Monday, February 13, 2012

Irena Sendler - WWII Saver of Children


Irena Sendler
 There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior motive' ... She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews, (she being German).   Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried.  She also carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids).   She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.   The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.   During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.   She was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely.   Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.   After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and reunited the family.   Most had been gassed.   Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.      Last year (2007) Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize ... She was not selected.
The story of Irena Sendler is true.  According to a website set up in her honor at - Life In A Jar-THE IRENA SENDLER PROJECT- she was not widely known until a series of events that started in Kansas in the U.S.A. in 1999.

A teacher in a rural Kansas town discovered a short magazine article that claimed that a Polish woman saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 and 1943.  He gave the story to four high school students and asked them to check it out.  He said he'd never heard of the woman and speculated that the article may have gotten the facts wrong.

The students looked into the story and discovered that Irena Sendler was real, her story was accurate, and that she was still alive and living in Poland.

Sendler was a Catholic social worker during the 1940s who saw the handwriting on the wall for the Jews of Poland.  She became concerned for the children in the Warsaw Ghetto, which was one of the largest ghettos of Jews established by the Nazis.  The population of the Warsaw Ghetto dropped from 450,000 to about 70,000 people because of starvation, sickness, and tens of thousands of Jews deported to concentration camps and death.

Sendler convinced Jewish parents that their children were facing death either in the Ghetto or in concentration camps and offered to rescue them.  She smuggled the children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and hid them in the homes of Poles who adopted them or in orphanages or convents.  She made lists of the children's names and family connections and hid them in jars in her garden so that someday she could find the children and tell them who they were.
Sendler was eventually discovered, arrested, tortured, and imprisoned by the Nazis.  The Polish underground bribed a guard to let her escape and she spent the rest of the war in hiding.

The students in Kansas developed a performance titled Life In a Jar that tells the story of Irena Sendler.  Those performances and the publicity that resulted have thrust the news about Irena Sendler around the world.




1 comment:

  1. During WWII
    As the gas chambers began
    Irena knew just what to do
    To thwart the Nazi's plan

    She got permission to drive
    Into the Warsaw ghetto
    With an ulterior motive
    She had places where children could stow

    And in her tool box, an infant
    A sack, a child or two
    A barking to through off the scent
    Or sound of crying too

    Foster care plans were made
    She kept a record of each one
    In a jar hidden away
    Twenty five hundred...She had just begun

    But, then she was caught
    And suffered terribly
    For she must be taught!
    They beat her severely

    Her arms and legs were broken
    But not her desire to help
    Her vow to each child spoken
    To put families back herself

    But when the war was over
    Most of the parents were dead
    A reminder to uncover
    How ugly is hatred

    I thought I'd share my poem about her...

    ReplyDelete