Janusz Korczak’s Last Day
Published in Issue #36 Translated from Yiddish by Maurice Wolfthal(Excerpt from a Novel)
The next day, announcements appeared on the walls, ordering all children to report to the Umschlagplatz, which meant to slaughter. The Germans had designated the corner of Gęsia and Okopowa as the waystation to death. Three-year-old Jews and four-year-olds and five-year-olds huddled together in a corner of the loading yard — Jews who had “instigated an international world war on the earth in order to murder the Aryan nations.” They stood around in their little school aprons, turning their little heads this way and that, searching for their mothers. And those who had brought little toys with them sat down on the ground: one with a little shovel dug up some sand and made a little house, another was baking a little bread made of sand, a third one was weeping, and another was biting his nails.
A shot suddenly rang out, shattering their quiet childish play. They threw themselves on the ground. But in front of them a mother who had been shot through the chest flung herself down. She hadn’t been able to find her child at home and had started running, her scarf flying around her head, like a hunted deer, down into the abyss called Gęsiaand Okopowa, the waystation for children to be slaughtered. She didn’t hear the warnings of the guards. She didn’t notice the screams of the SS. She was running to her child and saw him from a distance. She was reaching out her hands, and that was how she fell, oblivious.
The last breaths of her lungs pushed her forward. A little flock of children flickered before her, who...
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