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"He has showed you, O man, what
is good. And What does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk
humbly with your God.” ~Micha 6:8
This verse sounds so simple, yet
we are tested on this point in many areas of our
lives. Such was the case for Irena Sendler, a
Polish woman that worked for the Poland’s
Department of Welfare and used her position to
help the Jews of her nation during World War II.
In 1940, Hitler’s Nazi regime
built the Warsaw Ghetto, a 16 block area in the
city of Warsaw , Poland , and proceeded to herd
over 500,000 Polish Jews behind its wall to
await annihilation. Irena was appalled. While
many non-Jewish Poles turned their backs, Irena
Sendler refused to look the other way. She was
so horrified by the conditions of the Ghetto
that she joined the Council for Aid to Jews,
Zegota , organized by the Polish underground
resistance movement, and directed the efforts to
rescue Jewish children. At that time nearly
5,000 people were dying a month from starvation
and diseases. Though her name is not recognized
by most, Irena in an unsung heroine who defied
the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children from
certain death by smuggling them out of the
Warsaw Ghetto.
Born in 1910 as Irena
Krzyzanowski, she grew up in Otwock, a town
about 15 miles southeast of Warsaw . Irena was
greatly influenced by her father, Stanislaw, who
was one of the first Polish Socialists. His
ideas were a great influence on her as she
studied Polish literature and was part of the
leftist Union of Democratic Youth. Irena’s heart
for the Jewish people of her nation may have
been acquired by watching her father, a medical
doctor, take care his patients, many of which
were of poor Jews.
By the time she was arrested by
the Gestapo on October 20, 1942, Irena
successfully smuggled out over 400 children.
Only Irena knew the children’s true identities
and kept record of them, and their new
identities, in coded form. She placed this
information in glass jars and buried the jars
beneath an apple tree in a neighbor’s back yard,
across the street from German barracks. She
hoped to one day dig up the jars, locate the
children and inform them of their past.
Since she was the only one who
knew the names and addresses of the families
sheltering the Jewish children, she endured
torture to conceal this information. Under
unrelenting torment, Irena remained strong…and
silent. Though the Nazis could break her body
(they broke both her feet and legs) they could
not break her spirit. Irena refused to betray
any of her associates or the children in hiding.
She spent three months in the Pawiak prison and
was sentenced to death.
While she awaited execution, her
Zegota associates were able to bribe one of the
German guards to halt the execution. This German
soldier took Irena to an “additional
interrogation” and once outside he shouted in
Polish “Run!”…and she did. The next day she saw
her name on the list of the executed Poles.
Even though she faced death
because of her work in rescuing Jewish children,
Irena did not give up this cause after her
narrow escape. Instead, she returned to the
Warsaw Ghetto under a false identity and
continued the work of rescuing Jewish children
until the end of the war.
When the war ended, Irena dug up
the jars and used the notes in them to track
down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive
families in hopes of reuniting them with
relatives scattered across Europe . However, she
found that most of the children had lost their
families to Nazi concentration camps.
The children only knew Irena by
her code name Jolanta, but many never forgot
her. Years later she received an award for her
humanitarian service during the war and her
pictured appeared in the newspaper. When the
paper hit the newsstands, she received telephone
calls from many of the children, now grown, who
recognized her as the woman who took them out of
the Ghetto.
Still having a heart for people,
later in life Irena continued her work with
Social Welfare helping others by working to
create houses for elderly people, orphanages,
and emergency service for children.
Irena Sendler never considered
herself a hero and never claimed any credit for
her work on behalf of the Jewish people during
World War II. In fact, her one regret was that
she wasn’t able to do more and she felt that
this regret would follow her the rest of her
life.
Irena knew what was good and
what the Lord required of her. She acted justly,
and loved mercy, and walked humbly with her God.
Do we do the same?
To my knowledge, Irena is living
today in Warsaw , Poland , as is 94 years old.
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