True story of loving doctor who showed dignity in the face of evil
In The Pianist, his memoir of his danger-filled days in Warsaw and its Jewish ghetto under the German occupation – an experience relayed in the 2002 Polanski film of the same name – Wladyslaw Szpilman devoted a page to a vignette of tenderness.
In early August 1942, as the ghetto was being liquidated, the majority of its terrified inhabitants bound for “resettlement in the East”, he caught sight of Janusz Korczak accompanying a column of children from the Jewish orphanage that he ran at 92 Krochmalna Street. Korczak, Szpilman noted, had refused a last-minute offer to be saved from going to Treblinka and thus extermination, instead opting to try to cheer up his charges, dressed in their best as if for a country outing. “The smiling children were singing in chorus,” Spilzman wrote, adding: “I am sure that even in the gas chamber, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort: “It’s all right, children, it will be all right…”
You might think it’s impossible to summon such a moment on stage. Yet, using the simplest of theatrical means,
Dr Korczak’s Example, a 2001 play by David Greig sensitively revived in Leeds Playhouse’s new subterranean studio by James Brining (who first commissioned the work), does so, bringing tears to the eyes at its close. Under a spotlight, a battalion of figurines are arrayed on a table, a spindly likeness of Korczak at the helm, as if marching to a golden future. The implicit dignity goes in step with an emphatic message: Korczak’s far-sighted beliefs about child welfare eventually contributed to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
This isn’t a puppet-show, yet from time to time manikins are used to create a sense of the orphanage and its ethos: diminutive, vulnerable bodies needing care and attention, just what was offered by Korczak’s devotion in the face of barbarism. That barbarism – unspeakable if you read the accounts – is kept out of sight but never fully out of mind. Rose Revitt’s imposing design strews rubble around the acting area – in a certain light, it looks like piles of little suitcases. The effect is of a fragile sanctuary, surrounded by the engulfing ravages of conflict.
The sound of children is heard like a memory of youth; three adult actors tell the tale. At the start, Greig begins with a paradox: what we’re seeing actually “happened”, we’re told. Yet to shape the barely imaginable experience into manageable form requires fiction, a representative character to stand in for many. In the usual scheme of things, a little Jewish orphan boy seized by a German officer for thieving food would have been shot on the spot. Greig tells us this, then saves the child (called Adzio) to show how Korczak might have cared for such a waif, so traumatised at first he can’t say what befell his brother.
Rob Pickavance plays the hero, and you believe in his gentleness. There’s matching finesse from Danny Sykes as the cynical, twitchy, street-hardened newcomer who wants the orphanage to face the facts of impending annihilation yet succumbs to its idealism. The romance that blossoms between him and a compassionate girl called Stephanie (Gemma Barnett) perhaps panders to the need for today’s audiences to have something “relatable” to latch on to and be treated to the balm of escapism too. And yet, interestingly, Korczak penned a proto-harry Potter novel, Kaytek the Wizard, in 1933. I think he’d probably have approved of a hint of miracles in the face of overwhelming wickedness.