On the morning of August 6, 1942, German soldiers arrived at Dom Sierot. Approximately 192 children were ordered to march. Korczak, sixty-three, had been offered escape multiple times — by former students, the Polish underground, at least one German officer who recognized him as the author of children's books he had loved in his youth. He refused every offer. The refusal was not heroic in the sense the word usually implies — not with drama or declaration. It was quiet, with the stubbornness of a person for whom the offer was not unattractive but incoherent. To leave the children was not an option he was declining. It was a sentence in a language he did not speak. The grammar of his life did not contain a construction in which he existed separately from his responsibility to the children in his care. He dressed the children in their best clothes. Each carried a knapsack and a favorite book or