Irena Sendlerowa was a Polish nurse and social worker, who during WWII directed a children’s rescue group to smuggle Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false papers and placing them with substitute Polish families. Records that Irena kept showed that she and her group saved nearly 2,500 children from certain death under the Nazis.
Irena Sendler in December 1944
“I was raised to believe that the question of religion, nation, belonging to any race is of no importance – it’s a human being that matters!”
She was born in february of 1910 in Warsaw, but spent her childhood in Otwock where her father worked as a physician and director of a sanatorium. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, she was a social worker with the city's Social Welfare Department, the position she toke advantage of in any way she could. Along with some collegues from the department, she organized help in the form of money and cloathing for Jewish families and children who were excluded from their department`s social welfare protection by creating false references and conducting non-existant surveys. Her position at the Department gave her special permission to enter the ghetto, from where Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers.
In secret, Irena directed a children’s rescue group, who was apart of an organised ‘underground’ council called Zegota, set up to help Jews. Irena and those who went with her into the ghetto used various methods to smuggle the children out, but the listed five were more common than others:
Hiding the child under the ambulance stretcher
Escaping through the courthouse
Using underground passages and sewer pipes as an escape route
Using a trolley and hiding the child in a sack, trunk, suitcase or something similar
Faking an illness in order for the child to be legally removed using an ambulance
During this time she also took on the pseudonym “Jolanta”.
The children Irena managed to rescue from the ghetto, were given false papers and placed in Polish families who presented them to their neighbores and anyone who asked as their relatives, in order to avoid drawing any unwanted attention from the authorities. When she could not find a suitable family willing to take such a tremendous risk, she placed them in Catholic institutions like the Warsaw orphanage, or in convents. With the hope of one day reuniting the children with their relatives, those who managed to survive the Nazis, Irena kept careful records of all the children and kept them hidden in jars which she then burried in a friend`s garden. The records show that Irena and her group managed to save nearly 2,500 children from certain death that awaited them under the Nazis.
Inevitably, Irene was arrested on October 20, 1943 and was placed in the notorious Piawiak prison, where she was underwent constant questioning and torture to make her reveal information, including the names of the Zegota leaders, their addresses and the names of others involved. However, Irena gave nothing away and for that was condemned to death. She was to be shot. Her life was saved, however, because the German guards escorting her were bribed, and she was released on the way to the execution. Sendler was freed due to the efforts of Maria Palester, a fellow Welfare Department activist, who obtained the necessary funds from Zegota chief Julian Grobelny. Officially, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed and thus, was forced to take on a new identity. During the remaining years of the war, she lived hidden, just like the children she rescued. When the war was finally over, she dug up the bottles and began the job of finding the children and their relatives as she once hoped. Unfortunately, there wasn`t much she could do in regards to finding the children`s parents, as many of them suffered the same, terrifying faith at the Treblinka death camp. She died from Pneumonia on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98, leaving behind a daughter, Janina Zgrzembska.
Sendler with some people she saved as children, Warsaw, 2005
In April 2009 Irene Sendler was posthumously granted the Humanitarian of the Year award from The Sister Rose Thering Endowment, and in May of the same year the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award. Around this time American filmmaker Mary Skinner filmed a documentary, Irena Sendler, In the Name of Their Mothers, featuring the last interviews Sendler gave before her death. The film premiered in May 2011 in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day and went on to receive several awards, including the 2012 Gracie Award for outstanding public television documentaries.
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