The numbers from World War II are so massive as to be inconceivable.

Forty-five million civilian deaths.

Twenty million military personnel deaths.

Fifteen million battle deaths.

Twenty-five million battle wounded. 

The Holocaust, in particular, totaled eleven million people murdered, six million Jews, and five million others, including the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, etc…

In Poland alone, over two million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, while one hundred thousand were killed by the Soviets; ninety percent of their total Jewish population.

At its peak, almost five hundred thousand Jews were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, thirty percent of the city’s population crammed into less than three percent of the city’s area.

Numbers. Those are all numbers. 

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin, the 20th century leader who managed to kill even more people than Adolph Hitler, has been quoted as saying.

If we want future generations to fully comprehend the horror of World War II, we can’t give them statistics, we have to give them tragedies. The individual can expand into the universal in a way that the universal can never be shrunk down into the individual.

The Teacher of Warsaw by Mario Escaobar, translated from Spanish by Gretchen Abernathy and published by HarperCollins Espanol/Harper Muse, takes the unfathomable numbers of the Warsaw Ghetto and focuses them on the efforts of one man.

The novel tells the story of Janusz Korczak, a doctor and popular Polish radio personality, who worked in a children’s shelter outside of Kyiv during his commission as an Army physician during World War I, and ultimately founded his own orphanage, Dom Seirot (literally translated as: House of Orphans).

Korczak and his orphans were moved inside the Warsaw Ghetto in November of 1940, where in the face of great privation and disease, Korczak attempted to keep his hundreds of charges fed, warm, and alive for almost two years. During that time, he worked with allies inside and outside the ghetto to forge new identities for the most Aryan-looking of his Jewish children and smuggle them out to foster parents and sympathetic monasteries. 

In early August of 1942, all the orphans were ordered to report for deportation to Treblinka. Though rumor has it a friendly German official offered to spare Korczak his children’s fate, the doctor refused to leave his scared little ones. The image of an old, half-starved man holding the hands of and leading a virtual parade of equally ragged children down the streets of his hometown, forcing the citizenry to look upon what they were allowing to happen, is the most powerful visual offered in The Teacher of Warsaw.

Korczak and his orphans were transported to Treblinka, where all were immediately gassed to death on August 6, 1942. The diary he left behind was salvaged and hidden throughout the duration of the war, serving as the inspiration for the fictional retelling of Korczak’s story in The Teacher of Warsaw.

Janusz Korczak was not the only Jew gassed at Treblinka that August. His children were not the only children slaughtered there. But big numbers don’t pack the same punch as the story of a single man. Which is why we will always need individual accounts like The Teacher of Warsaw. To remind us of all the anonymous individuals who never got the chance to tell theirs.