A Hard Knock Life: Janusz Korczak & King Matt the First
In 2005, Hurt, a Polish rock band, released the song ‘Załoga G’. The band sings about the frustrations of adulthood: tired of wallowing in cynicism and self-centredness, they aspire to one day regain their youthful innocence and hope. This innocence and hope are represented in the children’s characters they sing about, including Bolek and Lolek, Tytus, Romek and A’Tomek, The Six Bullerby Children, Asterix and Obelix, and King Matt the First. Let us thus dive into a world where children and the imagination reign.
Cannonballed into adulthood
King Matt the First (Król Maciuś Pierwszy) was no ordinary children’s character. Janusz Korczak, a Polish paediatrician, promoted and popularised the rights of children, treating them as equals. In his 1923 book, King Matt the First, he catapulted his young protagonist into the adult world, war included. Despite these challenges, King Matt accepts them, along with any successes and failures that came along. He bravely confronts life’s challenges rather than avoiding them – not allowing anyone to prevent him from experiencing them.
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Janusz Korczak as a child, ca. 1888, book frontispiece from ‘King Matt the First’, the Nasz Dom (Our House) building, Pola Bielańskie, photo: courtesy of the Korczakianum Centre for Documentation and Research in Warsaw
At the start of the novel, the king of an unnamed European country dies from an incurable illness and Matt, his son and the prince, takes the throne. The beginning of King Matt’s reign is not healthy, as three other kings think ill of him and quickly declare war to take advantage of his youth and inexperience. King Matt’s ministers conceal the news from him, as he hadn’t yet learned important subjects as geography. King Matt, ready to command his army, confidently tells his ministers they must defend their country’s honour, but his ministers attempt to lead the efforts themselves, already having sent the army to fight two battles. To get a firsthand account of the action, King Matt trades his royal identity for the pseudonym Tomek, and sneaks off to join his soldiers on the front line.
An uphill battle
The battlefield was an entirely different playground. King Matt thought he would be leading his army on a white horse; instead, he finds himself in trench warfare. He once imagined a magnifying glass that would be able to set gunpowder on fire from a distance. Now, as a soldier, he dresses as a shepherd and lies to the opposing army, telling them his family’s hut burned down. They take him in, and he discovers the location of the ammunition dump. Once he returns to his army, his soldiers blow up the other army’s ammunition dump. This stands out as an important victory for King Matt’s army, and his generals guide the country to victory.
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Although he achieves peace with the other countries, King Matt continues the war with his ministers, who want to continue ruling the country. King Matt has them all arrested and only releases them when they name him King Matt the First, the Reformer. They agree to split the country: King Matt works on reforms for children while his ministers would rule the adults. King Matt secures money for his reforms, which include building a zoo in the capital and summer camps for sick children in the countryside.
A trip to Africa
King Matt’s plans for his zoo create an uproar. He meets an African prince who owns a variety of wild animals who will give them to King Matt for free if he visits the prince’s father, King Bum-Drum. Matt’s ministers, however, discourage him from doing this, as they see it is a country of cannibals. Matt goes forward, nonetheless, and because he is the first European king to visit the country, the king gives him gold, and Matt allows the cannibals to study in his country for free.
Korczak’s depiction of Africans as uneducated cannibals remains offensive, and the exchange of gold recalls a history of European imperialism. While Korczak depicts the Africans studying in King Matt’s country as being intelligent – King Bum-Drum’s daughter learns the new language in less than two months, creates a medicine to treat an ill calf, and questions gender roles – his characterization of Africans is dehumanizing. Korczak saw himself in his character, and he wanted to visit the places King Matt travelled to, but he was too old. Instead, Korczak travelled in his imagination, inventing stereotypes. Had he actually visited Africa, he would have seen with his own eyes how inaccurate his depictions were.
The children take over
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Mały Przegląd from 1 September 1939, photo: Polona.pl
The connection between Korczak’s life and the children’s novel does not end with travel. In the book, King Matt creates a children’s newspaper as well as a children’s parliament, which includes two delegates from every school between the ages of ten and fifteen. The children rule for themselves, give themselves watches, and have the ability to decide whether their relatives can kiss them or not. But they also make outrageous requests, such as when a few boy delegates want to abolish girls. In real life and in Poland, Korczak published a children’s newspaper called Mały Przegląd (Little Review), which ran from 1926 to 1939, an addition to the Jewish newspaper for adults, Nasz Przegląd (Our Review). Children could submit letters to Mały Przegląd on any topics they found interesting, and the newspaper would edit and publish them. Korczak was also the director of a Jewish orphanage that opened in Warsaw in 1913. In his orphanage, children maintained their own parliament.
Children continue to bear adult responsibilities in King Matt the First. The children feel their teachers punish them unfairly, so the children’s parliament votes for grown-ups to attend school. In response, the adult parliament votes for children to go to work. The role reversal fails, as there are troublemaker adults in school and woefully unprepared children at work who cause accidents – for example, the derailment of a train. The country soon devolves into a second war, as a journalist working as a spy publishes a manifesto, forging King Matt’s authorship, calling for children to revolt everywhere so that King Matt could become the king of all the world’s children. The three kingdoms from the previous war take note and declare an attack on King Matt’s country once again.
Real life
Before publishing King Matt the First, Korczak witnessed the brutality of war when he was drafted into the Russian army in 1905 to serve as a doctor in the Russo–Japanese War. The second war overcomes King Matt’s forces, and they surrender. Korczak does not give his children’s story a fairy tale ending, and the child-king’s reign ends with Matt calmly accepting his sentence to live in exile on a desert island.
This complex children’s book – filled with adult problems – characterizes Janusz Korczak’s thoughts on child development. King Matt is not a perfect ruler nor does he have all the solutions to life’s problems. But neither do the adults. However, the book allows King Matt the opportunity to fail and explore new ideas. This runs contrary to the innocence and hope which the band Hurt romanticizes. King Matt avoids execution, but exile awaits him nonetheless. The rest is uncertain: like adult life, the place from which Hurt sings.
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The orphanage on 92 Krochmalna Street (now 6 Jaktorowska Street), around 1935; photo by Korczakianum
Korczak’s life followed a similar path to that of his imagined hero’s. In 1896, his father died in a mental institution and Korczak had to support his family by tutoring at the age of 18. And his story did not end in innocence or peace. On 5 August 1942, long after he published King Matt the First, Korczak, the other workers from his orphanage, and the children from his orphanage were sent to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp.
Written by Darek Makowski, March 2022
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