"Un manicomio o un carcere?" Il Diario del ghetto di Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak’s Ghetto Diary, written within the Warsaw ghetto, May to August 4 1942, is one of the most intriguing and challenging documents of the period of the Holocaust. Based on this journal and on other writings from the same period, this paper illustrates the complex and contradictory personality of Janusz Korczak as a writer and as a thinker, and his moral resistance inside the ghetto walls, which is seen to derive both from the Stoic and the Jewish tradition.