The Woman Who Loved Children
Magnus
posts, read this one.
THE SCHINDLER NO ONE KNEW
Irena Sendler rescued 2,500 children from the Nazi death camps. Her
story, writes Marti Attoun in Ladies' Home Journal, was rescued by
three
Kansas teens. Irena Sendler keeps a photo of "her Kansas girls" on the
bedside table in her nursing-home room in Warsaw, Poland. She rests
easier now that her story is in good hands.
And her story is astounding, as awe-inspiring as that of Oskar
Schindler, whose courageous acts of Nazi resistance became a book
and an Academy Award-winning film. But unlike Schindler, who received
international acclaim, Sendler had been a footnote in history for
nearly
60 years. That all changed in September 1999, when three teenagers in
a small town in Kansas were looking for a topic for a history project
and
stumbled upon a short mention of Sendler in an article in a 5-year-old
newsmagazin
e. As a Catholic social worker, the article said, Sendler had
organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the
Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943.
"We thought it was a typo," recalls Elizabeth Cambers, now 18 and a
college freshman. "We thought it was supposed to say she rescued 250
children, not 2,500."
In September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Sendler was a
29-year-old social worker employed by Warsaw's social-welfare
department. An only child, she had been just 7 when her father, a
Catholic
doctor, contracted typhus and died after treating Jews during a 1917
typhus outbreak . But she never forgot his sacrifice. "I was taught
that if
a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or
nationality,"
Sendler has said. "One must help him. It is a need of the heart."
In the fall of 1940, Sendler watched as the Nazis forced 350,000 Jews
inside the Warsaw ghetto, a 16-square-block area that was walled off
and
guarded. With each passing month of the war, the torment of the people
locked inside intensified. They were dying of starvation and disease
while
unknowingly waiting for the Nazis to herd them into freight cars that
would
ultimately take them to their deaths in the gas chambers.
Sendler joined Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews
in Occupied Poland, an underground network founded in December 1942
by psychologist Adolf Berman and six other prominent scholars,
religious
leaders, and social activists. The secret organization, which forged
thousands of birth certificates and other documents to give Jews safe
Aryan identities, asked Sendler to head up their operation to smuggle
Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.
But first she had to get inside. Because the Nazis were on guard
against
the spread of infections, they allowed the delivery of medicine inside
the
Ghetto. A Zegota member working inside the Polish disease department
forged a permit that allowed Sendler to work undercover as a nurse
inside
the ghetto. Her code name was Jolanta.
With the help of 10 "messenger friends," as Sendler called her
colleagues, and dozens of volunteers, she organized the effort to
sneak the
children to orphanages, convents, and private homes in the Warsaw
region.
Children who were old enough to talk were taught to rattle off
Christian prayers
and mimic other religious behavior (such as how to make the sign of
the
cross) so they could live safely without arousing suspicion of their
Jewish
heritage.
Sendler and Zegota devised several routes for smuggling children out
of the ghetto. Kids escaped on foot or in the arms of volunteers
through
sewer pipes or basements with underground passageways. Many also
escaped through the courthouse, which had entrances on both the ghetto
side and Aryan side. Other methods were more inventive. For instance,
a trolley driver and Zegota member, when crossing from the ghetto to
the
Aryan side, hid little ones in trunks, suitcases, or sacks under his
back-seat,
where the Nazi guards could not see. Another supporter, an ambulance
driver, kept his dog beside him in the front seat and trained him to
bark to
camouflage any cries or noises from the babies hidden under stretchers
in
back. Sendler also arranged for babies and children to be sedated and
smuggled out with merchants in potato sacks, under their loads of
goods.
Sometimes, she even sneaked sedated children out in body bags, telling
the guards that they were dead.
Day after day, for about 16 months, Sendler persuaded parents and
grandparents to hand over their babies and children, to give them a
chance to live. "There were terrible scenes," Sendler says. "One
mother &I wanted a child to leave the ghetto while the father did not.
The
grandma wanted, the husband did not. They asked what was the
guarantee? What kind of guarantee could I give them?" She couldn't
even guarantee that she could get past the guards. On slips of tissue
paper, Sendler recorded the identity of every child she rescued.
Whenever possible, she wrote down the child's Jewish name as well as
the child's new Christian name and new address. Sendler buried
these names in jars under an apple tree in a friend's garden. After
the war,
Sendler hoped, the children would be located and their Jewish
identities revealed to them.
On Oct. 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. They had long
suspected
she was running a smuggling operation, and one of her messengers had
been
caught and tortured until she gave up Sendler's name and home address.
