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Krakow Orphanage Head Deported to Death Camp "Arm-in-Arm with His Pupils"

(Ha'aretz) Ofer Aderet - While many have heard the heroic story of educator Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in Warsaw and marched together with the children to their deaths during the Holocaust, few have heard of Rabbi Dawid Kurzmann, who directed the Jewish Orphans Institute in Krakow. On Oct. 28, 1942, at the head of a group of 300 orphans, Kurzmann, 77, walked to the Belzec extermination camp gas chambers. After the war, the Krakow Jewish community wrote, "When the barbarian Nazis came to destroy us, he did not part from his sainted flock but rather arm-in-arm with his pupils he marched proudly towards death." Meir Bossak, a Holocaust survivor from Krakow, wrote how the Germans ordered the orphans to go from the orphanage to the railroad station, and how they offered Kurzmann the possibility of remaining in the ghetto and saving his life, but he refused and went to his death "at the head of the company of orphans."
2018-01-26 00:00:00
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