Today is the first anniversary of the death of Irena Sendler, the woman who rescued the lives of some 2500 Jewish children – and their identities - from the Holocaust.
Elzbieta Krajewska reports
As she received for her heroism Poland’s highest state distinction, the Order of the White Eagle, Irena Sendler said that every child she saved had been a confirmation of her existence, not a title to glory:
“People ask me if I was afraid. I was, because everyone wants to live! I was afraid but hate for what these Germans, these criminals were doing was stronger – hate stronger than fear”.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War 2 doctor’s daughter Irena Sendler worked for the social services. Because of this she had entry to the ghetto that the Nazis had set up for the Jewish population of Warsaw. A member of the “Zegota” aid for Jews organization, with special responsibility for children, after the occupant’s decision to liquidate the ghetto in 1943 she began a mission to save the little ones.
Dressed as a nurse she drove an ambulance to the ghetto. The children were put to sleep then packed in sacks or boxes to be removed as typhoid victims. They were then taken to families, orphanages or convents around Warsaw. “There were 10 couriers, 10 homes where the children were kept after they were taken out of the ghetto. Some of them didn’t even speak Polish. We needed a place where they could learn the new reality”.
Irena Sendler saved the childrens’ lives - and identities. She made coded notes which she put in glass jars and buried, to be recovered after the war. She said: “I had to have a list, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to rejoin the Jewish community, would they? So I put down the Polish name, say Marysia Kowalska and next to it in brackets Rachel Grynberg. If such a list had fallen into German hands that would have been a catastrophe.”
Many of the children she drove out from the ghetto as dead were the only family members to stay alive.
In 1943 Irena Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and condemned to death. The Zegota organization paid a ransom for her life and she escaped execution, until the end of the war hiding under a false name. She was a Red Cross nurse in the Warsaw Rising. In the post-war years she lost her own child after she was arrested by the communist security services. She eventually joined the Polish People’s Party – to leave it after March 1968.
In 1965 Irena Sendler received the Righteous Among Nations medal awarded by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem for saving Jewish lives in the Holocaust – and the honorary citizenship of Israel. Children awarded her with the world’s only medal given by children – the Order of Smile. She was twice nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2007 the Polish Senate honoured Irena Sendler and the Council to Aid Jews with a special resolution. Michael Schudrich, the Head Rabbi of Poland said that she had “saved the soul of Europe”. Her legend endures: merely days ago, the Audrey Hepburn Foundation posthumously awarded her with its Humanitarian Award, presented at an exhibition devoted to the actress and UNICEF ambassador now on in Berlin.
Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98. She is buried in Powazki cemetery in Warsaw.
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