The Children's Republic

By Hannah Moscovitch, Stephanie Levitz and Amanda West Lewis

• Janusz’s diary from this time was published in 1958.
• Janusz, thirteen staff members, and 200 children were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp in August 1942. None survived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780369101471

Hannah Moscovitch

Hannah Moscovitch is an acclaimed Canadian playwright, TV writer, and librettist whose work has been widely produced in Canada and around the world. Recent stage work includes Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes and Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story (co-created with Christian Barry and Ben Caplan). Hannah has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, Trillium Book Award, the Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award, the Scotsman Fringe First and the Herald Angel Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize administered by Yale University. She has been nominated for the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Drama Desk Award, and Canada’s Siminovitch Prize in Theatre. She is a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. She spends her time between Halifax and Los Angeles.

Book preview

Cover: The Children's Republic by Hannah Moscovitch. Against a pitch-black background, a rough illustration of a bird cage placed overtop of a lit, white candle.

Also by Hannah Moscovitch

Bunny

East of Berlin

Infinity (with Njo Kong Kie)

Little One and Other Plays

The Mill Part Two: The Huron Bride

Post-Democracy

The Russian Play and Other Short Works

Secret Life of a Mother (with Maev Beaty and Ann-Marie Kerr)

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

This is War

What a Young Wife Ought to Know

The Children’s Republic

a play about Janusz Korczak

Hannah Moscovitch

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

The Children’s Republic © Copyright 2022 by Hannah Moscovitch

First edition: February 2022

Jacket design by Monnet Design

Author photo © Alejandro Santiago

Playwrights Canada Press

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The children’s republic / Hannah Moscovitch.

Names: Moscovitch, Hannah, author.

Description: First edition. | A play.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200375814 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200375822 | ISBN 9780369101457 (softcover) | ISBN 9780369101464 (PDF) | ISBN 9780369101471 (EPUB) | ISBN 9780369101488 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Korczak, Janusz, 1878-1942—Drama.

Classification: LCC PS8626.O837 C45 2020 | DDC C812/.6—dc23

Playwrights Canada Press operates on land which is the ancestral home of the Anishinaabe Nations (Ojibwe / Chippewa, Odawa, Potawatomi, Algonquin, Saulteaux, Nipissing, and Mississauga), the Wendat, and the members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora), as well as Metis and Inuit peoples. It always was and always will be Indigenous land.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts—which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country—the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts.Logo: Government of Canada.Logo: Ontario Creates.Logo: Ontario Arts Council.

To the children who performed this play.

Foreword

Stephanie Levitz

Today, when girls like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg become global activists for education, for climate change, for racial and social justice, their voices are celebrated and encouraged by the adults around them. But over one hundred years ago, a Polish physician and educator often found himself sidelined for suggesting children shouldn’t just speak up—it was their right to do so. Still, Janusz Korczak persisted. His work on theories of child development to incorporate the importances of the rights of children would eventually inspire a landmark international treaty: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

His work wasn’t only theoretical. In 1912, Korczak set up an orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw where hundreds of boys and girls whose parents were too destitute to care for them, or had died, were under his care. He ran his orphanage as if his charges were citizens of a country—a children’s republic. Their rights were clearly laid out in a charter. Rule-breakers faced trial by a jury of their peers. Achievements—even things as simple as getting up on time for a certain number of days in a row—were celebrated, to give the children a sense of accomplishment. And when a child left, most often in those days to be sent abroad to family, those who remained took a vote to determine how they felt.

My grandfather, Leon Gluzman, who entered the orphanage at the age of six, received one hundred votes regretting his departure, four in favour, and sixteen abstentions. My grandfather was on his way to Canada to live with extended family. The year was 1929, the Second World War had yet to break out, and the vicious anti-Semitism that would eventually lead to the Holocaust was only just beginning to take hold. He kept in touch with Korczak until 1939. In 1941, with war now raging, he received an urgent plea from the man many called the old doctor, asking for care packages to help the ailing orphans. A year later, with the Nazis in full control, most of the Jews of Warsaw were rounded up—Korzcak and his children among them. Though he held a position of prominence in Polish society and was offered a way to safety, Korzcak would not leave the children. He marched with them onto a train that was headed for the notorious death camp of Treblinka. He and all the children in his care were killed. Altogether, six million