By Tim Power

I recently finished reading “The Zookeeper’s Wife” by Diane Acherman. It was the choice of my book club and like so many of the club’s picks, a book I most likely would not have read of my own choice. It is a war story. It retells the story of Antonia Zabinski (and her husband Jan). They were Polish Christians who were zookeepers in Warsaw at the beginning of World War II. They were able to save over 300 people from the Warsaw Ghetto, yet their story is not well known.

When I read stories like this I am in awe of people who risk their lives, their possessions, and even members of their families to confront an eminent evil and reach out to save others. Not only does the book tell of Antonia and Jan’s heroic work, but it tells various stories of others who chose to stay behind to help those in the Ghetto when they themselves could easily have escaped.

One of those people was Henryk Goldszmit (pen name: Janusz Korczak). He was a pediatrician and novelist who abandoned both careers to found an orphanage for boys and girls, ages 7 to 14. In 1940, Jews were ordered into the Ghetto and so he moved the orphanage there. In the midst of such evil and violence he devoted himself to a “children’s republic” complete with its own parliament, newspaper and court system. The children were not allowed to hit one another, but if they felt slighted they could yell “I’ll sue you!” Then once a week the cases were judged by five children who weren’t being sued that week. In a situation where it would have been so easy to teach the power of brute force he chose to teach them the power of dialogue and reflection.

He also taught the children how to look deeper than the ugly things they saw around them. He encouraged them to imagine the beauty embedded in God’s creation. The following is one of the prayers he taught them: “Thank you, Merciful Lord, for having arranged to provide flowers with fragrance, glow worms with their glow and to make the stars in the sky sparkle.”

We find from Korczak’s diary how he used his imagination to help keep things in perspective and to help him hold on to hope. He tells how at night he would escape to his own private planet, Ro, where an imaginary astronomer friend, Zi, had finally succeeded in building a machine to convert radiant sunlight into moral strength. This moral strength brought peace to most of the universe. Unfortunately the machine did not work on “that restless spark, Planet Earth.” Korczak saw himself as the one who had to plead for compassion as Zi proposed that bloody, warmongering Earth should be destroyed.

Just weeks before it was clear that the children were to be shipped off to Treblinka (one of the death camps) he helped the children stage a drama to prepare them to face death more serenely. In the play, a bedridden boy named Amal suffers in a claustrophobic room and dreams of flying to a land where a king’s doctor can cure him. By the play’s end the royal doctor appears, heals him, flings open the doors and windows, and Amal beholds a circus of stars. Days after the play was staged, Korczak walked with 192 children to the boxcars that would take them to their death. In his diary he wrote: “You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this.”

The Israelis revere Korczak as on of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls make possible the world’s salvation. These are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and most of them remain unrecognized throughout their lives, while they choose to perpetuate goodness, even in the midst of inferno.

As I said, it is a book I would not have chosen to read on my own. But oh how I needed to hear the story. It reminded me to support systems that do not rely on brute force – to look deeper than the ugly when I pray – to use my imagination to give me hope – and that you do not leave a sick child in the night. Oh yes, it also reminded me to thank God for the Thirty-Six Just Ones, whoever they may be.

 The Rev. Tim Power shares this space with the Revs. Rod Anderson and Timothy A. Johnson as well as spiritual writers Dr. Bernard E. Johnson and Lauren Carlson-Vohs. “Spiritually Speaking” appears weekly.