Andrzej Wajda's Korczak (1990) paid tribute to a man who spent most of his life in pursuit of an ideal. Although a recognized doctor of medicine and a committed pedagogue who in 1911 had founded an orphanage for Jewish children, it was through his writings that he became internationally known. Set in 1944 , three years after the German invasion of Poland, the film covers the last tragic chapter of his life at the Jewish orphanage located just outside the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Henryk Goldszmit, better known as Dr. Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), was already well known in intellectual circles when, in 1972 , he was posthumously awarded in Frankfurt the Peace Prize of the German Book Publishers. The award cited the books he had written for and about children, a series that began with his popular children's play "Kloredy" (published in 1899) and continued almost uninterrupted over the next 40 years. Also, German playwright Erwin Sylvanus had dramatized the last year of the fatal year of 194 in his play "Korzak und die Kinder" (Korczak and the Children), which premiered in 1957. Throughout the troubled 1980s, with martial law declared in Poland and many of the country's artists in exile, Andrzej Wajda harbored only a slim hope to make a film about the life and deeds of the doctor-pedagogue who had gone freely into the gas chambers of Trebinka together with the Jewish orphans entrusted to his care. Worst of all, he could not resolve the question of film rights to two separate screenplays owned by a British producer - one of which had been written by Agnieszka Holland, Wajda's colleague who shared his exile in Paris. Nor did he have much hope either of ever receiving government permission to shoot in Poland at an
extermination camp. The climate changed in 1989: "Solidarity" leaders returned again to power and gave a green light to the Korczak project. At this juncture, too, Regina Ziegler stepped into the picture: the Berlin producer had collaborated with Andrzej Wajda on a televised version of the Polish director's production of Dostoyevsky's Schuld und Sühne (Crime and Punishment) (1987) at the Berliner Schaubühne, and now she asked if the relationship could continue. Fine, responded Wajda, but you will never get the rights to Holland's script on the story of Janusz Korczak. She did - by purchasing both screenplays from the British producer. Andrzej Wajda immediately signed Wojciech Pszoniak to play Janusz Korczak - Poland's eminent stage actor had also played the title role in Wajda's Danton (France, 1983). Robbie Müller, one of Europe's premiere cinematographers with a special talent for shooting in black-and-white, was engaged to heighten the feel of documentary realism on the set. When the Polish- German- British production had finally completed its long odyssey to the screen, Korczak was immediately invited to the Cannes festival (running out-of-competition, at the wish of the director), later played to packed houses in Paris, and was invited to the film festivals the world over.