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Irena Sendler: Risking Her Life to Save Others

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Are you interested in having the presentation come to your area? Life in a Jar is a dynamic program touching the Holocaust, ethics, education, respect and unsung heroes. It brings a message of hope, not despair.

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Life in a Jar - The Courageous Story of Irena Sendler

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Protestant kids from rural Kansas, discovered a Polish Catholic woman who saved Jewish children. Irena Sendler and these students chose to repair the world. This web site shares the legacy and life of Irena Sendler, plus her 'discovery' for the world.

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Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker and nurse who worked in the Polish underground during World War two. She is most famous for smuggling approximately 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, saving them all, and supplying those rescued with false identification documents. While serving with the Zegota (the Council to aid Jews) she put her life in danger to save others and was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations By Yad Vashem (Museum in Israel)

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Irena Sendler lived in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Warsaw Ghetto was the Largest Jewish ghetto created by Nazi Germany during World War ll. It was set up in Warsaw, Poland, in November 1940. Over 400,000 Jews were forced to live there in very poor and crowded conditions. Many people died from hunger and disease. In 1942, most of the people were takes from the ghetto and sent to the Treblinka death camp. In April 1943, the Jews who were left started the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to fight back. The Nazis destroyed the revolt and destroyed the ghetto. The uprising is remember as a brave act of resistances during the Holocaust

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Deportations to the Warsaw Ghetto

Between January and March 1941, Jews from smaller communities to the west of Warsaw were deported to the Warsaw ghetto. Between April and July 1942, Jews from the nearby towns east of Warsaw, from Germany, and from German-occupied areas of western Poland were deported there. The Germans also deported several hundred Roma (Gypsies) to the Warsaw ghetto.

At its height, the total population of the Warsaw ghetto exceeded 400,000 people. Miserable conditions in the ghetto, deliberately exacerbated by German policies, worsened over time. In 1941, one year before mass deportations, over 43,000 people died, more than 10 percent of the entire ghetto population.

Deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto

Between July and September 1942, German SS and police units, supported by non-German auxiliaries, deported approximately 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka II killing center. German SS and police personnel used violence to force Jews to march from their homes or places of work to the Umschlagplatz (concentration point), and forced them to board freight cars bound for Malkinia, on the Warsaw-Bialystok rail line. When the trains arrived in Malkinia, they were diverted along a special rail spur to Treblinka.

The Germans demanded that members of the Jewish council ( Judenrat) assist in organizing the deportations. The head of the Jewish council in Warsaw, Adam Czerniakow, refused to cooperate. Although Czerniakow did not call for resistance to the Germans, he refused to pass on the deportation order and committed suicide on July 23, 1942, by swallowing a cyanide capsule.

Generally, the Germans and their auxiliaries rounded up Jews by cordoning off a city block and systematically forcing the residents out onto the street. They then forced the Jews to march to the Umschlagplatz under heavy guard. As soon as one block was cleared, German SS and police units and their auxiliaries would secure the next block and repeat the process. German SS and police personnel viciously beat and tortured Jews to make them move more quickly; they shot those who were unable or unwilling to move. To lure Jews out of hiding, the German authorities often resorted to announcements that the deportations were over and those who not been deported would receive food. Starving and unaware that they would be transported to their deaths, some Jews reported and they too were deported to Treblinka. Toward the end of the deportations, German forces and collaborators systematically searched the then empty apartment houses and workplaces to find Jews in hiding.

In September 1942, as many as 70,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. In January 1943, German SS and police units deported roughly 6,500 Jewish residents of the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. During this three-day operation, 1,171 Jewish ghetto residents were shot and killed.

Between April 19 and May 16, 1943, German SS and police forces, supported by a battalion of specially trained auxiliary police guards from the Trawniki training camp, liquidated the Warsaw ghetto. When Jewish inhabitants resisted the initial deportation efforts (in what became known as the Warsaw ghetto uprising), the SS and police were caught by surprise and sustained dozens of casualties. The Germans then destroyed the ghetto block by block in order to break the resistance. More than 7,000 Jews, most of them resistance fighters or persons hidden inside the ghetto, were killed during the operation. Most of them were shot in combat with the SS and German police. The Germans deported about 7,000 more Jews to Treblinka, and about 42,000 to concentration camps and forced-labor camps in the Lublin District of the Generalgouvernement. Of this group, approximately 18,000 Jews were sent to the Majdanek camp, about 16,000 to the Poniatowa forced-labor camp, and some 6,000 to the Trawniki forced-labor camp. The remaining 2,000 were dispersed among smaller forced-labor camps such as Budzyn and Krasnik.

