A Love That Would Not Let Go

On August 5, 1942, German soldiers surrounded the Dom Sierot orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered its nearly two hundred children deported. Their director, Dr. Janusz Korczak — born Henryk Goldszmit — had already refused multiple offers of escape from Polish friends outside the ghetto walls. A pediatrician, author, and beloved educator, Korczak had spent thirty years raising orphaned children as his own. He would not leave them now.

That morning, he dressed the children in their best clothes. They walked in neat rows of four through the ghetto streets toward the Umschlagplatz, the deportation square. One child carried the orphanage's green flag — the banner of King Matt, from Korczak's famous children's novel. Eyewitnesses recalled an almost unbearable dignity in the procession. Even a German officer, recognizing the famous author, reportedly offered him a last-minute reprieve. Korczak refused. He boarded the cattle car with his children and accompanied them to Treblinka, where they were all murdered.

No one compelled him to go. Every door of escape stood open — for him alone. He closed each one because he would not purchase his own life at the cost of abandoning those who trusted him.

Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." Most of us will never face Korczak's choice. But every day we decide whether love is something we speak or something we walk into — even when the road ahead costs us everything.