WHO WAS THE GOOD DOCTOR OF WARSAW?

Janusz Korczak was an early pioneer of child welfare and psychology. As a young man in at the beginning of the twentieth century, Korczak had looked around and begun to ask why so many children were unhappy. There were vast numbers of slum children in Warsaw, neglected and unloved. Even the children of the rich seemed frustrated and resentful in spite of their material plenty. It was as if adults had forgotten what it was like to be a child. Korczak saw that adults had to learn to communicate with children and speak their language again. It was a lesson he understood from experience, enrolled by his anxious and overprotective parents into a school where the staff seemed to hate the pupils and beat them regularly to get results.

Korczak lived through a time of great social upheaval. He was born Henryk Goldszmit in 1879 into a Polish Jewish family in Warsaw, but only learned he was Jewish when at six years old he buried his canary in the courtyard and the janitor’s son pulled the cross out saying his canary was a Jewish bird. When Korczak was seventeen his father, a respected lawyer, died after a long internment in a mental asylum and Korczak had to combine medical studies with tutoring pupils to support his impoverished mother and sister. He also wrote books about Warsaw’s children. He attended the secret Polish university with its lectures on psychology, Polish culture and other forbidden subjects - for which he was twice imprisoned by the Russians who then ruled much of Poland. He was called up as a medical officer three times, in the Russian war against Japan, in the First World War and in the war of Polish independence from Russia.

As a young doctor in training, he wanted to heal not only children’s physical ailments, but also their souls and lives. Determined to make children’s lives happier, he set out on his first summer camp for slum children, armed with a wide reading of books on children, a bag full of games, good intentions and a carnation in his buttonhole. The week was chaotic. Korzcak found himself at odds with the boys, shouting at them to go to sleep and even resorting to threats. Ashamed and confused, he decided to ask the boys what they thought was going wrong. It soon became clear that his one-size- fits-all policy on childcare was missing the mark with for sleep, food, clothes sizes and what really interested the children. He realized that only by really listening to and knowing the children could he begin to devise creative ways to lead them towards who they were meant to be as people. Each child was a person to be respected in terms of their thoughts and feelings – that and a hefty dose of pre-planning for a group of 30 boys. The next summer, with lists, schedules and with a lot of effort made in getting to know each boy, he and the children had a wonderful summer in the country. He realized that childrearing was about knowledge from failed attempts, an on-going quest to find out what works for an individual. ‘I want everyone to know and love this state of “I do not know” when it comes to raising children – so full of life and dazzling surprises.’

For this reason, Korczak always put respecting and getting to know a child far higher than relying on books by child experts – although they were useful. ‘No book, no doctor can replace your own careful observation of a child.’ Mothers and fathers should trust their instinct about their own child, based on years of watching and getting to know who their child is. And above all, he saw childrearing as a relationship, not an exercise in control. The adult was charged with the responsibility of the child’s safety and happiness, but this meant accountability, not a free pass to lose one’s temper or be unfair for one’s own convenience. He loathed physical punishment, viewing it as wrong and completely ineffective. He understood that an adult has to be a grown up – ‘before you start laying down the law to children and bossing them about, make sure that you have brought up and educated the child inside yourself.’ And he saw no merit in treating childhood as if it were a mere preparation for the more important time of adulthood. ‘Children are people today, not people tomorrow. They have the right to their cup of happiness.’

 He taught children and adults to treat each other with empathy. He was quite happy to point out to a child that he was busy working or reading or simply tired, and that the child could perhaps amuse themselves for a while – while always remaining close at hand and in sight for help and comfort if needed.

He taught social responsibility through the court of peers where children brought their grievances against each other and debated the rights and wrongs of each case, considering the feelings of others and so developing a sense of justice and fairness. Punishments were mostly written warnings.

He wrote tirelessly to help children and educate parents and teachers about what childhood feels like and how to love a child. He was one of the signiaturies on the first Children’s Bill of Rights in Geneva in 1927. He wrote books for children and adults, he taught, he broadcast, he set up a newspaper by and for children, he worked as a court advocate for teenagers and he set up children’s homes for Polish and for Jewish children. The gradual dismantling of cooperation between cultural groups as fascism swept Europe in the 1930’s broke his heart.