After the destruction of the ghetto, SS authorities established a small concentration camp on the site of the Warsaw ghetto.

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Deportations to and from the Warsaw Ghetto

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Between January and March 1941, Jews from smaller communities to the west of Warsaw were deported to the Warsaw ghetto. Between April and July 1942, Jews from the nearby towns east of Warsaw, from Germany, and from German-occupied areas of western Poland were deported there.

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When Hitler and his Nazis built the Warsaw Ghetto and herded 500,000 Polish Jews behind its walls to await liquidation, Irena Sendler defied the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a health worker, she sneaked the children out between 1942 and 1943 to safe hiding places and found non-Jewish families to adopt them.

Her achievement went largely unnoticed for many years. Then the story was uncovered by four young students at Uniontown High School, in Kansas, who were the winners of the 2000 Kansas state National History Day competition by writing a play Life in a Jar about the heroic actions of Irena Sendler. The girls - Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood - have since gained international recognition, along with their teacher, Norman Conard. The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS, has brought Irena Sendler's story to a wider public.

Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was greatly influenced by her father who was one of the first Polish Socialists. As a doctor his patients were mostly poor Jews.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror.

At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in every district of the city. Previously, the canteens provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the destitute. Now, through Irena, the canteens also provided clothing, medicine and money for the Jews. They were registered under fictitious Christian names, and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis.

But in 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into a 16-block area that came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was sealed and the Jewish families ended up behind its walls, only to await certain death.

Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue Jewish children.

To be able to enter the Ghetto legally, Irena managed to be issued a pass from Warsaws Epidemic Control Department and she visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought food, medicines and clothing. But 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease in the Ghetto, and she decided to help the Jewish children to get out.

For Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk their life if the Nazis ever found out, was also not easy.

Sendler, who wore a star armband as a sign of her solidarity to Jews, began smuggling children out in an ambulance. She recruited at least one person from each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures and successfully smuggled almost 2,500 Jewish children to safety and gave them temporary new identities.

Some children were taken out in gunnysacks or body bags. Some were buried inside loads of goods. A mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Some kids were carried out in potato sacks, others were placed in coffins, some entered a church in the Ghetto which had two entrances. One entrance opened into the Ghetto, the other opened into the of Warsaw. They entered the church as Jews and exited as Christians. "Can you guarantee they will live?" Irena later recalled the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. "In my dreams," she said, "I still hear the cries when they left their parents."

Irena Sendler accomplished her incredible deeds with the active assistance of the church. "I sent most of the children to religious establishments," she recalled. "I knew I could count on the Sisters." Irena also had a remarkable record of cooperation when placing the youngsters: "No one ever refused to take a child from me," she said.

The children were given false identities and placed in homes, orphanages and convents. Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the children's original names and their new identities. She kept the only record of their true identities in jars buried beneath an apple tree in a neighbor's back yard, across the street from German barracks, hoping she could someday dig up the jars, locate the children and inform them of their past. In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children.

But the Nazis became aware of Irena's activities, and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her feet and legs. She ended up in the Pawiak Prison, but no one could break her spirit. Though she was the only one who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish children, she withstood the torture, refusing to betray either her associates or any of the Jewish children in hiding.

Sentenced to death, Irena was saved at the last minute whenmembers bribed one of the Germans to halt the execution. She escaped from prison but for the rest of the war she was pursued by the Gestapo.

After the war she dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe. But most lost their families during the Holocaust in Nazi death camps.

The children had known her only by her code name Jolanta. But years later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her picture appeared in a newspaper. "A man, a painter, telephoned me," said Sendler, "`I remember your face,' he said. `It was you who took me out of the ghetto.' I had many calls like that!"

Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. "I could have done more," she said. "This regret will follow me to my death."

She has been honored by international Jewish organizations - in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel.

Irena Sendler was awarded Poland's highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003.

This lovely, courageous woman was one of the most dedicated and active workers in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her courage enabled not only the survival of 2,500 Jewish children but also of the generations of their descendants.

She passed away on May 12, 2008, at the age of 98.

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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Discover the story of the Polish ‘Righteous Among the Nations’

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Irena Sendler - what happened after The War

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Irena Sendler - what happened after The War

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Following her ordeal in rescuing Jewish Children from the Holocaust, Irena Sendler Still fought for Humanity and the rights of all the exploited during the era of the new Communist government in Poland. She still fought for people and and dedicated to the caused of the needy, the exploited, and the persecute. She spent time in aiding and working or charities. While her heroism was over by the ending of the war, she never abandoned her leftist ideals and continued to work withing the system, and joined the PZPR (Polish United Workers party).