Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a thirty year old Polish Catholic social worker employed by the Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipal council when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. She was working in the department’s social assistance section, with responsibility for poor relief for Warsaw residents who could not work. The German occupation authorities ordered her department in 1939 to cease providing welfare to Jewish residents. Sendler and a small group of colleagues continued to do so anyway, using forged Polish identity papers for the Jewish recipients to disguise the welfare records. The work was the prelude to the larger operation she ran from late 1942 onwards.

The larger operation began in autumn 1942 after the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka had begun in July 1942 and after the Polish underground had established the Council to Aid Jews, the Żegota, in October 1942. Żegota was the only organisation in occupied Europe established and funded specifically by a national resistance movement, in this case the Polish Home Army and the Polish government-in-exile, to rescue Jews. Sendler was recruited as the head of Żegota’s children’s section. She used her existing Welfare Department position as a cover. Her department had legitimate work permits to enter the Warsaw ghetto on epidemic control and welfare grounds, in particular to monitor the typhus outbreaks that the Germans feared would spread to the Aryan side of the wall. Sendler used the permits to enter the ghetto regularly between October 1942 and her arrest in October 1943, sometimes daily, with a small team of Polish nurses and social workers, to identify Jewish children whose parents wanted them to be taken out and placed in Polish hiding addresses outside the ghetto.

The methods of getting the children out were varied and grim. Babies and small children were drugged with luminal to keep them silent and smuggled out in suitcases, ambulances, sacks marked as laundry, or, in one famous case, an undertaker’s coffin. Older children were walked out through the Welfare Department gate, posing as Polish children of poor families on the welfare books. Children old enough to walk and talk were trained to claim Polish names and Polish family backgrounds and to recite Catholic prayers. The team got around two thousand five hundred children out of the ghetto over the year of operation. The children were placed in Polish foster families across central Poland, in convents under the protection of Catholic religious orders, or in the orphanages of the Welfare Department itself, with their identities recorded in coded form on slips of cigarette paper. Sendler kept the slips in jars buried in the garden of a colleague’s house at Lekarska Street 9 in Warsaw. The intention was that, after the war, the slips would allow the children to be reunited with their families. Most of the families were murdered. The reunion at the end of the war was, in the great majority of cases, a search by the surviving aunt or grandmother in the Soviet zone for a child she had not seen in three years and could not be sure was still alive.

The Gestapo arrested Sendler in October 1943. She was tortured at the Pawiak prison, including the breaking of both legs and both feet. She did not give the names of her colleagues or the locations of the hidden children. She was sentenced to death and was on a list for execution at the Pawiak when Żegota’s network bribed a Gestapo officer with a substantial sum of cash to remove her from the list and stage her death. The arrangement worked. Sendler was officially recorded as executed but was secretly released and went into hiding herself for the remainder of the war.

The buried jars were dug up after liberation. The slips were given to the post-war Jewish Central Committee, which used them to attempt to reunite the surviving children with surviving relatives. Most of the children’s parents had been murdered. The reunifications were difficult; many of the older children had absorbed their Polish identities and their Polish foster families had become their real families, and the surviving Jewish relatives, often in displaced persons’ camps in Germany or in the new state of Israel, had to compete with Polish foster parents who had grown to love the children. The cases became some of the most difficult in the postwar Polish Jewish community. Sendler herself testified in some of them.

Sendler lived in Warsaw for the rest of her life under the Polish communist regime. The case was deliberately suppressed by the regime in the 1950s, on the standard ground that the work had been done under the auspices of the bourgeois Polish government-in-exile rather than under the auspices of the Soviet-aligned Polish workers’ party. Yad Vashem named her Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. She received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honour, in 2003. The American high school students of Uniontown, Kansas, brought her case to wide international attention through their 1999 history project Life in a Jar, which became a play and a 2009 CBS film. Sendler died in Warsaw on 12 May 2008 at the age of ninety eight. She had said for the rest of her life that she was not a hero, that she had been doing what any human being should do, and that she felt she had not done enough.

See also

Sources

  • Anna Mieszkowska, Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler, Penguin, 2010
  • Tilar J. Mazzeo, Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto, Gallery, 2016
  • Yad Vashem, file on Irena Sendler, Righteous Among the Nations, 1965
  • Joanna Beata Michlic, Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland, Yad Vashem, 2008
  • Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej), Warsaw, files on the Council to Aid Jews
  • Norman H. Conard and the Uniontown students, Life in a Jar, history project archive, Lowell Milken Center, Fort Scott, Kansas