Irena Sendler

Let me share with you this woman's life

Here is what she used to say:

• Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.

• I am the only person still alive of that rescuing group but I want everyone to know that, while I was coordinating our efforts, we were about twenty to twenty five people. I did not do it alone.

• Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory.

• Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its specter still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.

MEET

 IRENA SENDLER

(also called as Irena Sendlerowa in Polish)

 1910 - 2008 

She was a 98 year-old Polish woman at her time of death.

 Irena was a social worker who during World War II was an activist in the Polish Underground and Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw.

During World War II, Irena worked in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumbing/sewer specialist. She dedicated herself to  smuggle Jewish children out. Infants were carried in the bottom of the tool box she used and older children in a burlap sack she had in the back of her truck.

  She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids and infants’ noises. Irena managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children during this time.

She eventually was caught and the Nazis broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. 

Sentenced to death for her treachery against the Third Reich—a sentence she bore proudly, never once breathing even a hint of information that might endanger her associates, the children, or their cause, no matter the ferocity of the Nazi rage.  In route of her execution, a guard, bought by Zegota, arranged for her escape.

 Though listed among the executed, Irena was yet among the living, and active. She returned to her work with Zegota protected by the German’s belief in her death.  And in the time that followed, God continued to work in answer to her prayers.  

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard.  

And in the time that followed, God continued to work in answer to her prayers. 

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and reunited some of the families but most had been killed. She then helped those children get placement into foster family homes or adopted.

Before her death on May 12, 2008, she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest civilian honor, among others, and was credited with saving the lives of over 3,000 children from the terror of the Nazi regime.

 In 2007, Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected.

  Al Gore won for presenting a slide show on Global Warming, what do you know?!?