Saving
the Children
THE STORY OF IRENA SENDLER
What happens when an ordinary Polish woman encounters extraordinary evil?
Well, she saves 2,500 Jewish children.
This past week, PBS premiered the latest film by Ken Burns. His subject
was Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister and his wife Martha, who, during World
War II, helped smuggled at least 150 Jews out of Nazi-controlled areas,
operating first in Prague and then in Lisbon.
It’s a remarkable story that is worth telling and
hearing.
And
there’s another story involving the rescue of as many as 2,500 Jews that Glenn
Sunshine recently brought to our attention. And I promise, it’s a story that’s
also worthy of your attention.
The
protagonist of this story was a 29-year-old Polish social worker named Irena
Sendler. Her responsibilities included taking care of countless people who had
been dispossessed by the German occupation of her country.
The
most vulnerable and most dispossessed were Warsaw’s Jews. Four hundred thousand
of them were crowded into a three-and-one-half square mile area. At great
personal risk, Sendler found a way to enter the Ghetto, which was off-limits to
non-Jewish Poles, to see how she could help relieve the appalling
conditions.
As
her biographer wrote “Irena knew she had to help the sick and starving Jews who
were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. She began by smuggling food, clothing, and
medicine into the ghetto."
But
in the fall of 1942, half of the Ghetto’s inhabitants were deported to the
Treblinka death camp, where they were immediately gassed upon
arrival.
This barbarity led Sendler and her co-conspirators to
declare war on Hitler and to redouble their efforts. Working in concert with
Catholic orphanages, especially the Family of Mary orphanage in Warsaw, Sendler,
code-named “Jolanta,” and her co-conspirators helped smuggle out an estimated
2,500 Jewish children by whatever means possible: hiding them in coffins, potato
sacks, even in a tool box.
Not
surprisingly, this kind of resistance to evil eventually caught the attention of
the evil-doers. In October, 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. Though
brutally tortured, she refused to betray her network or give up the names and
locations of the children she smuggled out of the Ghetto. After being sentenced
to death, she managed to escape with the help of well-placed
bribes.
You
would think that such a Polish patriot would have been honored after the fall of
the Third Reich, but you’d be wrong. The Communist government imprisoned and
tortured Sendler after the war because her brand of resistance—Catholic and
non-communist—was the “wrong” kind of resistance.
Even after Israel bestowed the title “Righteous Among the Nations” on
Sendler, the communist government refused to recognize her heroism. It even
refused to allow Sendler to travel to Tel Aviv to receive her award and see the
tree planted in her name along the Avenue of the Righteous.
Not
much was known about Sendler’s story here in the U. S. until the late 1990s,
when Kansas high schoolers researched her life and wrote a play about her called
“Life in a Jar,” which was later adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV
special.
Now
based on what we know about Sendler, the lack of notoriety probably didn’t
bother her. As she told the Polish Senate shortly before her death, “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.”
Likewise, until her death in 2008, she rejected the title “hero” and said
she was haunted by her failure to do more.
But
of course she was a hero, a Christian whose courage should serve as an
inspiration to us all and a reminder that the most ordinary of people can make
an extraordinary difference.
For
more on Irena Sendler and the “Life in a Jar Project,” which tours the play
about her life, please visit BreakPoint.org and click on this
commentary.
