The stones rise from the earth like silent sentinels. Hundreds of them - jagged, weathered, and unyielding - stand in formation across the clearing where the horrors unfolded. This is Treblinka, where approximately 900,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered between 1942 and 1943. Among them was Janusz Korczak and the 192 orphans in his care.
Uprooted Yet Steadfast
As I walk among these stone markers at the Treblinka memorial, I'm struck by their dual nature. You see, each has been displaced - torn from the earth, shaped by human hands, and deliberately positioned across this haunting landscape. Yet in their new placement, they have found a kind of permanence, a steadfast presence that refuses to be forgotten.
For me, this displacement followed by permanence mirrors the life of a certain Dr. Henryk Goldszmit, better known by his pen name Janusz Korczak. Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1878, Korczak was a paediatrician, writer, and pioneering educator. When Janusz established an orphanage, Dom Sierot (The House of Orphans), he created a haven for displaced children - those uprooted from their families by poverty, illness, or abandonment.
In many respects, like these stones that now stand in silent testimony, Korczak gave these displaced children stability. In fact, he even created a children's republic within the orphanage walls, complete with its own parliament, court, and newspaper. Children who had been cast adrift at that time found anchor points in the routines, responsibilities, and respect that defined life in Korczak's care.
When Darkness Descended
However, the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939 brought new waves of displacement. The orphanage was forced to relocate to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. Conditions deteriorated as food became scarce and disease spread. Yet Korczak, already in his sixties, continued to seek donations and support for his children, often walking miles through the ghetto to procure a single loaf of bread.
Then on August 5, 1942, the Nazis ordered the deportation of Korczak's orphans to Treblinka. Eyewitnesses described the procession from the ghetto: Korczak leading his children in orderly rows, some accounts say carrying the orphanage flag with King Matyas (a character from one of Korczak's books) on one side and the Star of David on the other. A child in the front row carried another flag.
Despite having been offered sanctuary on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw multiple times, Korczak refused to abandon his children. "You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this," he is reported to have said.
The Stones Bear Witness
The memorial at Treblinka, designed by sculptor Franciszek Duszenko and architect Adam Haupt, was unveiled in 1964. The 17,000 stones you see represent not just the thousands of communities destroyed in the Holocaust, but individual lives - lives like Korczak and his orphans, each with their own stories, hopes, and dreams, so violently uprooted.
Among the sea of anonymous stones, one bears Korczak's name. It stands as a symbol of his final act - choosing to remain with his displaced children until the very end.
The Paradox of Memory
The Nazis would seek to erase Treblinka from the very earth. After a camp uprising in August 1943, they demolished the gas chambers, burned evidence, and planted lupines and pine trees over the site. They wanted no stone left standing as testimony to their crimes.
Yet here stand the stones, defying that erasure. Like Korczak's legacy, they have found permanence despite forces that sought their destruction. The Nazis could destroy bodies, but not the memory of lives lived and sacrifices made.
And still, this paradox of displacement and permanence continues to resonate in our world. We see it on the news every day: refugee crises, communities torn apart by violence, children separated from parents. Yet we also see it in acts of memorial and remembrance, in stories passed from generation to generation, in commitments to "never again."
The Children's Advocate
What makes Korczak's story so poignant for me is his lifelong advocacy for children's rights. His books like "How to Love a Child" and "The Child's Right to Respect" revolutionised thinking about childhood. He saw children not as incomplete adults but as full human beings deserving dignity and voice.
"Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today," he wrote. "They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals."
In a world that too often views children as afterthoughts, especially during crisis and displacement, Korczak's philosophy stands as firmly as these memorial stones. I suppose he reminds us that our treatment of society's most vulnerable members is the true measure of our humanity.
Finding Permanence in Memory
As I stand among these stones, watching how the shifting sunlight creates patterns of shadow and light across the memorial, I reflect on how memory itself is a kind of permanence we create from displacement. The physical bodies are gone, the camp buildings destroyed, yet something endures.
Korczak understood this power of memory and storytelling. His children's books, educational theories, and radio broadcasts (where he was known as "Old Doctor") created ripples that continue to affect our understanding of childhood and education today.
Perhaps this is the most profound lesson from both Korczak and Treblinka: that in our temporary existence, we can create permanence through our impact on others, through stories that outlive us, through principles that transcend our individual lives.
The stones of Treblinka, like Korczak's legacy, remind us that what is violently uprooted can still find permanence in our collective memory and conscience - if we choose to bear witness, to remember, and to act on that remembrance.
As I leave this solemn, peaceful place, I touch one of the cold stones and make a kind of promise: to carry these stories forward through my words and pictures, to resist the forces of erasure, and to stand, like these silent sentinels, as a witness to both what humanity has suffered and what it is capable of at its most courageous and compassionate.
