Irena Sendler

Will You Swim? 

By Chloe Kim, 10th grade, 2022 ARTEFFECT Grand Prize Winner

By 1942...[Irena] Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close friends--a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women--and began rescuing Jewish children.

She and her friends smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcass, sacks, and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. 

Most of the children who left with Sendler's group were taken into Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend's garden. 

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captor who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. When Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers' underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler.

During one particually brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners. 

After her escape, Irena went into hiding, just like the children she rescued, for the remainder of the war. All the while, she continued her work. With the help of the Polish Resistance and some 200 convents and orphanages in the city of Warsaw and throughout the countryside, Irena and her helpers managed to save the lives of at least 2,500 Jewish children. When the war was finally over, she dug up the jars she had buried under the noses of the Germans and began the difficult job of finding the children and locating a living relative. But almost all the parents of the children that Irena saved died at the Treblinka death camp.

-From LMC Unsung Heroes