Irena Sendler

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Irena Sendler was a Roman Catholic Polish social worker who saved the lives of an estimated 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust. She was born Irena Krzyżanowska on February 15, 1910, in Warsaw, Poland, and raised in Otwock, Poland. Her father, a physician, treated poor Jews during typhus outbreaks when other doctors refused to do so. He instilled in her the principle that people are good or bad, regardless of religion, race, or nationality. This principle would guide her throughout her life.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Irena Sendler was a social worker and had access to the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned. As a member of Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews, she helped rescue 2,500 Jewish children from the ghetto. She and her associates provided food, clothing, shelter, forged documents, and money to thousands of Jews. She would smuggle the children out of the ghetto in suitcases, ambulances, and even through the sewer system. She would then place them with Polish families, convents, or orphanages, giving them new identities and carefully recording their original names and placements so that surviving relatives could find them after the war.

Irena Sendler was motivated by her faith and her sense of social justice. She believed that religion, race, and nationality were immaterial, and that people should be judged by their character. She risked her own life many times over to save the lives of Jewish children. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and tortured brutally, but she refused to give any information about Żegota or about the children she had placed in hiding. She was sentenced to death, but members of Żegota bribed one of the Gestapo agents, and on the day she was to be executed, she was permitted to escape. She had to go into hiding for the remainder of the war but continued to coordinate her rescue work.

After the war, Irena Sendler dug up the jars containing the names of the children she had saved and tried to reunite them with their families. Sadly, most of the parents had been killed in the Holocaust. She was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial organization, as Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. In 2003, Poland honored her with its Order of the White Eagle. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2008, but she passed away on May 12, 2008, in Warsaw, Poland, at the age of 98.

Irena Sendler’s story was captured in a 2009 TV movie, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, which starred Anna Paquin in the title role. Her legacy lives on through the Life in a Jar project, which was started by three Kansas teens who uncovered her story while researching a National History Day project. The project has gathered over 4,000 pages of primary material and research on the life of Irena Sendler and the work of Żegota.

Citations:

[1] https://www.biography.com/activist/irena-sendler 

[2] https://www.franciscanmedia.org/st-anthony-messenger/irena-sendler-world-war-ii-s-polish-angel/ 

[3] https://irenasendler.org/timeline-irena-sendlers-life-life-jar-project/ 

[4] https://jfr.org/rescuer-stories/sendler-irena/ 

[5] https://irenasendler.org/facts-about-irena/ 

[6] https://jpost.com/magazine/features/irena-sendlers-legacy 

[7] https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/irena-sendler-important-events 

[8] https://www.lowellmilkencenter.org/programs/projects/view/life-in-a-jar/hero 

[9] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/sendler-irena 

[10] https://www.neh.gov/article/irena-sendler-and-girls-kansas 

[11] https://commons.und.edu/features-archive/175/ 

[12] https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/in-memoriam/irena-sendler-1910-2008 

[13] https://myhero.com/irena-sendler-4 

[14] https://artsandculture.google.com/story/irena-sendler-the-museum-of-the-history-of-polish-jews-jewish-museum-warsaw/zgWx_XNxPh8dLQ?hl=en 

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler 

[16] https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/righteous-women/sendler.asp