Dom Sierot

Dom Sierot (Polish: "House of Orphans") opened in October 1912 at 92 Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, serving Jewish children who had lost parents or been abandoned. Funded through the Society for Orphans' Aid, it housed approximately one hundred children between ages seven and fourteen under the co-direction of Korczak and Stefania Wilczyńska. Over thirty years of operation — relocated into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 and liquidated in August 1942 — the institution developed the three signature structures that embodied Korczak's framework: the children's parliament, the children's court, and the children's newspaper. Each granted the orphans genuine authority over their own community; each embodied, in institutional form, the conviction that children are persons now rather than future persons in preparation. The orphanage functioned simultaneously as a home, a clinical laboratory for Korczak's pediatric observations, and a philosophical demonstration.