Lead Review
- Book: The Good Doctor of Warsaw
- Location: Warsaw
- Author: Elisabeth Gifford
“…if you have love then you have everything”
We went to Warsaw last year and, as is my wont, I looked out for books set in the place I am visiting. This book hadn’t been published at the point of my visit but it would have been an amazing addition to my collection of books to read in the city. It is an easy destination for anyone in Europe and it is a city that has been witness to so much; Poland itself has been a country that has existed in some form for centuries but being in the heart of Europe has seen its size grow and reduce, depending who had conquered the country at a given point.
In the novel, as WW2 breaks out, the Germans are advancing from the West. The city is caught in a pincer movement, eventually the Russians homing in from the East. The author has chosen as her central character the child doctor Janusz Korczak, who used his experiences as a child to inform his thinking and studies in later life. He advocated that children need to be treated with empathy and understanding, so that they can develop into well rounded adults. If children cry, it is a way to express something for which they have no words… why would punishment be the first response?
He has set up an orphanage for Jewish children based on strong principles of care and respect. Helping him is Misha – and in part this is his story too, with Sophia. As the war unfolds, the Jews are confined to the area within the Ghetto until they are largely transported to the death camp at Treblinka. After the war only 1% of the jews of Warsaw survived. The Germans razed the Ghetto to the ground to wipe out everyone behind an uprising.
The story of the humiliation, abuse and terror is told with feeling, it is a terrible story unfolding on the pages. It is written in the present tense (and I am not usually a fan of books written in the present) and this lends the story an immediacy and a way of connecting with terrible events that happened across the Summer of 1942 onwards to the end of the war… just over 70 years ago. It is many ways an homage to this selfless and caring man who tried to prioritise the children in his care. it is a great surprise to me that he is not more well-known.
The author has a gift for storytelling and once she had decided on the central character and his story, she had to then work on actually writing her book, no mean feat. This is a satisfying story that, although depressing in many ways, is also redemptive – and a timely and sobering reminder how easily psychopaths can manipulate and terrorise and ultimately eradicate one section of the population.
It is definitely a novel to read and to hear the footsteps echo from the past in Warsaw.
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