Korczak exhibition opens in Brazil

The exhibition in São José dos Pinhais, southern Brazil, is the culmination of a project targeted at the city's fourth-grade students and features their work.

During the project, prepared in cooperation with the Holocaust Museum in the nearby city of Curitiba, the children took part in workshops and lectures.

Polish director Andrzej Wajda's film Korczak was screened at the end of the exhibition opening.

The exhibition remains open until the end of December.

A committed advocate of children's rights, Janusz Korczak was a noted Warsaw physician who founded an orphanage that boasted its own newspaper, children's parliament and court.

After Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Korczak was forced to move his orphanage to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.

In 1942, the orphanage's nearly 200 children and about a dozen staff were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Despite being offered sanctuary outside the ghetto, Korczak accompanied and comforted “his children”.

Korczak served in World War I and in the Polish-Soviet war as a doctor and was also an accomplished writer of pedagogical and children's fiction, but few of his children's books have been translated into English. (vb/pk)

Source: IAR