Irena Sendler
Born 15 February 1910
Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire
Died 12 May 2008 (aged 98)
Warsaw, Poland
Occupation Social worker, humanitarian
Irena Sendler (in Polish Irena Sendlerowa née Krzyzanowska; 15 February 1910 – 12 May 2008)[1] was a Polish Catholic social worker who served in the Polish Underground and the Zegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II.
Assisted by some two dozen other Zegota members, Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them false documents, and sheltering them in individual and group children’s homes outside the Ghetto.[2]
Sendler’s story was brought to light in the United States when students in Kansas found it described in a magazine and popularized it through their original play Life in a Jar.
On April 19, 2009, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production written and directed by John Kent Harrison and starring Anna Paquin in the title role, was broadcast by CBS.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 World War II
* 3 Awards
* 4 Nobel nominee
* 5 Life in a Jar
* 6 Film adaptation
* 7 See also
* 8 Notes
* 9 References
* 10 External links
[edit] Early life
Irena sympathized with Jews from childhood. Her great-grandfather had been deported to Siberia by Czarist Russia. Her physician father had died in 1917 of typhus contracted while treating Jewish patients. She opposed the ghetto-bench system that existed at some prewar Polish universities, and because of this she was suspended for three years from Warsaw University. [3]
[edit] World War II
During the German occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (prior to that, she had lived in Otwock and Tarczyn while working for urban Social Welfare departments). As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began aiding Jews. She and her helpers created over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, prior to joining the organized Zegota resistance and the children’s division. Helping Jews was very risky—in German-occupied Poland, all household members risked death if they were found to be hiding Jews, a more severe punishment than in other occupied European countries.
Nazi German poster in German and Polish (Warsaw, 1942) threatening death to any Pole who aided Jews
Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto
In December 1942 the newly created Zegota (the Council to Aid Jews) nominated her (by her cover name Jolanta[4]) to head its children’s section. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the Ghetto.[5] During these visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself.
She cooperated with the Children’s Section of the Municipal Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys.[2] Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the Ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.[6] She also used the old courthouse at the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto (still standing) as one of the main routes for smuggling out children.
The children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, or Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate[7] at Turkowice and Chotomów. Some children were smuggled to priests in parish rectories. She hid lists of their names in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Zegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.[8]
In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Zegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs.[2] She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children’s identities and attempted to find the children and return them to their parents. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had gone missing otherwise.
[edit] Awards
“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.”[9]
—Letter to the Polish Parliament
After the war and the Soviet takeover of Poland, she was at first persecuted and imprisoned by the communist Polish state authorities for her relations with the Polish government in exile and with the Home Army. While in prison she miscarried her second child and her other children were later denied the right to study at communist controlled Polish universities.[3]
Sendler with some children she saved, Warsaw, 2005
In 1965 Sendler was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations, which was confirmed in 1983 by the Israeli Supreme Court. She also was awarded the Commander’s Cross by the Israeli Institute. Only in that year did the Polish communist government allow her to travel abroad, to receive the award in Israel.
In 2003 Pope John Paul II sent Sendler a personal letter praising her wartime efforts. On 10 October 2003 she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest civilian decoration, and the Jan Karski Award “For Courage and Heart,” given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, D.C..
On 14 March 2007 Sendler was honored by Poland’s Senate. At age 97, she was unable to leave her nursing home to receive the honor, but she sent a statement through Elzbieta Ficowska, whom Sendler had saved as an infant. Polish President Lech Kaczynski stated she “can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize” (though nominations are supposed to be kept secret). On 11 April 2007, she received the Order of the Smile as the oldest recipient of the award.
In May 2009, Irena Sendler was posthumously granted the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award.[citation needed] The award, named in honor of the late actress and UNICEF ambassador, is presented to persons and organizations recognised for helping children. In its citation, the Audrey Hepburn Foundation recalled Irena Sendler’s heroic efforts that saved two and a half thousand Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War Two.
Sendler was the last survivor of the Children’s Section of the Zegota Council to Assist Jews, which she had headed from January 1943 until the end of the war.
[edit] Nobel nominee
In 2007 considerable publicity[10] accompanied Sendler’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.[11] While failed nominations for the award have not been officially announced by the Nobel organization for 50 years, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, reported in 2007 that Irena Sendler’s nominator had made the nomination public. [12] Regardless of its legitimacy, talk of the nomination focused a spotlight on Sendler and her wartime achievements. The 2007 award instead went to Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
[edit] Life in a Jar
Sendler’s tree at Yad Vashem
In 1999, Megan Stewart and her friends were inspired, by their high school history teacher Norman Conard in southeast Kansas, to investigate a small clipping on the life of an unsung hero, Irena Sendler.[13] When the students began their research, they found a website that mentioned her. Based on their findings, the students created a play, Life in a Jar (after her hiding place for documents). After ten years, their play and the subsequent media attention had made her world-famous.[citation needed]
Irena Sendler funeral, 2008
As of August 2008, there have been over 250 performances: first in Kansas, then throughout the United States and Canada, and later in Europe. The students (now young men and women in their mid-20s) continue to share her story with the world. They made six trips to Poland to visit her before she died on May 12, 2008. The cast visited Irena in Warsaw a week before her death. Irena’s final words to them, “You have changed Poland, you have changed the United States, you have changed the world [by bringing Irena’s story to light]. Poland has seen great changes in Holocaust education, in the perception of the time and have provided a grand hero for their country and the world. I love you very, very much.”
