Irena Sendler: Woman Who Smuggled 2500 Jewish Children
Irena Sendler (Polish name: Irena Sendlerowa) claimed she did not do anything extraordinary. “To save one Jewish child, ten Poles and two Jews had to risk death. To betray that same child and the family that hid him required only one informer …”. If they were caught, they faced certain death.
This dedicated team of workers, members of the underground resistance movement, cast aside their own fears of what would happen to them if they were caught and instead chose to do what was right. While the people of Nazi Germany had been propagandised against the Jews by Hitler and the Nazis, there were others during the German occupation of Poland who continued to recognise that no people group was of any less worth than another. All are made in the image of God and the non-Jewish people of Europe had to make a choice as to whether it is best to commit a wrong or to endure a wrong.
There were many who chose the latter and didn’t consider it a choice as to whether to help to save the Jewish population or not, it was simply the right thing and the human thing to do. At the start of World War II, even before she saved the first Jewish child, Irena was offering food and shelter to Jewish families. At this stage, many in the rest of the world but also those in Europe and even in Germany, were naively unaware of the Nazi’s final solution for the Jews.
Knowing what lay ahead for the Jewish people as trains began departing for the death camps, Irena, a social worker posing as a nurse, obtained a position with social services. She served as a sanitary worker, alongside other health workers inside the Warsaw ghetto. Going from door to door of private homes in the ghetto, she begged Jewish parents to hand over their children to her. Irena worked with the Jewish Welfare Organization as well as the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota). Zegota was established in December of 1942 as an underground rescue organization for Poles and Jews.
By this stage, many Jews had already been deported from Poland and sent to death camps. This drove Irena and others to pursue their rescue work relentlessly, in order to save as many of the remaining survivors as possible. Due to the risk of the children making noise or babies crying during their escape, they needed to be sedated. Irena would smuggle the children out in potato sacks, handbags, toolboxes and even in body bags and coffins, claiming they were children who had died.
- Using an ambulance, a child could be taken out, hidden under the stretcher.
- Escape routes through the old courthouse.
- A child could be taken out using the sewer pipes or other secret underground passages.
- A trolley could carry out children hiding in a sack, a trunk, a suitcase or something similar.
- If a child could pretend to be sick or was actually very ill, it could be legally removed using the ambulance.
After giving the rescued children false identities, Irena would keep careful records, detailing the children’s names and family identities on a slip of tissue paper along with their new identity stated in the false documents that she would procure for them. This paper went into a jar that was ultimately buried under an apple tree, across the road from where the gestapo agents patrolled.
When the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed in September 1943, Irena who went by the code name Jolanta, used her contacts to find safe hiding places for many of the remaining Jewish children in orphanages, convents and other religious institutions as well as with non-Jewish families. It was understood by the people who cared for the children that they would return them to their families at the end of the war.
After being caught and then escaping from the Gestapo, Irena remained in hiding until the end of the war. Once the war was over, she dug up the jars brimming full with the names of all the children she and her team had rescued and began the arduous task of attempting to reunite the children with family members. Tragically, 90% of the children’s parents did not survive the Treblinka death camp, so many of the orphan children did not have anyone to come looking for them once the war was over.
Elzbieta Ficowska was born in the Warsaw Ghetto and having no memory of her parents who perished, considered Irena who saved her life, her second mother. Elzebieta was only 5 months old when Irena carried her out of the Warsaw Ghetto in a carpenter’s box. While it is claimed that Irena saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children, the exact number of children cannot be known.
“In 1963 Yad Vashem embarked upon a worldwide project to pay tribute to the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. This represents a unique and unprecedented attempt by the victims to honor individuals from within the nations of perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders, who stood by the victims’ side and acted in stark contrast to the mainstream of indifference and hostility that prevailed in the darkest time of history.”
– Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre.
In 1965, Irena received the Yad Vashem medal as they recognized her as one of The Righteous Among the Nations. Those endowed with the title “The Righteous Among the Nations” who risked their lives in order to save Jewish lives included Armenians, Muslims, churches, diplomats, nursemaids, underground rescue networks such as those Irena worked with, rescuers in Auschwitz, teachers, sportsmen, soldiers, policemen and other officials. Read Irena’s Yad Vashem story here.
Irena lamented toward the end of her life that none of her fellow co-workers had survived long enough to enjoy any of the honours that Irena received.
Books
Picture Book Biography
IIrena Sendler, a Polish social worker, helped nearly four hundred Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and into hiding during World War II.
Please Note: The biographies of Irena Sendler state that she saved 2,500 children. These were published 6 years after this picture book so I assume these are updated figures as more evidence of her story has come to light.
Biography: Young Reader’s Editions
Young Reader's Edition: Age 10+
The extraordinary and long forgotten story of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.
Biography
Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who saved 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. But Irena did something even more astonishing: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war. She could not know that more than ninety percent of their families would perish.
Movie
The story if Irena Sendler, a social worker who was part of the Polish Underground during World War II and was arrested by the Nazi's for saving the lives of nearly 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto.
Please preview in order to determine suitability for your family.
