基本信息出版社：Algonquin Books
页码：352 页
出版日期：2004年10月
ISBN：1565124421
International Standard Book Number：1565124421
条形码：9781565124424
EAN：9781565124424
装帧：平装
正文语种：英语

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Janusz Korczak was a Polish physician and educator who wrote over twenty books--his fiction was in his time as well known as Peter Pan, and his nonfiction works bore passionate messages of child advocacy. During World War II, the Jewish orphanage he directed was relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. Although Korczak's celebrity afforded him many chances to escape, he refused to abandon the children. He was killed at Treblinka along with the children.

King Matt the First, one of Korczak's most beloved tales, is the story of a boy who becomes king and sets out to reform his kingdom. He decrees that all children are to be given a piece of chocolate at the end of each day. He visits faraway lands and befriends cannibal kings. Whenever his ministers tell him something's impossible, he puts them in jail. He disguises himself as a soldier and becomes a hero. But, as in real life, fantasy is tempered by reality:Matt's fellow kings become jealous of his success--and in the end, Matt falls, although it's clear that he was the greatest king there ever was.

Now this rediscovered classic is available again, and with a vibrant new cover by award-winning artist Brian Selznick. This timeless tale shows that only through the honesty and spontaneity of children can grown-ups begin to imagine and to create a better world.
作者简介 "The lives of great men are like legends?difficult but beautiful," Janusz Korczak once wrote, and it was true of his. Yet most Americans have never heard of Korczak, a Polish-Jewish children?s writer and educator who is as well known in Europe as Anne Frank. Like her, he died in the Holocaust and left behind a diary; unlike her, he had a chance to escape that fate?a chance he chose not to take.

On August 6, 1942, during the early stages of the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, Germans ordered Korczak?s famous orphanage evacuated. Korczak was forced to gather together the two hundred children in his care. He led them with quiet dignity on that final march through the ghetto streets to the train bound for the death camp Treblinka.

It was Janusz Korczak who introduced progressive orphanages into Poland, founded the first national children?s newspaper, trained teachers in what we now call moral education, and worked in juvenile courts defending children?s rights.

Korczak wrote over twenty books. His nonfiction, such as How to Love a Child and The Child?s Right to Respect, gave parents and teachers new insights into child psychology. And generations of young people grew up on his fiction, especially the classic King Matt the First, which tells of the adventures and tribulations of a boy king who aspires to bring reforms to his subjects. It was as beloved in Poland as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were in the English-speaking world.

At the end, Korczak, who had directed a Catholic as well as a Jewish orphanage before the war, had refused all offers of help for his own safety from his Gentile colleagues and friends. "You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this," he said.

Some time after the war, the land that had once been Treblinka was transformed into a vast rock garden. Among the seventeen thousand nameless stones, there is one that bears a personal name:

JANUSZ KORCZAK
(HENRYK GOLDSZMIT)
AND THE CHILDREN