Korczak knew that children take comfort from the religion they were raised in and gave both Jewish and Christian children the chance to pray or go to services if they so wished. He wasn’t a practising Jew but had been brought up in the tenets of the religion, and though he did not follow a specific creed, he believed in a loving God and read widely from wisdom literature. His religion, he said, was the sacred duty to protect children. He believed that a child belongs to itself and that it is the duty of not only parents but the whole community to care for the children in their midst. He had no children of his own yet he was father to hundreds of children. Korczak firmly believed that children held the world together and that the basis of nationhood was not an ethnic or cultural group, but the decision of a people irrespective of creed or race to come together to care for their children. He understood that where nations decide not to care for the child then civilisation is on the verge of flying apart, which is precisely what happened when the Nazi Reich decided to murder thousands of children in 1942, in Warsaw, in Poland, and across Europe. There can be no greater contrast than this terrible decision compared to Korczak’s will to protect the rights and happiness of his children, even to the very end when he accompanied them from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp, even though offered a means of personal escape to freedom several times.

Korczak’s message is as pertinent today as it ever was, both in how we define a nation, and in how we raise children who are independent, happy, loved and loving. Perhaps the best observation about Korczak comes from a child in care who was given some of Korczak’s sayings to read: ‘I wish all parents could read Janusz Korczak, because then all children would be happier.’ 

The Liberation of Warsaw

The Liberation of Warsaw

The line of four Willys jeeps was waiting at the edge of the snow- covered river. Between the breaking clouds, scraps of black sky and a sliver of metallic moon. Franek, Misha’s driver and self-appointed guide and counsellor, was at the wheel of the first jeep, the flaps of his sheepskin hat pulled down over his ears.

‘Hurry up, man, before we freeze to death,’ he yelled. ‘We want to get across before there’s any light.’ Warsaw was still held by night but at their backs, dawn was already a pale red line. Their brief was to send back a wireless message on the situation before the Polish infantry began to cross on foot at dawn.

Misha hauled up alongside Franek and pulled the door shut, but the cold wind still managed to whistle in through the gaps, the jeep rocking with its blows. He took his pistol from its holster. In front of them, the river shone white, a long and meandering plain of snow, far brighter than the wadding of clouds above.

His breath fogging and rising in front of his face, Franek leaned forward as the wheels bumped down onto the snow-covered surface of the river. Misha felt his muscles tense but the ice held, half a winter in thickness. Sliding and jolting, they began to track across the rutted surface, four black shapes, no headlights, driving slowly, the engines’ noise low. Snow had softened the shapes of burned-out army trucks and the frozen bodies of dead horses and other debris, casting long shadows in the ghostly light. To their right, the broken girders of the Poniatowski Bridge rose up out of the ice at drunken angles.

‘Hard to believe,’ said Misha. ‘Here we are, the first to liberate Warsaw. Going home.’

‘Do you mean liberate in the Russian sense? Sit on the opposite bank saying you’re waiting for supplies for six months until the Wehrmacht has crushed the Polish resistance into the dust, wait until the Germans have pulled out, and then roll in? A nice clean slate for Russian occupation.’

‘Have you heard any more from your brothers?’
Franek shook his head.
‘I’m sorry, Franek,’ said Misha.
Franek had heard through intelligence that one of his brothers had died during the Warsaw uprising. Another had died in the unauthorized breakout of the Polish army in an attempt to cross the river and come to the aid of besieged Warsaw a few weeks after they arrived.

The jeep banged down into a deep rut in the ice and Misha’s free hand flew out to grip onto the dashboard. The dark shapes behind braked. Franek spun the wheel, gained purchase again and drove carefully around the rutted area. Misha looked back. The others were following. He unpeeled his hand from the cold metal and rubbed his frozen cheeks. His skin prickled with a naked feeling, waiting to hear a shot ring out from the opposite bank. 

They were now more than halfway across the ice. For years, Misha had crossed the Vistula back home into Warsaw, taking for granted the town’s long silhouette floating between the sky and the wide river, its elegant steeples and church towers, the bulk of the palace fortress.

All that was gone. As he trained his binoculars on the approaching bank and the bridgehead up on their right, he scanned nothing but empty spaces and eroded stumps in the toneless light. Rising smoke drifted against a dirty sky. He swung the binoculars round to the head of the broken bridge.

‘Stop, Franek. Stop. Up there, I can see a sentry.’

Franek braked sharply. Misha heard the jeep behind squeal to a halt.

Misha passed him the glasses, and pointed to a red-and-white box just visible on the bank. ‘No cover out here if he fires.’

