Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician running a Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, kept writing a diary of weighing medicine, begging for food, and recording the children's small illnesses while deportation loomed. He repeatedly declined offers to escape and leave the children behind, continuing the daily routines of care until he was deported with roughly two hundred orphans to Treblinka in 1942.
Under conditions of starvation and threatened extermination, Korczak treats the preservation of ordinary structure (meals weighed and distributed, hygiene, sleep schedules, lessons) as the practical form resistance takes. Maintaining normalcy is presented not as denial but as the concrete means by which the children's humanity is held intact when nothing larger can be controlled.
Korczak insists the child is not an incomplete adult or a project for the future but a complete human being whose current feelings, rights, and judgments deserve respect now. This reframes the caregiver's task from shaping who the child will become to honoring who the child already is.
The diary registers catastrophe almost entirely through minute material details: the exact gram of a potato, who coughed, the cost of a bribe, a broken window. Attending to the smallest administrative and bodily particulars becomes a way of seeing a larger horror more truthfully than abstract statements of it would.