Korczak, the Jewish - Polish physician and educator, was born and raised as Henrik Goldschmidt. Janusz Korczak was his pseudonym from the beginning of his literary career. He was active in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s.
From 1912 to 1942 he ran the Jewish orphanage in Warsaw (Dom Sierot),
and from 1919 to 1939 he was a took part in the pedagogical management of the Polish orphanage "Beiteinu".
In his educational approach, he applied values of respectful attitude toward the child and toward every person, choosing between good and bad, concern for the weak and responsibility towards others.
Korczak was innovative in the pedagogical principles he outlined in the educational frameworks in which he worked, and greatly influenced the development of dialogic education in Poland and worldwide.
Korczak was one of the forerunners of activities for children's rights and equal rights for children. The orphanages he founded and ran were one of the earliest attempts at democratic education, which also included a children's tribunal. One of the pioneers in the field of child and adolescent rehabilitation and educational diagnosis, and the pioneer of research in the field of physical and mental development of the child. Author of books in the field of theory and practice of education, alongside children's books.
He was a Polish Jew who declared all his life that he belonged to both nations. During the Holocaust, when the children of his orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto were sent to Treblinka, he refused a salvation offer to himself alone and chose to die in Treblinka with his protégés, thus becoming one of the great historical-Jewish symbols of our time.