‘He’s not moving. Can’t have seen us.’ Opening the window flap, Franek clicked the gun catch, sighted and fired. The noise of the shot ricocheted across the plain.

‘Shit. Missed.’ Franek reloaded hurriedly, waiting for the sentry to return fire. He quickly took a second shot. The guard shuddered, a spray of matter from a direct hit, but the man remained leaning rigidly against the wooden box.

Misha took the glasses back.
‘There’s snow on his shoulders.’
‘My God, frozen at his post.’
Approaching the bank cautiously, Franek pulled up alongside the sentry box. Light was beginning to gather in the sky, and the snow cast an eerie light up on the dead man’s grey face. A rime of frost dusted his helmet and the wool of his coat. A second sentry was leaning inside the box like a toppled skittle, a rifle slung across his front. 

‘Warsaw’s being guarded by corpses,’ said Franek.

The small convoy of jeeps carried on up the slipway alongside the smashed bridge piers. At the top, Franek stopped the engine.

In front of them lay a sight that defied words in the cold half- light, nothing but long vistas open to the livid sky, miles of ruins and rubble blanketed with snow. Not a single building intact, chimney stacks left like broken trees. Here and there ragged remains of walls stuck up with gaps for windows, black against the luminous snow. They listened tensely for the click of a gun, a lone sniper watching them, but there was nothing. A deep silence, even the air frozen and dead.

‘Which way?’ said Franek. 

Remembering those who returned from WW1, and its ongoing legacy

MANCHESTER 1935

Ma said maybe she’d shut her eyes, just for a moment, have a sit down in the old armchair by the hearth. Doris patted straight the big cushion that covered the spring that had come through.The moment she was sitting there by the fire Ma fell asleep.

Peter stayed at the table, turning the floppy, soft pages of his and Bill’s old comic, watching over her. No sounds but for the sounds of the Saturday market clearing up in the square outside, the only light came from the lamp in the middle of the table. She woke up with a start.

‘Is he back yet?’ she said. Peter shook his head. She went out the back, looked up and down the alleyway.There were steps running down the passage, but it wasn’t him.

She came inside, white and wheezing. Kitty made her sit back down in the chair, unlaced her shoes and put her feet on a stool in front of the small fire.

‘He’s a disgrace, me dad,’ said Kitty. ‘He’ll be down at the Dog still. How many times have we had to flit because he’s drank the rent? I’m that sick of my dad.’

Ma gave a shake to her feet. She held on to the arms of the old chair and leant forward.‘I won’t hear you speak like that about your own father,Kitty.He does the best he can. A good man in hard times.’

Kitty simmered her anger inside; had her own opinions.

‘I met your dad in a hospital, you know. A bit like the one I’ve been biding in just now.’

Peter wanted a story. He wanted a story of how she had met Dad, back when Dad was a soldier in the war. So she told him again how he’d worked with the planes till the gas had got him. How she’d been nursing him and they’d fallen in love – although at first she’d been that cross with him when she’d caught him sneaking out at night to the kitchens for a bacon sandwich. She’d caught him and his mates coming back down the corridor, a line of three men hobbling back together with their crutches and slings and bandages, sharing out their good arms and legs and eyes between them. She made Peter laugh and he was satisfied. It was a good story.

**

After they’d gone to bed she watched the flame through the bars of the iron range in the hearth, and she thought of that sweet time, unexpected and tender.The children couldn’t really see what she’d seen back then, how their father had set out to be a fine man. But the gas had changed him. 

The last thing Jim had ever seen clearly was the burst of a shell and a sludge of brown liquid spreading out over the snow – the gas attack on Nancy airbase. He told her it looked like sherry, pools of thick Christmas sherry across the snow.A fog was rising up from the sludge, sickly yellow in the flares. And he was already breathing the gas in, coughing, his eyes burning, scrambling for his mask, his fingers numb and thick; but he couldn’t get the strap over his head, the balaclava bunched up and in the way. He’d tried to run to clean air, to cool his lungs down. But he blundered on through the thick fog. Burning his breath. Burning his lungs.The siren sounding too late.

You couldn’t tell how bad you’d got it. Not at first.You just had to lie in your bunk and wait to see how bad it would get.When his blisters had dried, when he could get back into clothes again, they packed him in a troop train with hundreds of others like him to go home. Rusty iron in his mouth each time he spat into a cloth. The bandages still over his eyes. 

