The Millstone Times

Irena Sendler,

Twenty-nine-year-old Irena Sendler, born Irena Sendlerowa, was a social worker employed by the Welfare Department of the municipality in Warsaw, Poland. After the German occupation, the department still took care of poor and dispossessed people in the city. Irena took advantage of her job in order to help some jews escape their captors, until the point where in 1940 the ghetto, one of the places the jews were held at, was completely sealed off. Close to 400,000 thousand people had been driven into that small area where their situation rapidly deteriorated. The lack of food, poor hygienics, and lack of medical supplies lead to a high death rate. At a great risk to herself, Irena was able to get permission to inspect the conditions as part of her job. Once in, she quickly established contacts with activists of the Jewish Welfare Organization and began to help them. She helped smuggle jews out of the ghetto and helped set up hiding places for them. When the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota) was established, Sendler became one of its main activists. The Council was created in 1942, after 280,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka. When it began to function towards the end of the year, most of the Jews of Warsaw had already been killed. But the council played a crucial role in the rescue of a large number who had survived the massive deportations. The organization took care of thousands of Jews who were trying to survive; hiding them away, and paying for their upkeep and medical care. In September 1943, four months after the Warsaw ghetto was completely destroyed, Sendler was appointed director of Zegota’s Department for the Care of Jewish Children. As head of the children’s division of Zegota, the Polish underground Council for Aid to Jews, Irena, whose code name was “Jolanta” helped smuggle more than 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto. Hiding them in orphanages, convents, schools, hospitals, and private homes, she provided each child with a new identity, carefully recording in code their Jewish names and placements so that surviving relatives could find them after the war. Many of the children were sent to the Rodzina Marii (Family of Mary) Orphanage inWarsaw, and to religious institutions run by nuns in nearby Chotomów, and in Turkowice, near Lublin. The exact number of children saved by Sendler and her partners is unknown but it is known that it was well over 2,500. Sendler hid the list of the children’s real identity in milk jars buried in the backyard of one of her co-conspirators. Arrested by the Gestapo in the fall of 1943, Sendler was sentenced to death. She was sent to the infamous Pawiak prison, but underground activists managed to bribe a German guard who then released her. Her close encounter with death did not deter her from continuing her activity. After her release in February 1944, even though she knew that the authorities were keeping an eye on her, Sendler continued her underground activities. Because of the danger she was in, she had to go into hiding. She couldn’t even attend her own mother’s funeral. She assumed a new identity and continued her work for Zegota. Poland was arguably the most victimized country in occupied Europe. The consequence for hiding or even feeding a Jew was execution, often in pub- lic as a warning to other Poles. After the war, Poland’s Communist government persecuted members of Poland’s wartime resistance, Zegota, of which Sendler was a part. They were harassed, interrogated, imprisoned, and even executed. Sendler and others who rescued Jews during the war kept silent in fear of their lives. Almost no one knew of Sendler and her heroism. When asked by journalists why Sendler would put herself and her family at such risk, she said, “It was a need of my heart and that she only did what any decent person would do; and that it was the parents and grandparents who gave up their children, that were the true heroes.” Irena would have remained an unsung hero were it not three teenage American girls who discovered her forgotten story 60 years later. The students were working on a project for a National History Day competition, but it became so much more when they found out that the person that they thought to be long dead was actually still alive. Sendler’s story inspired them so much, with the help of their teacher, they wrote a play about her life and per- formed it. It was called Life in a Jar. It retold, in dramatic form, the emotional story of Sendler knocking on ghetto doors and asking Jewish parents to give up their children to save them. The title, Life in a Jar, refers to the lists Sendler buried. What followed after that was world recognition for Irena Sendler, championing her legacy in Poland, the U.S., and around the world. When the teens read that Irena had been arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo, and severely tortured in Pawiak Prison, from which almost no one escaped, they began searching cemetery records, and reached out to the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, seeking information about where she might be buried. Soon after, they received a letter from the foundation, saying that Sendler was alive! She was in her nineties and living in poverty with her daughter-in-law in Warsaw. The foundation then put them in touch with Sendler herself. The three students made plans to travel to Poland and meet Sendler, first trying to raise money through candy sales, until philanthropists and Holo- caust survivors from the Kansas City Jewish community stepped in to help cover the trip. Traveling out of the country for the first time the girls finally met Sendler at her Warsaw home in 2001. They maintained a tender friendship with her for the next seven years until she passed, making several trips to Poland to visit her, each time performing Life in a Jar at various venues. They began working with Polish high school students and others, who were telling the forgotten stories of rescuers from their own communities. From their incredible project, hundreds of other people, many who were saved by Irena, and many who were afraid to come forward about their past, started telling their stories. No more were they afraid to talk about the past for fear of retaliation. Because of these three teenagers, Irena finally got the recognition she deserved. Irena Sendler, a true hero! There is so much more to learn about the life of Irena Sendler. In 1965, Sendler was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations. In 1983, she was present when a tree was planted in her honor at the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations.

42 The Millstone Times

March 2022