundred and
fifty. A few months before the outbreak of the war, she had fulfilled her dream
of sending her beloved Esterka Weintraub to college in Belgium, and she would
not consider Korczak´s suggestion that Esterka be asked to return. But before he
left Warsaw, Korczak took it upon himself to write Esterka of his concern about
Stefa. As he hoped, she interrupted her studies to rush back. She stayed at
Stefa´s side for the next two years, working night and day under the difficult
conditions of the German occupation, even carrying sick children on her back to
the hospital. When she caught typhus and died during the epidemic of 1916, Stefa
felt as if she had lost her own daughter. Crazed with grief, she even thought of
giving up her work, but because there were so many children dependent on her,
she forced herself to carry on. But never again would Stefa allow herself to
become so deeply attached to any of the orphans.
Korczak was assigned to a
divisional field hospital on the Eastern front. This brutal war, through which
he slogged in his heavy Russian uniform and high military boots as the armies of
Russia and the Austro- Hungarian Empire swept back and forth across the
defenseless villages of Eastern Europe, was to impress on him that men march to
"a clock with only one hand-the sword." Not even men, but "an orgy of devils in
intoxicated procession. " And for what?
While camping overnight in a
deserted village, he was riveted by the sight of a blind old Jew groping his way
with his stick through the infantry unit's convoy ofhorses and wagons. The
man>>s family and friends had tried to persuade him to leave with them,
but he had insisted on remaining behind to watch over the synagogue and
cemetery. (Twenty- five years later, when Korczak chose to remain in the Warsaw
Ghetto with his orphans, he would liken himself to that blind old Jew.)
Yet
he tried to see everything in universal terms. "It is not only the Jews who
suffer," he wrote. "All the world is submerged in blood and fire, in tears and
mourning. And suffering does not make men noble, not even the Jews."
Perhaps
to keep himself from falling into despair as the field hospital moved back and
forth with the troops across the battlefields of Eastern Europe, he began
writing the book which would become How to Love a Child. It was to be no less
than the " synthesis of the child" he had dreamed of during his half year in
Paris, distilled from his experiences as a pediatrician, camp counselor, and
educator. He wrote in the field station to the deafening cacophony of artillery
fire, on a tree stump in a forest where the troops were resting, in a meadow
under a pine tree. Everything seemed important-he was constantly pausing to jot
things down so that he wouldn´t forget. "It would be an irretrievable loss to
mankind, " he would jest ironically to his orderly.
The orderly, whom we
know only as Walenty, was given the task of typing each day´s segment. He must
have been a long-suffering aide: typing a manuscript on child development is not
the usual military assignment. He rebelled only once during a brief respite in
their schedule: Korczak quotes him fondly as grumbling, "Is it worth it for just
a half hour?" There were times when Korczak would be forced to interrupt his
work on the book for as long as a month. During those periods, he would be
filled with self-doubt. Why make a fool of himself ? "That which is wise is
known to a hundred men."
How to Love a Child was originally to be only a
short pamphlet for parents and teachers, but perhaps because it was a long war
the manuscript grew to hundreds of pages. One of its main theses is that you
cannot possibly love a child-your own, or another´s -until you see him as a
separate being with the inalienable right to grow into the person he was meant
to be. You cannot even understand a child until you achieve self- knowledge:
"You yourself are the child whom you must learn to know, rear, and above all,
enlighten."
Because he was an artist by temperament and not a theorist,
Korczak did not produce a systematic tract, but rather images of the child in
each fleeting time frame of its development. Feigning modesty, he admits that to
most questions the reader may have, he can only answer "I don´t know." (But he
adds slyly that this seemingly empty phrase contains limitless possibilities of
"new breakthroughs.")
"It is impossible to tell parents unknown to me how to
rear a child also unknown to me under conditions unknown to me," he writes. The
mother must learn to trust her own perceptions; no one can know her child as she
does: "To demand that others should provide you textbook prognoses is like
asking a strange woman to give birth to your baby. There are insights that can
be born only of your own pain, and they are the most precious."
Korczak, the
artist, speaks mystically, comparing the child to a piece of parchment covered
with hieroglyphs, only some of which the parents will ever be able to decipher:
"Seek in that stranger who is your child the undiscovered part of yourself," The
pediatrician urges common sense, warning that a baby´s development cannot be
measured like other things in society. "When is the proper time for a child to
start walking and talking? When he does. When should his teeth start cutting?
When they do. How many hours should a baby sleep? As long as it needs to."