She was there on the ward in the Manchester hospital, the assisting nurse, when the doctor had the bandages taken off. Jim told them the room was all misty, shapes that wouldn’t come properly into focus. The doctor said the gas had carried on eating into the surface of his eyes, but given the circumstances he could see fairly well.

Then he showed Jim the grey night-map of his lung X-ray.‘These areas here, they’re the permanent damage. I would say you’ve got half capacity.’

‘You mean the rest won’t come back then?’

‘I’m sorry.You will need to look for less physical employment in future.’

‘Maybe I’ll get meself a job in a bank,’ he said.

But he was still sure he was going to get better. Spring was coming out in swathes of blurred purple and yellow in the hospital gardens. There were nurses to tease and flirt with, and the nurses were game and said,‘Oh Jim, you are a right one.’And how Alf was going to have all the ladies running after him once he got out – as if it never crossed their minds that Jim was half blind, or that Alf had his leg missing. It was a form of kindness really, not taken seriously.

But Jim was different around her, serious, noticing everything she did. She wasn’t young, not like a lot of the nurses, and she didn’t know how to flirt with a man.When she took his temperature he stared right into her eyes and held her wrist, said,‘How’s my gorgeous girl?’ She’d try to be haughty then and boss him about, but he’d got her. He saw how she was hopeful in spite of herself, half ashamed of the feelings he stirred up in her.

It was as if he knew her life. Given up on marriage, a sweetheart lost early in the war, the one slice of toast in front of the small gas fire in her small nurse’s room, washing with the jug and pitcher in the cold, hurrying under the sheets and knowing tomorrow would be as it was ordained.The visits home in a best coat to be bullied by her father, the small pot of rouge brought to keep her pretty. For what: the withdrawing into hard work and self-sufficiency?

He said she smelled good, of soap and ironing and books. For the first time in years she was aware of all that she was holding back; the way her arm jumped if he touched it when she smoothed his sheets; the feel of his hand suddenly grasping hers, thanking her, his palm warm and calloused.

It was an imposing institutional building, miles of corridors, entrances and stairwells that were forgotten, deserted at different parts of the day.There were acres of dishevelled parkland where gentry had once taken their evening stroll. A damp, heady spring turning into summer.They worked out ways to meet and she thought, I’m courting. She was giddy with the tender pressure of being wanted so much.

One night she sat alone on her nurse’s bed in her rayon slip, her hand over her mouth, trying not to wake the girl sleeping in the other bed. She’d missed three times.Three times. She was rocking in agitation, and she held her arms round her narrow stomach and let it come to her gladly, this knowledge, this deep root, this baby, already growing inside her. Nothing would part her from this. She looked around the room. How simple and elemental and wonderful this tiny room and her whole life had suddenly become.

They said another couple of weeks and he could leave. She had to tell him. She knew he would finish with her. She would start to show soon, and then she would have to leave too. In disgrace.

Early one morning she came in to a great commotion going on in the ward.The war was over.The patients were dancing around,Alf hopping and waving one crutch, grabbing the nurses, and even Matron let herself be kissed. Jim grabbed Evelyn and said,‘Marry me then.’

He got hold of a brass ring, with a red glass stone; the sort of ring that left a greenish mark on your skin. He said he would do better for her later.When she told him about the baby he was as excited as if the war had ended all over again.

He was twenty-two when they got married. He was war wounded, but had a fire inside him, determined that he could wrest a living for them. But his lungs were eaten away; sometimes she’d find him gasping and panicked, the small amounts of air claustrophobic in his lungs. His eyes stayed blurred over with cataracts from the gas. Each evening he’d ask her to read the paper aloud to him, because she had such a nice voice.

He took what he could in the way of work, but mostly he went back and stood in line in the dole queue. He brought home a pittance to keep them alive – just.They did what they could to manage.And then the babies came, Kitty and John, Doris and Bill, and last of all, Peter.

They did what they could to manage, and he was still sure then that by his will and his bare hands he could wrest a good living for them, refused to take into account any diminishment caused by the war.

You had to wait to see how bad the damage got while the gas was still burning into the flesh, and you had to wait to see how far the bitterness would burn down into a man’s soul.

She got out of the chair to stoke up the coals with the poker and sank back down. Eleven o’clock. She may as well snooze here a little longer in case he was back – unless a lock-in started and he stayed on. He would come home sooner or later, flushed and drunk from holding court in the Irish pubs, half the dole money gone again. A small man in a big suit, bought off a dead man’s widow.Always looking for the man who fitted that suit.

