The educator murdered at Treblinka, the child who carried his hero’s name into battle, and the invisible thread between them.

There is a card at the Ghetto Fighters’ House archive in Israel.

Armia Krajowa. Okręg Warszawski. Home Army, Warsaw District. Number 113716, signed by Major Wołk on August 15, 1944, two weeks into the Warsaw Uprising. It certifies that the bearer is a soldier of the Polish Home Army. On the line for her nom de guerre, a typewriter has struck a single word:

The soldier on that card was nine years old.

She was a Jewish girl hiding in plain sight, born at 18 Miła Street in Warsaw, the address that would later become the command bunker of the Jewish Fighting Organization. By the summer of 1944 she had lost her home, her real name, and most of her family. Living under the false identity of a Polish Catholic orphan, she had been sworn into the Home Army as a courier.

When asked to choose the name under which she would fight, she chose Kajtek.

When asked to choose the name under which she would fight, she chose Kajtek.

Kajtek was the hero of her favorite childhood book, Kaytek the Wizard, the 1933 story of a Warsaw schoolboy who suddenly discovers extraordinary powers. But the novel is not really about magic. It is about character: Kajtek learns that power without responsibility is dangerous, and that courage means using one’s gifts to protect others rather than oneself. Its author was Janusz Korczak, the pen name of the Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, and writer Henryk Goldszmit.

By the time Edna chose his fictional hero’s name, Korczak had been dead for two years, murdered at Treblinka alongside the nearly two hundred children of his orphanage after refusing repeated opportunities to save himself without them.

While researching and writing Edna’s memoir, I kept returning to this braid of two names.

The nine-year-old who became Kajtek did not understand whose imagination she was carrying into battle. And Korczak, leading his children on their final march, could not have imagined that within two years a Jewish child would carry his hero’s name through the burning streets of Warsaw.

The nine-year-old who became Kajtek did not understand whose imagination she was carrying into battle. And Korczak, leading his children on their final march, could not have imagined that within two years a Jewish child would carry his hero’s name through the burning streets of Warsaw.

The connection is more than coincidence. It reveals something profound about his legacy.

Most people remember Janusz Korczak for the way he died. They should. His refusal to abandon his orphans remains one of the defining moral acts of the Holocaust. Yet reducing him to the final march risks overlooking the life that made that decision possible. Long before he became a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)