Along with so many others, I’ve been haunted by the story of the teacher in Newtown who risked her life to save her students. Here’s the story of another brave woman that I wish more people knew about. Her name was Irena Sendlerowa.
Known also by the shortened surname Sendler, Irena was born in 1910 into a Roman Catholic family in a town fifteen miles southeast of Warsaw. Her father was a doctor. Most of his patients were Jewish.
The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and in 1942 herded 450,000 Jews into a sixteen-block area that became known as the Warsaw Ghetto, without food or medicine. A seven foot wall was erected. Thousands began dying of starvation and disease even before the Nazis began deporting them to the death camps.
Sendler obtained a fake ID and passed herself off as a nurse, securing permission to travel in and out of the Ghetto. She saved as many as five hundred Jews before she even joined the Polish underground and became head of the children’s bureau, set up to save Jewish children. With the help of a group of close friends that she recruited, Irena rescued Jewish children, creating false ID papers which kids had to commit to memory (birth, baptism, family history) forged by priests and officials in the Social Services Department.
She smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, and coffins. Young babies were sedated so they wouldn’t cry. She trained a dog to bark as she passed through Nazi checkpoints, which drowned out the sound of any crying child.
What is so very haunting about her story is how difficult it must have been to convince Jewish parents to part with their children, with no guarantee that the child would be kept safe, and then to find Christian families willing to shelter the children, risking execution of their entire family. According to this PBS website, many escapes had to be timed to the second. Older children were drilled to memorize their new false identities. The city was crawling with Gestapo on the lookout for Jews that had escaped from the ghetto. “Any child on the street could be stopped and interrogated. If he was unable to recite a Catholic prayer he could be killed.”
Irena was caught by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured in an effort to get her to reveal the names of her fellow resistance fighters. Despite having her arms and legs broken, she withstood the torture. As she was on her way to her execution, a Gestapo officer accepted a bribe from her resistance comrades to help her escape. He added her name to a list of executed prisoners and released her. She was never again able to walk without crutches.
In all, she helped to smuggle out as many as 2500 children. She kept a record of their names in glass jars, which she buried beneath a tree in the yard. After the war, she tried to reunite the kids with their parents, although many of their families had died.
In a letter just before her death to the Polish Senate, she wrote: “Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory.”