A Group Of School Girls From A Small Kansas Town Help The World Remember A Polish Christian Woman Of Great Courage!
John 15:13
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
The high school at Uniontown, Kansas.
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1999 A.D.: There is no greater love than when we put our neighbor's welfare above our own, risk our life or lose our life for theirs? The Scripture confirms the power of it!
Three school girls (initially three, later more!) from Uniontown, Kansas weren't having it that their newfound Polish WWII hero, Irena Sendler, whose story they had discovered while doing a high school history project, was still alive but living in poverty and obscurity in Warsaw, Poland. How could that be the right ending for such a courageous woman? Joined by other Kansas girls, then people from their town, then state, then nation and finally even people from other nations participating, they worked to make things better!
There were three Kansas school girls, Elizabeth Cambers (later Hutton), Megan Stewart (later Felt) and Sabrina Coons (later Murphy) who began a history project in high school. In the course of completing their project for National History Day, led by teacher Norm Conrad, they learned about Irena Sendler, and found that she and her group of about 25 that she led had saved the lives of thousands of children - imagine that, about 2,500 children - at great peril to her life and freedom, at near constant great risk to herself, during WWII. Then the Kansas girls discovered that this very heroic lady was living, very poor but still alive, in Warsaw, Poland around 55 years later at the time of their school project. They had assumed that since it all happened so long ago that Irena must probably be deceased, but they contacted the Jewish Foundation For the Righteous to find where Irena was buried, and instead they were informed that she was still alive. The Kansas girls were to discover that Irena, now an elderly woman, was not one to often advertise the exploits of her youth, so even her neighbors in Poland were somewhat unaware of who they lived beside. That's not right! Gotta fix that! So, being young American women from Kansas, they decide to rectify what seems to them like an injustice, really. Found it...gotta fix it!! They took action. And boy did it have an amazingly large effect. Good job, girls! Way to raise your daughters, Kansas.
Irena Sendler (Feb 1910 - May 2008) in her early 30's. She was married, but her husband was a captured Polish soldier for most of the war. Does she look so tough that you could torture her and break her bones and she'd not inform on her fellow resistance team mates? Does she look so brave that she would help transport 2,500 infants and children out of danger under the eyes of the watching German Gestapo? This Catholic Christian girl looks normal and feminine, but she was rawhide!
What was it that Irena had done back in the early 1940's? She was a young Polish woman, a Catholic though, not a Jew. Ghetto is a word which seems to have first been used in 1516 in Venice, Italy where Jews there were forced to live in a certain designated area of the city. Then several other cities in Europe over the next centuries also confined their Jewish citizens to a certain area of their city, and so the word ghetto came to be used to designate the place within a city where Jews were forced to live, out of a certain animosity or jealousy towards them. And there was a period of time in Warsaw, Poland in WWII where the Jews were confined to their specified neighborhood, called the Warsaw Ghetto, as the Germans began treating them ever more like animals to be slaughtered, shipping them off to concentration camps like nearby newly built Treblinka to be disposed of. To enter or exit the Warsaw Ghetto there were check points and German guards with guns that you had to get past.
So, as the outbound shipping efforts of Jews by Germans ramped up, the Jewish families lived much confined to their neighborhood which was referred to as the Warsaw Ghetto. It was essentially a sort of prison. Irena took a job with Zegota, an organization which was the Council For Aid To Jews, as a social worker of sorts. The Germans were allowing this organization to come and go into the ghetto to perform certain limited aid functions and city sanitation and health visitation functions for the Jews or among them. They would do typhoid checks, for instance, and ensure the sick people among the crowded ghetto area did not have something contagious that could spread to the Aryan side of the city. Irena's job allowed her to be one of those who could come and go, though she was subject to inspection.
As it became more clear to the Jewish families in the Warsaw Ghetto that their future looked very dark, as more and more Jewish adults and family were shipped to the Treblinka Camp 50 miles away or in some cases were even killed there in the Warsaw Ghetto, there came to be an undercover effort to at least get the Jewish children out of there and off to some safe location by various undetected means, as the Germans were not allowing them to be removed openly.
The children rescue effort was largely organized by the Polish government, from exile. Irena became part of this effort. She initially delivered forged escape paperwork, forged identities, etc., and eventually did direct rescues of the very young.
She could enter with a fairly large basket or toolbox or cart, etc., to provide permitted aid to families in the ghetto, and she could leave with a sleeping, drugged baby or small toddler hidden away in what she carried. The sewers were sometimes employed as escape routes. There were children escorted out in coffins pretending to be dead, and there were secret spaces built into ambulances which entered the ghetto and then left. There were both courthouses and churches that straddled the exact boundary of the ghetto, and sometimes children entered from the Jewish side and went out, disguised and coached to use a fake accent, into the German side. This underground organization employed many imaginative means of bringing out these very young Jewish children. The parents hated to send their child away, but they feared what might await their child, so, many babies and toddlers were relinquished to Irena and other brave young nurses or social workers on her team who were also allowed to enter. But each time they had to somehow get past the guards at the check points. Getting caught could result in anything from torture to imprisonment to execution.
For a long time Irena succeeded in slipping the children by the guards, and then one day she did not. This brave young non-Jewish Polish nurse...who took these risks simply because she felt that someone must...was caught one day in October 1943 and taken to Pawiak Prison and also to Gestapo headquarters. Over the next days she was brutally interrogated. Her interrogators even broke the bones of her legs and feet, and bones in her arms, but despite the terrific pain she did not betray her team mate or their methods or the where abouts of the babies and children they had removed and taken away to safety. She stubbornly kept her mouth shut in the face of all the pain, which only angered her captors. The Gestapo finally decided that she should be executed by firing squad, and the execution was scheduled.
