Irena

Recently there was a death of a 98-year-old lady named Irena that I wonder how many of my readers have ever heard about. Until recently I was unaware of who she was or what a miraculous lady she was.


In Memory of
Irena Sendlerowa
1910-2008


Irena Sendler passed away on May 12th, in Warsaw, Poland. Irena was 98 years old.

Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker. During World War II she was an activist in the Polish Underground and the Żegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the Ghetto.

During the World War II German occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (before that she lived in Otwock and Tarczyn) while working for the city's Social Welfare Department.

She started helping Jews a long time before the Warsaw Ghetto was established. As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began helping Jews by offering them food and shelter. Irena and her helpers made over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, before she joined Żegota and the children's division. Helping Jews was very risky — in German-occupied Poland, all household members were punished by death if a hidden Jew was found in their house. This punishment was more severe than those applied in other occupied European countries.

In December 1942, the newly created Children's Section of the Żegota (Council for Aid to Jews), nominated her (under her cover name Jolanta) to head its children's department. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto. During the visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself.

She cooperated with the Children's Section of the Municipal Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish Relief Organization tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the Ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages. She also used the old courthouse on the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto (still standing) as one of the main routes of smuggling children out. The children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary or Roman Catholic convents such as the Sisters Little Servants of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Mary at Turkowice and Chotomów. Some were smuggled to priests in parish rectories where they could be further hidden. She hid lists of their names in jars, in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they must be returned to Jewish relatives.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and began an attempt to find the children and return them to living parents. However, almost all the children's parents had died at the Treblinka extermination camp.

Sendler was the last survivor of the Children's Section of the Żegota Council for Assistance to the Jews, which she had headed from January 1943 until the end of World War II.

On 14 March 2007 Sendler was honored by Poland's Senate. Polish President Lech Kaczyński stated that she "can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" (though nominations are supposed to be kept secret).

Nobel nominee
In 2007, considerable publicity accompanied a nomination of Sendler for the Nobel Peace Prize. Although failed nominees for the award are not publicly announced by the Nobel organization for 50 years, this publicity focused a spotlight upon Sendler and her wartime contribution.

She LOST.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.