The
Gestapo interrogated Sendler, demanding information about the
identities of
the other rescuers and the children in hiding. But she refused to
talk, even
when she was beaten until her legs and feet were broken. "I was quiet
as a
mouse," Sendler has said. "I would have rather died than disclose
anything
about our operations." She was then taken to Pawiak prison, where she
was
sentenced to be executed.
At the last minute, however, the woman who had rescued so many others
was herself rescued. On the day she was to be executed, Zegota paid a
hefty bribe to a guard, who allowed Sendler to escape. The guard
subsequently posted Sendler's name on public bulletin boards as one of
the
executed, essentially rendering her invisible to the Nazis. She then
went into
hiding in Poland, just like the children she'd saved.
When Poland was liberated a year and three months later, in January
1945, Sendler returned to the friend's garden and dug up the jars. She
turned over the rescued children's names to Zegota's Berman, and he
and
other members of the group tried to locate the children's foster
families.
Sadly, most of the children had no parents or grandparents to be
found. Less
than 1 percent of the Jews inside the ghetto survived the war, most
having
perished at the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. After the
war,
Sendler married, raised two children of her own, and continued her
career
as a social worker in Warsaw. The beatings she had suffered at the
hands
of the Gestapo left her permanently disabled and she has had trouble
walking ever since. But she never talked openly about her rescue work.
Poland was under a communist regime, and the postwar climate wasn't
safe.
For almost 60 years, her story was essentially lost to history.
Then, in March 2000, she received a letter from Elizabeth Cambers and
two of her classmates at Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kan.
Encouraged by their social studies teacher, the girls had selected
Sendler
as the subject of their National History Day project, and though
information
about her was scarce, they had been able to write a 10-minute play,
titled
"Life in a Jar", that had already won first place at the state level
of the
national contest. "We explained who we were and what we were doing,"
says
Sabrina Coons, now 20 and a student at Kansas State University. "We
told her
that we found her story amazing."
Sendler's response, handwritten in Polish, arrived in Kansas three
weeks later. "I am very eager to receive and read your play," Sendler
wrote. In a series of letters, Sendler answered the students'
questions, and
slowly the details of her remarkable story unfolded; an international
friendship was forged.
After an emotional performance of Life in a Jar at Uniontown High,
the students were invited to perform the play for church groups,
nursing
homes, and civic organizations throughout southeast Kansas. Through
their
correspondence with Sendler, the teens learned that she lived quite
meagerly. So at each performance, they set out a donation jar. Their
first gift to Sendler was $3, which they told her to use for postage.
"We
found out later that she gave the $3 away to a children's home," says
Coons.
"That's just how she is."
Although the girls didn't win any awards when they traveled to
Maryland in June 2000 to compete in the national contest, their play
gained
national and international attention, and the students have since
given more
than 100 performances of the play in eight different states. As a
result,
Sendler has received numerous awards for her courageous work. After
learning she was to be given a $10,000 humanitarian award from the
American
Center of Polish Culture in Washington, she wrote to her girls "My
emotion is
being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful
coworkers,
who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all
the
honors that now are falling upon me.... I can't find the words to
thank you, my dear girls.... Before the day you have written the play
"Life in a
Jar" -- nobody in my own country and in the whole world cared about my
person and my work during the war ..." One member of a Kansas City
audience
was so profoundly moved by Sendler's story that he raised money to
send the
play's three authors to Poland to meet Sendler in May 2001.
"It wasn't real until I actually met Irena," says Megan Stewart. "We
all ran up and hugged her. She wanted to just hold our hands and hear
about
our lives." Cambers told Sendler, "I love you. You are my hero."
Sendler, a 4-foot-11-inch woman who now uses a wheelchair, deflected
the girls' praise. "A hero is someone doing extraordinary things," she
told them.. "What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing
to
do."
>From "The Woman Who Loved Children," Ladies' Home Journal
PirateJohn
Hyfler/Rosner
"Magnus" <robertc...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1186172547.0...@i13g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> This is a sad, wonderful, inspiring story. Even if you
> hate me and my
> posts, read this one.
>
>
> THE SCHINDLER NO ONE KNEW
>
> Irena Sendler rescued 2,500 children from the Nazi death
> camps. Her
> story, writes Marti Attoun in Ladies' Home Journal, was
> rescued by
> three
Amazing story. Thanks for posting.
MGW
scrawled:
Amazing indeed!
> Sendler, a 4-foot-11-inch woman who now uses a wheelchair, deflected
> the girls' praise. "A hero is someone doing extraordinary things," she
> told them.. "What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing
> to do."
Sadly, if it was a normal thing to do, many few people would have been
murdered in the Holocaust.
--
MGW
I have yet to see a problem, however complicated, which when you looked at
it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. ~ Poul Anderson