Twelve years ago, when my wife, Elana, and I were living in Jerusalem, we visited Yad Vashem. In an exhibit on art in the Nazi ghettos, I first learned the story of Henryk Goldszmit, better known as Janusz Korczak — a prominent educator, author, and pediatrician, and the head of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw.
By July of 1942, Warsaw had been under Nazi occupation for two years and the city’s Jews were imprisoned in its ghetto. The orphanage — which had been relocated from Krochmalna to Chłodna and finally to Sienna Street as the borders of the ghetto were shifted and shrunk by the Nazis — swelled with nearly two hundred children between the ages of seven and fourteen. Food rations had become scarce, and word had spread of the possibility of mass deportations. Korczak was offered passage out of the ghetto by his influential friends, but he remained with his orphans. In fact, as a film in the exhibit explained, he decided to help them stage an adaptation of the Bengali play The Post Office by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
I was stunned. The Post Office? I knew the play. My class had read it in my elementary school in India, and our teacher had directed us in a rag-tag production. The plot centers on an orphaned boy, Amal, who suffers from a mysterious illness. The village doctor instructs him to quarantine. Nevertheless, he manages to meet many engaging figures through his window, including other boys his own age, a flower girl, and a wandering musician. Though he’s rebuked for his imagination, Amal comes to believe that beyond the distant mountains lives a great king who will someday send him a letter. In the final scene of the play, as Amal lies on his deathbed, the king’s doctor and messenger arrive at his house. Amal’s vision of the world is vindicated.
As a seven-year-old, I was less interested in Tagore’s themes than I was in the fact that I was getting to wear a costume I’d made with my teacher’s help and act in a play in which most of the main parts had been given to me and my classmates. Standing in Yad Vashem, I remembered the chaotic energy before the curtain rose, a roomful of children jostling each other and trying their best to keep quiet. Now, however, I also contemplated the coincidence that I, a Bengali man married to the Jewish granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, would come across a play from my youth at a Holocaust museum. Why had Korczak put on a play in the ghetto — what was he hoping to achieve? And why had he chosen this play in particular? Underlying both questions was perhaps a more fundamental one: What is the value of art in wartime?
I later learned that The Post Office had received international recognition by the time it was performed in the Warsaw Ghetto. After its premiere in Rabindranath Tagore’s school in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, it was staged in Dublin and London in 1913 at the urging of W. B. Yeats, then in 1921 in Berlin with Tagore himself in the audience, and then in Paris the night before the city fell to German forces in 1940.
When Korczak decided to stage the play, he was fighting to keep his children and staff from losing hope and falling into depression. He had organized a series of weekly “chats” that spanned the range of his intellectual interests— literary analysis, visual art, women’s rights, and the nature of evil — and invited everyone from newspaper vendors to poets to speak about their professions. For the older students and staff, he held study circles. Moreover, Korczak integrated the arts into the everyday life of the orphanage, with marionette plays along with musical and theater productions. The children performed in some of these programs, too.
In the bleakness of the Warsaw Ghetto, Korczak was fighting to keep his children and his staff from falling into depression.
When Korczak decided to stage the play, he was fighting to keep his children and staff from losing hope and falling into depression. He had organized a series of weekly “chats” that spanned the range of his intellectual interests— literary analysis, visual art, women’s rights, and the nature of evil — and invited everyone from newspaper vendors to poets to speak about their professions. For the older students and staff, he held study circles. Moreover, Korczak integrated the arts into the everyday life of the orphanage, with marionette plays along with musical and theater productions. The children performed in some of these programs, too.
For Korczak’s children, acting in a play was a meaningful enterprise. Like my classmates and me, they made their own costumes, although theirs were sewn out of old bed sheets and torn socks. They were excited by the prospect of the entire community coming to see their show.
Korczak had been a student of theosophy and meditation, and had delved into Eastern mythology. I think he saw Amal’s journey as a brave example. Tagore once described the play: “Amal represents the man whose soul has received the call of the open road … that which is ‘death’ to the world of hoarded wealth and certified creeds brings him awakening in the world of spiritual freedom.”
For Tagore, the end of the play isn’t the end for Amal, but rather a kind of awakening — a movement from enslavement toward freedom. I believe Korczak was inspired by the idea that art can change us, that the actors might find their sense of dignity restored, and that those witnessing it might be given a sense of hope and possibility.
What would have happened if the actors of yesterday were to continue in their roles today?
Jerzyk fancied himself a fakir.
Chaimek — a real doctor.
Adek — the lord mayor.
So wrote Korczak in his diary after the performance of The Post Office. Mass deportations to Treblinka began three days later, and neither Korczak nor his children were spared.
Looking back, it’s difficult to discuss Korczak’s approach or words without invoking the term “protest.” Korczak’s protest was in the way he lived his life and in the world he created for his orphans. His choice to produce The Post Office, a simple play with complex themes, was in the name of art, renewal, and life — a search in darkness for human connection.
Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award and short-listed for the Tagore Prize. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness. His short fiction has received both an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize and has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and elsewhere. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.