Dr Korczak's Oak

Janusz Korczak ran his orphanage from this corner for 29 years, until German soldiers marched him and roughly 200 children from the building to a train bound for Treblinka in August 1942, where all were murdered. He was offered a chance to walk away alone, by then already a well-known pediatrician and radio personality; he refused, choosing to stay with the children rather than abandon them, and that refusal is most of why his name is still known today far beyond Poland. The orphanage building itself, designed in 1911 for the Jewish charity Pomoc dla Sierot and completed the following year, is the only structure on this stretch of what was then Krochmalna Street to survive the district's wartime destruction; everything burned around it, then everything else standing was cleared after the war, leaving Korczak's building alone on ground later renamed Jaktorowska Street in 1970. The Hungarian oak growing at its corner, protected as one of Warsaw's natural monuments and formally named for Korczak, stands roughly 22 metres tall with a trunk 440 centimetres around. No record fixes exactly when it was planted, so it may or may not have already stood here while the orphanage still operated, but it has grown up beside the one building in the neighbourhood old enough to remember.