Janusz Korczak: Sculptor of Children’s Souls

This wonderful book by former teacher and scholar Marcia Talmage Schneider, offers details of Janusz Korczak and his orphanage from the perspectives of several orphans and former teachers. To the children he took in, Janusz Korczak was more than a teacher, doctor, or orphanage director. He was, in the words of one of the young lives he touched, a "sculptor of children's souls." The teachers who worked for him thought likewise. Although all of Korczak's children and staff during the World War II years perished with him at Treblinka, several earlier students and teachers managed to flee Poland and have survived. Marcia Talmage Schneider undertook the arduous task to locate these survivors, most of whom were living in Israel, to obtain first-hand accounts of Pan Doctor. By doing so, Ms. Schneider offers a valuable supplement to Betty Jean Lifton's superb biography, The King of Children.