The recent memorial ceremonies for the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising has created renewed interest in the actions of Polish Chasidai Umos HaOlam who assisted Poland’s Jews during the Nazi occupation.
Some of these righteous gentiles hid individual Jews who managed to flee the Germans while others joined in the Warsaw ghetto revolt, forged identity papers for Jews, accepted Jews into partisan units and participated in other activities which saved Jewish lives. One of these rescuers, Irena Sendler, managed, historians believe, to save over 3000 Jewish lives.
Irena Sendler was working as a social worker in Warsaw when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The Warsaw Department of Social Work attempted to help Jews who were displaced and impoverished under the German rule. Irena participated in these endeavors and expanded on her job as a member of the anti-Nazi Zagota underground.
When the Germans created the Warsaw ghetto Sendler obtained forged documents which identified her as a nurse who specialized in infectious diseases. These documents allowed her to enter the ghetto and bring in whatever food and medicines that she could. Irena quickly realized that she would be more effective if she could help Jews escape. She decided to concentrate on removing children from the ghetto as it would be easier to hide children once they were on the “free”side of Warsaw.
Sendler began by smuggling street children out of the ghetto but she soon expanded to bring out children whose parents were still alive. She knocked on the doors of families in an effort to convince Jewish parents that their children’s sole possibility of survival lay with escape.
“I talked the mothers out of their children” Sendler said in an interview that she gave over 50 years after the war’s end. “Those scenes over whether to give a child away were heart-rending. Sometimes, they wouldn’t give me the child. Their first question was, ‘What guarantee is there that the child will live?’ I said, ‘None. I don’t even know if I will get out of the ghetto alive today.”
Sendler and her Zagota comrades used a number of methods to smuggle children out of the ghetto. Some children were sedated and hidden under Sendler’s tram seat, in toolboxes or bags or in carts under piles of garbage or barking dogs. Older children could be walked out through the sewer system that ran underneath Warsaw or via a break in the Old Courthouse that sat on the ghetto’s border.
Once a child was smuggled out of the ghetto it was necessary to find a secure hiding place for the child. This could be as perilous as the actual act of smuggling the child out of the ghetto. Sendler and her Zagota compatriots identified sympathetic Polish families who were prepared to risk their lives to hide a Jewish child. The Zagota members transported the children to safe hiding places including orphanages and convents. Sendler recorded the children’s names and their designated hiding places so that they could be reunited with the Jewish community after the war ended. Sendler’s “records” were stuffed into glass jars and buried in her neighbor’s garden.
The Warsaw Ghetto revolt broke out in April 1943. Within months there were no Jews remaining in the area. Zagota gave Sendler, who went by the code name “Jolenta,” total responsibility for the welfare of Jewish children. Sendler continued to try to find children who had, somehow, been saved from the transports and mass shootings and transfer them into hiding.
In October 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. She was brought to the infamous Pawiak prison where the Nazis broke both of her feet. Sendler did not reveal any information about her Zagota comrades or the whereabouts of any of the children. The Germans sentenced Sendler to death but Zagota members were able to bribe a Nazi guard and Irena was released just hours before her scheduled execution.
In 1999 a group of highschool students from Uniontown Kansas heard a rumor about Sendler’s activities. They embarked on an extensive research project about Sendler’s life and wartime activities. A sympathetic Jewish philanthropist took interest in their project and provided them funding to create Life in a Jar which evolved into a website, a book and a presentation that has been seen by thousands of people from around the world.
(YWN – Studio B)
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One Response
This is a remarkable tribute to a courageous woman. She is truly a heroine of the modern era and her story needs to be repeated as often as possible.
One little know facet of Irena Sendler’s legacy is the spirit of four 9th graders in Kansas who captured one woman’s courage and compassion in a 10 minute presentation called “Life in a Jar.” Their project spilled over into their community and ultimately attracted global attention.
Irena Sendler, A Heroine of the Holocaust can be found at http://quilligrapher.hubpages.com/hub/Sendler. It is a tapestry depicting the lives of a brave social worker in Poland and four students in Kansas who brought her amazing story to life.
Thank you for sharing the inspirational story of this marvelous woman with us.