From National Book Award Finalist Albert Marrin comes the shifting story of Janusz Korczak, the heroic Polish Jewish doctor who devoted his life to children, perishing with them in the Holocaust.

Janusz Korczak was more than a great doctor. He was a hero. The Dr. Spock of his day, he set up orphanages run on his concept of honoring children and distributed his concepts with the general public in books and on the radio. He famously said that ‘children aren’t the people of tomorrow, but people today.’ about A Light in the Darkness: Janusz Korczak, His Orphans, and the Holocaust Korczak was a guy before his period, whose work ultimately became the basis for the U.N. Declaration of the Privileges of the kid.

Korczak was also a Polish Jew around the eve of World War II. He turned down multiple possibilities for escape, standing up by the children in his orphanage because they became restricted towards the Warsaw Ghetto. Dressing them within their Sabbath finest, he led their march to the trains and eventually perished with his children in Treblinka.

But this book is much greater than a biography. In it, renowned non-fiction professional Albert Marrin examines not only Janusz Korczak’s life but his ideology of children: that kids are valuable in and of themselves, as individuals. He contrasts this with Adolf Hitler’s life and his ideology of children: that kids are nothing more than tools of the state.

And throughout, Marrin draws readers in to the Warsaw Ghetto. What it had been like. How it had been run. How Jews within and Poles without responded. Who proved helpful to save lives and who tried to enrich themselves on other’s suffering. And exactly how one guy came to symbolize the conscience as well as the soul of humanity.

This is an unforgettable portrait of a man whose compassion in even the darkest hours reminds us what is possible.