1917 – School yard incident-Irena standing up for Jewish children

1918 – Father dies of typhus

1937 – Anti-semitic laws in Poland – college classroom incident

1938 – Kristallnacht

1939 – Poland has over 3 million Jews, the largest Jewish population in the world and 10% of the Polish population

1939 – World War II begins- German invasion of Poland from west on September 1, Russia invasion from the East on September 17

1939 – Irena makes false documents for Jewish families

1940 – October 16th– The Warsaw Ghetto is established

 

As head of the children’s section of Żegota, the Polish underground Council for Aid to Jews, Irena, or Jolonta Sendler, regularly used her position as a social worker to enter the Warsaw ghetto and help smuggle children out. Hiding them in orphanages, convents, schools, hospitals, and private homes, she provided each child with a new identity, carefully recording in code their original names and placements so that surviving relatives could find them after the war.Arrested and tortured by the Gestapo,the German secret state police,in the fall of 1943, she was sentenced to death, but Żegota managed to rescue her before she could be executed. She assumed a new identity and continued her work for Żegota.Yad Vashem recognized Ms. Sendler with the Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965. She died in Warsaw, Poland, on May 12, 2008, following a long illness.