Her organization was working hard behind the scenes to save her, however, and before her execution took place her team found a German they could bribe, and they performed a successful rescue mission, snatching her up and spiriting her away in time to save her. Here is an excerpt from an interview Irena did after the war, describing how she got captured on her 'name day', which is the feast day of the patron saint that Polish Catholics were attached to as a newborn:
Well, in ’43, in October, on my name day as it happened, the Gestapo came for me. Of course, I was arrested. The woman who exposed me couldn’t take the beating, she revealed my name, so of course the Germans knew that I belonged to an organization that was helping Jews. They beat me. Tortured me. Hence, you know, my bad legs. And very quickly I got a death sentence. Illegal communications, clandestine notes, were exchanged between Żegota and me in Pawiak prison. Żegota did everything to get me out. Not only because they liked me, but… I was the only person who had the encoded [names] of 2,500 Jewish children placed in various locations, in convents, with private individuals. And I had this file at home. Thanks to some enormous chance, it never fell into German hands, so Żegota knew that if I were killed, then 2,500 Jewish children would never make their way back to the Jewish community, because nobody knew this file, where it was encoded. By “file” I mean narrow strips of paper that had writing on them, let’s say, “Marysia Kowalska” equals Rachela Rosenberg, who is hidden in, say, such and such a convent, you know. So my person was, well, I was a person they wanted to keep alive. And so Żegota and [Julian] Grobelny did everything to get me out of Pawiak prison.
End quote
Irena paid a high price for her courageous life as a nurse/spy and secret child rescuer, but she lived. Somewhat against the odds, the war ended instead of her life. And, as mentioned, she, her team, is credited with saving the lives of around 2,500 children, which is an incredible success story. After she herself was rescued, broken bones and all, from the Gestapo she healed, and then continued to do organizational work and document forging work to assist with the child rescues for the remainder of the war.
Interestingly, she felt it very important that each child should one day be reunited with their actual parents if that were possible, and so she made a habit of writing down the original name of each child she rescued as well as the new forged names they were given, along with the name of the birth parents, on strips of paper in a jar that she would keep buried under a certain apple tree, so that there would be an accurate record and it could one day be dug up to aid in returning these children to their rightful parents. Such papers were evidence of the secret child rescue operations, so they had to be hidden very securely. The children, once removed from the ghetto, were placed with mostly non-Jewish families, with orphanages, with foster homes, etc. Some were not even old enough to know that they were not growing up with their natural family, and some were only told when fairly old. Sadly, many of the natural parents did not survive. Many were shipped off to the camps and met their ends there. It is estimated, however, that over 10,000 people alive today possess their live as a result of these 2,500 or so rescued by Irena and her team.
Irena was a married woman during the war, but married someone else shortly after the war. She had three children, two of who preceded her in death, and she actually divorced and remarried her first husband again but they also got divorced again in 1971. So she lived long, about 37 years, as a single woman after that. The Polish Communist Government of the late 70's, 80's and 90's did not promote her story mostly for political reasons, as she was no fan of that era of communist Polish government. She lived meagerly in a small apartment until the girls from Kansas discovered her and learned that she was alive.
The Kansas girls discovered Irena's brave work, and they felt inspired to write a play about her wartime exploits. They named it Life In A Jar (referring to the jar that many of the children's names were placed in.) The play really blew up, it received a lot of high level attention and good press and suddenly the story of the Kansas girls and the name of Irena Sendler were somewhat famous again both in the USA and in Poland. The girls traveled to Poland and met Irena, and money was also raised, and in her 90's she was able to move to and stay in a 24 hour care facility that was much more comfortable, and where her surviving relatives, including daughter Janina and widowed daughter in law Iwona, would come to see her and keep her company with some regularity until she died in 2008 at 98 years of age.
Irena received some prestigious awards from appreciative Jewish groups in her old age also. Even in 1965 she had received the Righteous Among the Nations award, then she received the Jan Karski Award For Valor and Compassion, then in 2003, following the Kansas girls' efforts to reacquaint the world with her name, she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. The Israelis are often an appreciative people who remember those who have made great sacrifices for them.
In 2007 Irene was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But she did not win...Al Gore won along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for...you know...their daring climate change work, I suppose.
Irena was an outstanding example of a brave young Christian woman during her war years, and led a life to be noted and emulated due to her courage and dedication to others. She loved her neighbor as Jesus taught us Christians we must, risking all. And there are some young women from Kansas that should be very proud, I think, for doing much to bring some well deserved appreciation and comfort and care to Irene in the last years of her life, and for writing a play that will likely inspire future generations of girls and men alike. Their parents raised them right, their teacher led them well, their instincts for the appreciation of others were commendable. Good job, Kansas...good job. Their town even has n Irene Sendler Day and an Irene Sendler Week fron what I read. And may it please the Lord, Irene Sendler, that you are resting with Him in peace and joy, a forgiven and rescued soul who was also, herself, a brave rescuer in her day.
Irena and Kansas girls in Poland.
Irene and the girls not only met more than once, but exchanged letters as well. Here is an excerpt reportedly from one of Irene's letters to the girls:
They wrote Irena, and she wrote dozens of deeply meaningful letters to them, with such comments as, “My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that my co-workers have all passed on, and these honors fall to me. I can’t find words to thank you for my own country and the world to know of the bravery of rescuers. Before the day you wrote Life in a Jar, the world did not know our story; your performance and work are continuing the effort I started over fifty years ago. You are my dearly beloved ones.”