Behind all of Korczak"s assertions are the honed reflections of a child
psychologist who was one of the first of his time to recognize the importance of
infancy in human development. While Freud was still gathering information on
childhood from his adult patients, Korczak already understood the necessity for
direct observation of the baby. "Napoleon suffered from tetanus, Bismarck had
rickets, each was an infant before he became a man. Ifwe wish to probe the
source ofthought, emotions, and ambition, we must turn to the infant."
He
found in the infant a "well-defined personality composed of innate temperament,
strength, and intellect." Bending over a hundred cribs, he could pick out the
"trusting and suspicious, the steady and capricious, the cheerful and gloomy,
the wavering, the frightened, and the hostile." But though their temperaments
might be different, each was attempting to prevail over unknown powers, to probe
the secret of the mysterious world which was delivering both good and bad
messages. "The infant runs its affairs within the scope of its available
knowledge and meansboth of which are meager. . . . It does not know yet that the
breast, the face, and the hands comprise a unit-the mother."
The mother has
only to observe her infant selflessly to receive its message, for what is its
intense gaze if not one of inquiry? The baby may not have mastered words yet,
but it speaks in "the language of facial expressions, the language of images and
emotional recollections." Its every new movement is "like that of a pianist for
whom the proper frame of mind and absolute self-control are essential to be able
to play." The child emerges as both the benefactor and the victim of its
mother´s love, with the author intervening like a guardian angel on its behalf
He is equally wary of teachers, whom he consoles one moment-"You will always
make mistakes because you are a human being, not a machine" -and chastises the
next- "Children love laughter, movement, playing tricks. Teacher, if life is a
graveyard to you, leave the children free to see it as a pasture." It was one
thing to write about how to love a child and another not to have a child to
love. When, in February 1917 the field hospital dug in for an indefinite stay on
a hill overlooking the town of Tarnopol in Galicia, Korczak was particularly
vulnerable. it was almost three years since he had left his orphans in Warsaw,
and six months since a short, crumpled letter had somehow got through "the tight
ring of bayonets, censors, and spies." At night, when he was finished with his
duties, he would sit outside the hospital and watch as one by one the lights
went out in the town below. A feeling of homesickness would overwhelm him as he
remembered lights-out at the orphanage and the deep silence that fell over
everything.__________________________________________________________
As soon as he had a few free hours, Korczak visited a shelter
for homeless children set up in Tarnopol by the municipal authorities. He was
shocked by the conditions there. Rather than serving as sanctuaries´ places like
this were "dustbins into which children were cast as the refuse of war, the
waste products of dysentery, typhoid fever, or cholera that had destroyed their
parents-or rather their mothers. Their fathers were off fighting for a better
world."
How did he happen to notice Stefan? Perhaps the boy was standing
apart from the others. Perhaps their eyes met in an unexpected glance of
sympathy. Soon they were deep in conversation. When Stefan mentioned that he
would like to learn a craft of some kind, Korczak told him about the carpentry
shop in his hospital compound. No sooner had he asked the boy if he would like
to come along with him, to learn carpentry and how to read, than he regretted
it. He had violated his own dictum that one should never spring anything
suddenly on a child. "Not today. I'll come for you on Monday," he quickly added.
" Ask your brother about it. Think it over." As if there was much for a
displaced boy like Stefan Zagrodnik to think over-it was Korczak who had some
thinking to do.
As he had noted in his journal, he was used to working with
children in groups of one hundred. His every word influenced a hundred minds,
his every step was watched by a hundred pair of vigilant eyes. if he failed with
some, there were always a few he had reached. He never had to fear "utter
defeat." He used to say that working with only one child was a game not worth
the candle; he spoke contemptuously of teachers who left group projects to work
privately, dismissing them as being in it only for the money or for better
personal conditions. But now he was about to offer "the hours, the days, and the
months" of his life to one child. Stefan was waiting eagerly when Korczak came
with Walenty and a sledge to pick him up that Monday night. The orderly had been
disgruntled from the moment he heard about the plan. First he had had to take on
typing manuscripts, and now he was expected to cook and clean for some vagrant
Ukrainian boy. To add insult to injury, Stefan was hardly in Walenty' s company
two minutes before he was calling him by his first name. But Stefan was aware
only of his first moonlit ride through the snow as they passed the church, the
railway station, carriages and trucks, and the bridge on their way to the field
hospital.
Korczak asked little of the boy the first few days´ although he
made a mental note to have him address Walenty respectfully. He knew from
similar incidents at the Warsaw orphanage that the janitor, cook, and
washerwoman resented it when the children didn´t give "a handle" to their names.