The students have collected over 4,000 pages of research on Irena’s life and those she worked with during the war. More than 100 colleges and universities use material gathered by the project members for class instruction. She told the students in 2002, “You cannot separate people based on their race or religion. You can only separate people by good and evil. The good will always triumph.”
Life in a Jar/The Irena Sendler Project has created a teacher’s award in the United States and Poland for the outstanding teacher in Holocaust Education. The members of the project are now working with the Children of the Holocaust Organization in Warsaw on the creation of a statue in her honor, to be completed on her birthday in 2010.
[edit] Film adaptation
In 2005, Anna Mieszkowska wrote the biography Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Irena Sendler Story. It was adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame production entitled The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler that was broadcast by CBS on April 19, 2009.
rena Sendler
Irena Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was greatly influenced by her father who was one of the first Polish Socialists. As a doctor his patients were mostly poor Jews. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror. At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in every district of the city. Previously, the canteens provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the destitute. Now, through Irena, the canteens also provided clothing, medicine and money for the Jews. They were registered under fictitious Christian names, and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis.
But in 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into a 16-block area that came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was sealed and the Jewish families ended up behind its walls, only to await certain death. Irena Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue Jewish children.
The Warsaw Ghetto
To be able to enter the Ghetto legally, Irena managed to be issued a pass from Warsaws Epidemic Control Department and she visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought food, medicines and clothing. But 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease in the Ghetto, and she decided to help the Jewish children to get out. For Irena Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk their life if the Nazis ever found out, was also not easy.
Irena Sendler, who wore a star armband as a sign of her solidarity to Jews, began smuggling children out in an ambulance. She recruited at least one person from each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. Irena Sendler successfully smuggled almost 2,500 Jewish children to safety and gave them temporary new identities.
Some children were taken out in gunnysacks or body bags. Some were buried inside loads of goods. A mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Some kids were carried out in potato sacks, others were placed in coffins, some entered a church in the Ghetto which had two entrances. One entrance opened into the Ghetto, the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. They entered the church as Jews and exited as Christians. “`Can you guarantee they will live?’” Irena later recalled the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. “In my dreams,” she said, “I still hear the cries when they left their parents.”
Irena Sendler accomplished her incredible deeds with the active assistance of the church. “I sent most of the children to religious establishments,” she recalled. “I knew I could count on the Sisters.” Irena also had a remarkable record of cooperation when placing the youngsters: “No one ever refused to take a child from me,” she said. The children were given false identities and placed in homes, orphanages and convents. Irena Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the childrens original names and their new identities. She kept the only record of their true identities in jars buried beneath an apple tree in a neighbor’s back yard, across the street from German barracks, hoping she could someday dig up the jars, locate the children and inform them of their past.
In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children …
Nazi Genocide
But the Nazis became aware of Irena’s activities, and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her feet and legs. She ended up in the Pawiak Prison, but no one could break her spirit. Though she was the only one who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish children, she withstood the torture, that crippled her for life, refusing to betray either her associates or any of the Jewish children in hiding. Sentenced to death, Irena was saved at the last minute when Zegota members bribed one of the Gestapo agents to halt the execution. She escaped from prison but for the rest of the war she was pursued by the Nazis.
After the war she dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe. But most lost their families during the Holocaust in Nazi death camps. The children had known her only by her code name Jolanta. But years later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her picture appeared in a newspaper. “A man, a painter, telephoned me,” said Sendler, “`I remember your face,’ he said. `It was you who took me out of the ghetto.’ I had many calls like that!”
The Holocaust
Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. “I could have done more,” she said. “This regret will follow me to my death.” She has been honored by international Jewish organizations – in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Irena Sendler was awarded Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle, in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003, and she was announced as the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. She has officially been designated a national hero in Poland and schools are named in her honor. Annual Irena Sendler days are celebrated throughout Europe and the United States.
In 2007, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At a special session in Poland’s upper house of Parliament, President Lech Kaczynski announced the unanimous resolution to honor Irena Sendler for rescuing “the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children.” He referred to her as a “great heroine who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize. She deserves great respect from our whole nation.”
During the ceremony Elzbieta Ficowska, who was just six months old when she was saved by Irena Sendler, read out a letter on her behalf: “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory,” Irena Sendler said in the letter, “Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.”
Irena Sendler
This lovely, courageous woman was one of the most dedicated and active workers in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her courage enabled not only the survival of 2,500 Jewish children but also of the generations of their descendants.
The Nobel Prize recipient, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, has dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews. He wrote:
“In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care …”
By Amy Cook-Porter