Actors perform a court scene during a rehearsal of The Children's Republic. The children at Janusz Korczak's orphanage had their own court, parliament and newspaper. (Kate Porter/CBC)

An Ottawa man who grew up in a Jewish orphanage in Poland has inspired a new play about his extraordinary childhood mentor, a man who followed the children he loved to the Nazi death camps during the Second World War.

The Children's Republic by Hannah Moscovitch is about Janusz Korczak, who cared for hundreds of orphaned and abandoned Jewish children in Poland before and during the Second World War —including Leon Gluzman, an Ottawa businessman and philanthropist who is now in his 90s.

The play, which opens at the Great Canadian Theatre Company on Nov. 3, shines a light on the lives of Korczak, whose real name was Henryk Goldszmith, and the children who lived in his orphanage. They had their own court, parliament and newspaper because that was how Korczak ran the facility. After the Nazi invasion, Korczak followed his young charges to the Warsaw Ghetto and eventually the death camps.

'I thought they were crazy'

The play was commissioned to thank Gluzman for the support he's given the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama. Moscovitch, who is originally from Ottawa and is now playwright-in-residence at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, said she was asked by the school's artistic director, Amanda Lewis, and the theatre company's artistic director Lise Anne Johnston to include young actors in the production.

"I thought they were crazy," recalled Moscovitch, an award-winning playwright whose recent works include East of Berlin, a popular play about the Holocaust from the Nazi point of view that has been performed in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton.

Children are almost always played by adults in plays for adult audiences, she said. But Moscovitch later decided that having child actors perform was fitting.

"Janusz Korczak really strongly believed that children need to be respected, and their abilities need to be respected," Moscovitch said. "So what better way to honour him than to have children perform for adults in a play about him and his life?"

Moscovitch said she has attended some of the rehearsals, and has enjoyed watching the children work.

"I found it pretty charming," she added. "Their process is so unusual."

In preparation for the play, the young actors interviewed Gluzman about life at the orphanage, including details like what food they ate.

"He had nothing but good things to say about it," said Hannah Kaya, one of the six young students who researched Poland in the 1940s, watched the play develop over the past three years and will now act in the production.

"It's a huge relief — everything we've been working up to is finally here," she said at a rehearsal this week. "It's also a lot of stress because it feels like, 'Oh, my God it's finally here. I hope it's good.'"

The play runs until Nov. 22.