The Teacher of Warsaw

The disappointing latest from Escobar (The Librarian of Saint-Malo) dramatizes the final years of real-life WWII hero Janusz Korczak and his work protecting orphans in the Warsaw ghetto. It’s 1939 and Korczak, known as “Teacher,” has spent decades as the director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, but after Nazi Germany attacks Poland, Korczak and his coworkers struggle to protect the children from bomb raids and the horrors of war. Their hardships increase after the Nazis force all Jewish citizens—including Korczak and the orphans—to relocate to the ghetto. There, they must deal with overcrowding, typhus, and chronic hunger as Korczak does his best to keep the children’s spirits up with dramatic story recitals and the ramshackle staging of Rabindranath Tagore’s play The Post Office. Korczak will stop at nothing to protect the children, even as rumors swirl about plans to deport Jewish people to an obscure region up north called Treblinka. Frequent navel-gazing disrupts the story (“Does freedom really exist, or is it an idea invented by human beings?”), and some scenes feel disjointed and mechanical as they jump from plot point to plot point with little regard for narrative flow. Escobar’s fans will hope he returns to form in his next outing. (June)