Have you ever wondered what
you would do if the Nazi’s had marched into your country and set up ghettos to
contain “undesirables”? Would you have the courage to confront them for
mistreatment of others even if it meant death? Would you find ways to subvert
the Nazi agenda by working covertly? I’d like to think that I would, but no one
really knows until one faces the actual situation.
Another Intrepid Woman in
the series I am writing for middle grade readers is Irena Sendler (aka Irena Sendlerowa) who was part
of the Polish Resistance during World War II. Irena, a Polish Catholic social
worker, knew that her faith as well as her moral compass demanded she take
action even in the face of a death sentence if discovered.
She was a woman in her late
20s when the Nazi’s absorbed Poland. The changes were swift and deep. One
change was the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto to house 500,000 Jews. Such
crowded conditions bred disease and starvation. Posing as a health care
professional, she was able to obtain clearance to enter the Warsaw Ghetto regularly
to attend to health needs.
The Germans were afraid of
diseases, so they wouldn’t check the apartments she labeled as having typhus or
some other contagion. In this way she was able to protect the identities of the
children she and others smuggled out in tool boxes, gunny sacks, coffins, under
produce, in ambulances and other ways. Irena herself got out 400 children, some
infants. Twenty-five others in her network smuggled out an additional 2100
children.
Irena kept a list of all
the children’s names and other details in the hope that she could reunite them
with their families after the war. She wrote the names and stored them in a
glass jar she buried under an apple tree in a neighbor’s backyard. After the
war, she was saddened that most of the children’s families had been
exterminated by the Nazi’s and she couldn’t bring them together. However, of
the 2500 children, not one had been refused a home by sympathetic Poles, who placed
the children in orphanages or reared the children as their own.
An informant told the Nazi’s
of her work. They imprisoned her and tortured her, breaking both her feet and
legs. Still she would not betray a single person in her network nor the names
of the children she helped save. After the torture, she was sentenced to death.
She was saved by the Resistance she had been part of when they bribed a guard who
helped her escape. The German’s placed a price on her head, but she changed her
name and was able to remain free until the war ended.
We only know of her story
because a group of rural Kansas middle schoolers discovered her story and won a
state history contest by retelling her tale. They wrote a play, “Life in a Jar”,
that introduced this remarkable woman to the world.
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Another post about an Intrepid Woman. Irena Sendler was responsible for the
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Another remarkable intrepid woman. Irena Sendler saved 2500 Jewish children in
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