Irena Stanisława Sendler was born in Warsaw, Poland, and grew up in Otwock, a town with a vibrant Jewish community. As a child, she saw her father, a doctor and humanitarian, treat the poor for free. After he died, when she was seven years old, she and her mother returned to Warsaw.
In 1927, she attended the University of Warsaw, studying law before changing to Polish literature. As a student, she joined the Union of Polish Democratic Youth and became involved with the Communist Party of Poland. She advocated against the ghetto-bench system, which assigned Jewish students to designated sections of the lecture halls, and she defaced the “non-Jewish” identification on her grade card. Her public protest resulted in her suspension from the university, and she could not find a position in the Warsaw school system because of her lefties views.
In 1931, at 21, she married Mieczysław Sendler and found a job as a social worker in the legal department for the Mother and Child Assistance Division of the Free Polish University. In 1935, she began to work in the Warsaw Department of Social Welfare and Public Health, where she was in charge of the canteens that assisted people in need.
In 1939, after the Nazis invaded Poland, she and her colleagues used the canteens to help the oppressed Jews by providing them with food, medicine, and clothing. By the end of the following year, all of Warsaw’s Jewish population, about 400,000 people, were forced to move into the small area of the ghetto. The density, poor hygienic conditions, and lack of food and medical supplies resulted in the death of hundreds of people every day from disease and starvation. As social workers, Sendler and her colleagues had a special permit to enter the ghetto and inspect its sanitary conditions. Once in, she established contact with the Zegota – the Underground Council to Aid Jews and brought in medications, food, and clothing. Soon, she began to help people who managed to escape the ghetto and smuggle out many babies and small children, especially orphans. Her actions were done at huge risk since any kind of assistance to Jews was punishable by death.
In 1943, 33 years old Sendler was appointed director of Zegota’s Department for the Care of Jewish Children, and alongside her 12 associates, she enhanced smuggling operations. They had various ways to smuggle the children out of the ghetto, hidden in an ambulance, carried in caskets and potato sacks, or in underground tunnels. On the Aryan side, the children received new catholic identities and were kept with non-Jewish families and convents. Sendler wanted to preserve the children’s true identity so they could reunite with their families after the war, so she kept detailed lists of the children’s birth names, Christian names, and current locations. She hid the records in a jar in the yard of one of her friends.
On October 20th, 1943, she was arrested by the Gestapo and was sent to Pawiak Prison. To get her to reveal information about her associates, she was beaten and tortured. She was sentenced to death, but underground activists bribed the prison’s guards, and they released her in February 1944. In the following month, she resumed her activities, which she continued until the Nazis left Poland. The group is estimated to have rescued about 2,500 children, 400 of whom she saved.
After the war, she and her associates, together with the Zegota organization, tried to track down their families. Unfortunately, only a few parents were found since only 1% of the Warsaw Ghetto residents had survived the war.
In the next few years, Sendler reorganized a field hospital, in which she worked as a nurse toward the end of the war, as the Warsaw’s Children Home. She resumed her social work activities, and in 1945 she was appointed head of the Department of Social Welfare in Warsaw’s municipal government. In 1947, she joined the Social-Professional Department of the Polish Workers Party Central Committee. Over the next two decades, she held various administrative positions in the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health. In 1962, at the age of 52, she was named deputy director of Warsaw trade medical schools, where she established numerous social work projects, including a care center for orphans and the elderly and a rehabilitation program for teenage prostitutes. In 1967, she resigned from her management positions due to health problems and worked as a teacher and librarian until her retirement at 73 years old. Over the years, she was active in many social organizations, including the League of Women, the National League to Fight Racism, the Warsaw National Council, and the Friends of Children Association.
She became a well-known public figure only in 1999 when her story was found by three high school students from Uniontown, Kansas, when they were searching for a project for the National History Day competition. Led by their teacher, the students produced a play named Life in a Jar, based on her life story and saving the children’s operation. The play was staged in the US and Poland in front of 90 years old Sendler and later was adapted for television as The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler.
She died at the age of 98.
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