An astonishing heroine: Irena Sendler

“If you see someone drowning, you must jump in to save them, whether you can swim or not.”
Irena Sendler was just seven years old when her father spoke those words. A doctor, he had contracted typhus while caring for poor Jewish people afflicted by the epidemic in their small Polish town. Irena’s father died shortly thereafter, but like him, she would devote her life to saving others—including more than 2,500 Jewish children during WWII.
Irena was born in 1910 and grew up an only child in the Polish town of Otwock. After her father’s death, Jewish community leaders, touched by his kindness, offered to help Irena’s mother pay for her education. Irena studied Polish literature at Warsaw University and joined the Socialist party before becoming a social worker. She was nearly 30 when the Nazis took over Warsaw through ruthless aerial bombardments and a brutal occupation that would last the duration of the war.
As soon as the Nazi tanks rolled in, Irena began offering food and shelter to Jews in her neighbourhood. By the following year, the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest in Nazi-occupied Europe, had been constructed: 10–foot-high walls topped with barbed wire and surrounded by Nazi guards with orders to shoot escapees on sight. Some 400,000 Jewish people were forced into 1.3 square miles of space and afforded daily rations of a mere 181 calories. At least 254,000 of those who managed to survive the rampant disease, mass starvation, and random killings in the ghetto were sent to Treblinka concentration camp, where most died.
Between 1939 and 1942, Irena, along with friends and colleagues, made over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families escape the ghetto, saving many lives. She then joined the underground Polish organization, Zegota, in December 1942 and ran its children’s division. Using her Social Welfare Department permit, Irena entered the Warsaw Ghetto under the guise of checking for signs of typhus, which the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto walls.
Wearing a Star of David to show her solidarity, Irena began talking Jewish parents into giving up their children, who faced near-sure fates of dying in the ghetto or death camps. The parents had a devastatingly heartbreaking choice to make, and Irena, risking her own life, could afford them no assurances—only a chance their children otherwise would not have.
Irena and her group of about 25 volunteers, mostly women, smuggled the children past Nazi guards using various methods. Sometimes Irena took children out in an ambulance, hidden under a stretcher, or in the trolley, concealed in trunks or suitcases. Other times, she put sedated children in body bags to sneak out the ghetto entrance.
Some children were taken out through sewer pipes or other secret underground passages; others escaped through the old courthouse that stood on the edge of the ghetto. If a child spoke good Polish and could rattle off some Christian prayers, he or she could be smuggled into the church next to the ghetto through an entrance guarded by Germans and later taken to the Aryan side.
But all of these methods were highly dangerous, and the Germans often used ruses to trick the Poles and arrest them.
After removing the children from the ghetto, Irena and her coworkers adopted them into the homes of Polish families or hid them in convents and orphanages. They ensured that each family hiding a child knew he or she must be returned to Jewish relatives after the war. Meanwhile, Irena made lists of the children’s real names on thin tissue paper and hid them in jars, which she buried under an apple tree across the street from the German barracks.
On October 20, 1943, the Gestapo came to Irena’s apartment; two German guards stood watch outside as nine pounded up the stairs. In the nick of time, Irena tossed the list of children’s names to a friend, who hid it under her arm.
The Germans dragged Irena to Pawiak prison and beat her severely, fracturing her feet and legs. A young guard interrogated and tortured her for the names of the Zegota leaders, and she fed him a story that she and her collaborators had prepared in the event of capture. But the guard held up a folder of intelligence the Gestapo had gathered on her, including the names of people who had informed on her. Irena received a sentence of death by firing squad.
Irena described feeling near relief at her death sentence, which would spare her the constant, unbearable fear she felt risking her life every day. But at the last minute, Zegota bribed a German guard who helped Irena escape just as she was being led to her execution. The next day, posters went up all over the city with the news that Irena had been shot. She read the posters herself.
After her escape, Irena went into hiding, just like the children she rescued, for the remainder of the war. All the while, she continued her work. With the help of the Polish Resistance and some 200 convents and orphanages in the city of Warsaw and throughout the countryside, Irena and her helpers managed to save the lives of at least 2,500 Jewish children. When the war was finally over, she dug up the jars she had buried under the noses of the Germans and began the difficult job of finding the children and locating a living relative. But almost all the parents of the children that Irena saved died at the Treblinka death camp.
Irena lived out the next 50 years in anonymity, suppressed by the Communist regime in post-war Poland and haunted by the horrors she had witnessed throughout the war. She had nightmares every single night of her life, asking herself, “Did I do enough?” Then in 1999, when Irena was 89 years old, a group of Protestant high school students from Kansas dug up her story and brought it to light, giving the world a true heroine—and Irena the recognition she so rightly deserved. In 2007, Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize before passing away in 2008 at the age of 98.