But he wanted Stefan to have a chance to feel his way around, test the
situation, develop some trust. Stefan's mother had died when he was seven. He
couldn´t even remember her name-only that blood came out of her mouth when she
coughed and that she didn´t come back from the hospital. As for his father, he
might have been killed in action by now-or he might still be at the front, or in
a POW camp. For a while Stefan had lived with his seventeen- year-old brother in
Tarnopol, and then with some soldiers until he was taken off to the municipal
shelter where Korczak found him._____________________________________________________________
At first, it looked as if Walenty were right
about his misgivings. Stefan was there only a day when he had a terrible
stomachache, brought on by the combination of cold sausage from the soldiers'
canteen and the jam cakes and candies he had bought with the fifty kopecks his
brother gave him as a send-off.
In the orphanage, sickness often meant extra
trouble and could cause tension in the house, but Korczak noted that Stefan's
discomfort drew them together, as it does a family. He propped the boy up in bed
like the king ofthe roost. To enable Stefan to do his writing exercises, Korczak
carefully secured the inkpot in an old can that Walenty had previously converted
into an ashtray. Then, balancing the can in a large box that he emptied for this
purpose, he put a supporting pillow on one side and another box on the other
side. As Stefan thanked him with a smile, it occurred to Korczak that a boarding
home could not afford such a luxury. He also realized that when he was with a
large group of children, a smile was too subtle a signal to notice. Only now did
he see it as an important signal deserving study.
Korczak held to his
pedagogic intent to teach Stefan to read, re- cording each day>> s
progress in minute detail. it was as if initiating Stefan into the intricacies
of Polish grammar would restore the universe to both of them. As Stefan tried to
correct his own sentences>> without quite knowing how to get them right,
Korczak was struck with the thought that a child is endowed with a "rammatical
conscience" that may be hindered by the teacher´s complex explanations: The
child´s mind-a forest in which the tops oftrees gently sway, the branches
mingle, and the shivering leaves touch. Sometimes a tree grazes its neighbor and
receives the vibrations of a hundred or a thousand trees-of the whole forest.
Whenever any of us says "-right-wrong-pay attention-do it again," it is like a
gust of wind that plays havoc with the child.
Stefan stumbled along
awkwardly the first week, but then it was as if he felt the "vibrations." He
glided over the book as smoothly as he tobogganed outdoors, negotiating the
obstacles with a determination that he had not shown before. He had managed to
"transfer the risk of sport to learning." Yet the boy was sly-he knew how to
manipulate his mentor. He tried to cheat at checkers, to avoid some of his
lessons. He took a cannon shell to the workshop without asking permission and
resorted to lying when questioned about it.
The pedagogue was as defenseless
as any father. He had to be on is bound to creep in. One must fight back, work
toward maintaining authority, by demonstration, without scolding ofany kind." As
ifto further convince himself, he added: "Children like a certain amount of
coercion. it helps them to fight their own inner resistance. it spares them the
intellectual effort of having to make a choice."S tefan worked in the carpentry
shop while Korczak made his rounds among the two hundred and seventeen patients
in the wards, some of them suffering from contagious diseases, others fresh
casualties from the front. When Korczak dropped by the carpentry shop, the
instructor praised the boy, saying he was hardworking. But it was painful for
Korczak to watch Stefan struggling to saw a wobbly plank. He had to force
himself not to warn the boy to be careful of his fingers. Already his
admonitions- "Don´t go out barefoot!" "Don´t drink unboiled water!""Aren´t you
cold?"" Are you sure you don´t have a stomachache?" -were making him sound like
those overanxious mothers he had ridiculed in his books.___________________________________________________________
Even Walenty (who
still muttered about all the trouble and that no good would come of all this)
was growing protective of Stefan. He went outside more than once to call the boy
in from tobogganing when he was late for his evening lesson-"as in a family."
Korczak hoped that Stefan would see the child in the man who sided with him,
but he knew that the boy saw a balding thirty-nine-year-old medical officer who,
in his eyes, was old. Yet Stefan admired him. "I´d like to write the letter K
like you do," he said. It reminded Korczak of how the orphans used to copy the
way he wrote the letters of the alphabet. And of how long it had taken him to
master writing the capital W like his father.
Trying to follow the logic
ofmany ofStefan"s questions forced Korczak to consider how differently children
perceive things from adults. When Stefan asked: "What is a poppy seed made of?"
"Why is it black? ""Can you get enough poppy seeds from one garden to fill a
plate?" Korczak realized that the boy´s conception of a garden covered four,
perhaps five, ideas, while his own covered a hundred, even a thousand. "The roots of many seemingly illogical questions asked by children are to be found here, " he noted."We have difficulty finding a common language with children because even though they use the same words we do, they fill them with an entirely different content. >Garden,<, >father<, >death<>