Podcast
Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project
After the war, Irena’s name dropped into obscurity due to the fact that Poland’s Communist government persecuted members of the Polish resistance. Undisclosed members stayed silent. If it wasn’t for a group of female students from Uniontown High School in rural Kansas, we may even today never have heard the name of Irena Sendler. Choosing to learn more about the Holocaust for a National History Day competition in 1999, they came upon a brief reference to Irena in an article titled “The Other Schindlers”, in reference to Oskar Schindler who also saved many lives (including children) through “employing” them in his factories (see more below).
Inspired and motivated to learn more about this unassuming woman, they struggled to find further information online and instead reached out to the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous as well as searching cemetery records. What follows is an incredible story as they were soon notified by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous that Sendler was in fact alive and living in Poland. Many from the Kansas Jewish community, including Holocaust survivors and Jewish community leaders funded a trip for the girls, parents and teachers to travel to Warsaw to meet Irena. The group of girls and Irena became fast friends and considered each other family.
Over the remaining 7 years of Irena’s life, the girls made several more trips to Poland to visit her, performing their play, Life in a Jar while there and also working alongside Polish high school students. These students were also bringing to light the stories of The Righteous Among the Nations from their local communities. Incredibly, the group of students from Kansas ended up collating over 4,000 pages of primary sources, interviews and research based on Irena’s story and the work of Zegota.
Book
The Irena Sendler Project
The title for this project came from the fact that for every child she saved, Irena wrote the names of the Jewish children on a slip of paper, along with their new names and identities, in the hope of reuniting these children with their families after the war. Across the road from the where the SS soldiers patrolled, this Jar of life and hope was buried under an apple tree.
Youtube
Unfortunately, just 80 years after World War II, antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda are more rife than ever. What I did not realise as a young mother teaching my children about the Jewish holocaust, was how quickly and easily people could once again be led down this path of hatred toward the Jewish population.
The “Never Again” slogan referring to the genocides of the Holocaust, has very quickly faded into the shadows of the past. We are in the midst of a generation, plagued with Biblical and historical illiteracy. May we always be learning from the lessons of the past and teach our children to never be tempted to view any people group as less valuable or any less “made in the image of God” as others.
High School Propaganda Experiment
Age 12+
The Wave is based on a true incident that occured in a high school history class in Palo Alto, California, in 1969.
The powerful forces of group pressure that pervaded many historic movements such as Nazism are recreated in the classroom when history teacher Burt Ross introduces a "new" system to his students. And before long "The Wave," with its rules of "strength through discipline, community, and action, " sweeps from the classroom through the entire school.
The Zookeeper’s Wife
Children were not the only ones smuggled from the Warsaw ghetto. One of the safe houses to which Irena took the children, was the Warsaw Zoo, subject of the book and subsequent movie, The Zookeeper’s Wife. Antonina Zabinski (The Zookeeper’s Wife) not only took in children but also adults whom Jan Zabinski (The Zookeeper) had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Up to 2 dozen people at a time found refuge in their 2-storey house in the grounds of the zoo but many others hid in the empty animal compounds until safer refuge could be found for them. Faced with a death sentence, Irena herself found refuge there when she was on the run from the Gestapo, after a truck driver allowed her to escape on the way to her execution.
Yad Vashem recognized Jan and Antonina Zabinski as Righteous Among the Nations. Read their story here.
Book
Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism. Antonina, “the zookeeper’s wife,” was responsible for her own family, the zoo animals and their “Guests”―Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose names they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself.
Movie
Schindler’s List
While the Schindler’s List novel by Thomas Keneally and the movie based on Keneally’s account are not appropriate for children, here are some great options for learning about Schindler’s story for younger readers. It is an enigma that a drinking, gambling, womanising member of the Nazi party acted more “Christian” than most of the German church during World War II. Schindler was responsible for saving the lives of 1,200 Jewish people by employing them in his factories.
Yad Vashem recognized Emilie and Oskar Schindler as Righteous Among the Nations. Read Oskar and Emilie’s story here.
Books
Age 8+
Rena Finder was only eleven when the Nazis forced her and her family, along with all the other Jewish families, into the ghetto in Krakow, Poland. Rena worked as a slave laborer with scarcely any food, and watched as friends and family were sent away.
Then Rena and her mother ended up working for Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who employed Jewish prisoners in his factory and kept them fed and healthy. But Rena's nightmares were not over. She and her mother were deported to the concentration camp Auschwitz. With great cunning, it was Schindler who set out to help them escape.
How the Impossible Became Possible . . . on Schindler's List - Age 10+
“Much like The Boy In the Striped Pajamas or The Book Thief,” this remarkable memoir from Leon Leyson, one of the youngest children to survive the Holocaust on Oskar Schindler’s list, “brings to readers a story of bravery and the fight for a chance to live” (VOYA).
A Memoir of a Schindler's List Survivor - Age 14+
Oskar Schindler was Hannelore's one hope to survive. Schindler had a plan to take eleven hundred Jews to the safety of his new factory in Czechoslovakia. But survival was not that simple. Weeks later Hannelore found herself, alone, outside the gates of Auschwitz, pushed toward the smoking crematoria.
I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree is the remarkable true story of one young woman's nightmarish coming-of-age. But it is also a story about the surprising possibilities for hope and love in one of history's most brutal times.
75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the Nazi concentration camps. This award-winning, bestselling work of Holocaust fiction was the inspiration for the classic film. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden—Schindler’s Jews—to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.
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