Have You Heard Of... Irena Sendler?

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker.

 

Irena was born in Warsaw in 1910 to Dr. Stanisław Krzyżanowski and his wife Janina. Her father died when she was 7 – he had contracted typhus from his patients.

 

At the start of World War II, in 1939, Irena was a young social worker working in Warsaw. She used her position as a social worker to help Jews, but when Jewish communities became isolated in the Warsaw Ghetto, it was harder for Irena to reach them. 450,000 Jewish people were forced into the Ghetto , which was an area just 2.4% the size of the whole city. The Ghetto was surrounded by high walls which the Jewish people had had to build themselves, under the harsh guard of the Nazis. Conditions within the walls were desperate – overcrowding, disease and starvation.

 

Irena, determined to get inside the ghetto to help the Jews, devised a plan. She obtained a permit which enabled her, as a social worker, to enter the ghetto to inspect the sanitation. Once inside, Irena helped Jewish activists to mobilise; together they started to smuggle Jewish children out, finding safe houses to hide them in with Polish families, or in orphanages. Irena and her underground network used many methods to rescue the children – among others, hidden in ambulances, through sewer pipes or underground passages, in sacks or suitcases. The children’s names and original identities were carefully noted down and hidden in glass jars in a garden, so that, after the war, they might be reunited with their families. (The reality was that most of the parents of the children died at the Treblinka camp).

 

In 1942, Irena joined Zegota – the Council To Aid Jews – a Polish underground organisation set up to help Jewish people. Irena was in charge of the Children’s Division of Zegota. Irena was arrested in 1943. She was sent to Piawiak prison, where she was interrogated and tortured. She gave a false account of her activities, refusing to divulge any real details of her network or those they had saved, and Irena was sentenced to death. Her fellow activists managed to bribe the German executioner, who helped her to safety and saved her life. Irena hid until the end of the war in 1944.

 

In 1965, Irena Sendler was recognised by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, as Righteous Among The Nations for her efforts in the war.

 

In 2003, Poland awarded Irena its highest honour, the Order Of the White Eagle.

 

Irena Sendler died in 2008 in Warsaw, aged 98.

 
Have You Heard Of..?Trudi Murray