Hero:
Sendler, a social worker, began organizing financial and material help for Jews after the war began in 1939 with the Nazi invasion. Posing as a nurse and wearing a Star of David armband – in solidarity and to blend in – Sendler would enter the Warsaw Ghetto, the prison enclave the Nazis established as a prelude to deporting and murdering Poland’s Jews in death camps.
A Polish doctor forged papers stating she was a nurse. The Nazis, who feared the typhoid fever spreading in the ghetto, were happy to let Polish medical workers handle the sick and the dead.
Sendler persuaded Jewish parents that their children had a better chance to live if she smuggled them out and placed them with Catholic families.
In hopes of reuniting them later with their birth parents, she wrote the children’s names and new addresses, in code, on slips of paper and buried them in two jars in an assistant’s yard. That hope never came true: Almost all the parents died in Hitler’s camps.
What the jar did save was their true, Jewish names.
Sendler was arrested in a Gestapo night raid on her apartment on Oct. 20, 1943. The Nazis took her to the dreaded Pawiak prison, which few left alive. She was tortured and says she still has scars on her body – but she refused to betray her team.
“I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity,” she was quoted as saying in the one book about her, “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler” by Anna Mieszkowska.
The Polish resistance bribed a Gestapo officer. He put her name on a list of executed prisoners and let her go. She went into hiding under an assumed name but continued her activity.
(via Reddit)
Related:
Wikipedia’s entry on Irena Sendler.
