As it reached a much larger audience, Szpilman's memoir was widely praised. Britain's "Independent" described it as "a compelling, harrowing masterpiece"; it is "one of the most powerful accounts ever written" of the era declared another leading British daily. The book's description of the famed Warsaw teacher and writer Janusz Korczak has been described as "overwhelmingly powerful and poignant." Korczak declined to save himself from deportation to Treblinka, instead walking with the children of his orphanage to the deportation site and ultimately escorting them "into the next world," as Szpilman related: