The Shepherd Who Would Not Run

On August 5, 1942, German soldiers arrived at the orphanage on Sienna Street in the Warsaw Ghetto with orders to empty it. Inside were roughly 192 Jewish children under the care of Janusz Korczak — the pen name of Dr. Henryk Goldszmit, a pediatrician who had devoted thirty years to raising Warsaw's most vulnerable orphans. The Nazis had offered Korczak personal sanctuary more than once. Friends on the outside had arranged escapes. Each time, he refused. He would not leave his children.

That August morning, Korczak dressed the children in their best clothes. He organized them in rows of four. The youngest he carried in his arms. Witnesses recalled the children marching with a strange, quiet dignity through the ghetto streets toward the Umschlagplatz — the deportation square — and from there to the cattle cars bound for Treblinka. Korczak walked with them every step. He walked with them into the gas chambers.

In John 10:11-13, Jesus draws a sharp line between the good shepherd and the hired hand. When the wolf comes, the hired hand runs. He calculates the cost and decides the sheep are not worth his life. But the good shepherd stays. The good shepherd dies with his flock rather than abandon them to the darkness alone.

Korczak was not the Good Shepherd — only Christ holds that title. But in that long walk through the Warsaw streets, he showed us what the Shepherd's love looks like when it puts on human skin: a love that will not save itself while its little ones perish.