The New Opportunities in Korczakian Documentary Research, Love and Friendship among Pupils in the Orphans’ Home
The New Opportunities in Korczakian Documentary Research, Love and Friendship among Pupils in the Orphans’ Home

Summary/Abstract: The main aim of this article is to show an example of the new opportunitiesin Korczakian research. They have arisen due to the developmentof digital history and recently donated or hitherto unused archival resources.The article also adopts the perspective of deepening the knowledge of thoseaspects of the Korczak research field that is not directly related to Janusz Korczak,his biography and pedagogy. I consider it important to explore the topicsand biographies of people around Korczak, not only Stefania Wilczyńska, butalso children, educators or staff. The more complete the picture of Korczak’suniverse, the better we will understand the multidirectional influences andconnections between individuals and topics.My ambition was also to introduce non-Polish-speaking researchers to Korczaksource materials that are rarely translated from Polish. My preliminaryresearch, based on almost unknown sources from the archives of LohameiHa’Getaot in Israel (Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives), served as an example ofhow to take advantage of new opportunities. I adopted a microhistorical approachand analyzed personal documents, primarily letters of the pupils ofthe Orphans’ Home from 1938/1939–1941. The content of the sources made itpossible to look at love and friendship relationships among the teenagers inthe Orphans’ Home. I also discuss the topics of love and friendship in the pedagogicalcontext of Janusz Korczak’s approach.Their intimate stories complement the knowledge of the history and functioningof the Orphans’ Home that we get from Korczak’s writings, Wilczyńska’s texts and other documents. In turn, the intrapersonal and interpersonalskills that can be captured in the sources I examined allow us to assume thatalso in the aspect of love and friendship relations, we can capture the positiveimpact of the Orphans’ Home on its pupils.

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