Tomorrow she would take the clock from the front room, and roll up the bedding. Most weeks Peter and Bill would carry it to the shop with the three metal balls above a window filled with boxes of rings and piles of old shoes. On Friday, when Kitty’s and John’s money came in, the clock would be back on the shelf, the bedcover spread on her bed again.

They ate tripe and vinegar; bruised fruit sold cheap at the market, cracked eggs from Seymour’s the grocer’s. She’d had a grammar school education. She was a clever girl.They didn’t go hungry. Sometimes their dad came home with unlikely things from the pub; rabbit meat that came from no one knew where; once, three gorgeous pheasants that needed plucking of all their gold feathers. 

The secret history hidden in the Selkie story

The historical novel THE SEA HOUSE ( published as SECRETS OF THE SEA HOUSE in the UK) was inspired by a real letter to the Times newspaper in 1809 reporting a mermaid sighting by a Scots schoolmaster. There are many strange legends about sea people in the Hebrides.

            The legend of the Selkie is told along the Western coast of Scotland and as far down as Ireland. Selkies are seals in the water, but once on land, they take off their skins and become human. If an ordinary mortal sees a Selkie in human form, they will inevitably fall in love. The Selkie legend has several variations but never ends happily. The husband or wife of a Selkie may hide away their seal skins, but once their hiding place is discovered the Selkie is powerless to resist the call of the sea. He slides back into his skins and departs, leaving behind any children.

            It’s a sad and spine tingling legend that I first heard while on holiday in the Outer Hebrides with my children. But as I read and researched the history of the islands, I began to realise that the Selkie story was much more than just a fairy story.

            In his book on the seal people, Gaelic historian John MacAulay puts forward an interesting theory, that the Selkie stories are actually a very old form of oral history. He suggests that for thousands of years, Eskimo type kayakers in sealskin canoes have been travelling down to Scotland from remote Arctic Norway. The Sea Sami, now extinct, were a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers that used Eskimo kayaks and technology to hunt and fish.

            Now imagine how such a kayaker must have looked to someone who had never seen a kayaker before. A sealskin kayak becomes waterlogged after eight hours and so lies just below the surface of the water. All you would see from the shore would be the top half of a man and below the water, the shape of a long tail wavering in the refracted light. It must have looked remarkably like a creature that was half man, half seal. And imagine the islander’s shock if that creature came ashore, took off its sealskins and became entirely human.

            There are several families from the Outer Hebrides who came claim direct descent from sea people. The famous poet MacOdrum was said to be one of the seal people and to get his skill in song writing from the seal’s gift of singing.

            I was amazed to find that there were also many sightings of mermaids around Scotland’s shores, recorded by highly respectable people, among them, a letter to the London Times in 1809 reporting a mermaid sighting by a schoolmaster in Sanday. There was even a record of a funeral held in 1830 for a mermaid whose body was washed up on the shore of Benbecula in the Hebrides.

            It could well be that such mermaid sightings were describing sightings of the same kayakers from Norway. The Times mermaid was seen seated on a rock inaccessible to any human, combing its long hair. It’s interesting to note that a seal skin kayak has to haul out onto a rock every so often to dry out the kayak. A female kayaker would no doubt take the chance to comb out her hair. As soon as it saw it was observed, the long-tailed creature launched back into the water, as a kayak would from a rock.

            The Sea Sami tribe that once lived in Norway has now disappeared. Almost none of their fragile artefacts or kayaks have survived to prove that they ever visited Scotland. Two hundred years ago, under intense pressure to assimilate into the mainstream culture, the Sea Sami way of life disappeared. The last recorded mermaid sighting was also two hundred years ago – both mermaids and Sea Sami disappeared at exactly the same time.

            The Selkie stories are probably the clearest evidence we have that Sea Sami ever visited the islands of the North Scotland.

            Most of the island families that claim to be descended from Selkies are now in Canada or America following the mid Victorian clearances in Scotland, when entire communities of Gaelic crofters were evicted to make way for the landlord’s sheep. In Secrets of the Sea House, Moira’s struggle with eviction in 1860 reflects that sad time. In a strange parallel, it seems that the mermaid and Selkie sightings stopped because the Sea Sami culture was banned in Norway, just as the Gaelic culture of the Outer Isles was once supressed for many years. Secrets of the Sea House is a mystery story, but it is also a way to celebrate and hold on to and celebrate some of the history of the Western seaboard of Scotland, and in particular the magical Selkie stories.