Irena Sendler, My Hero
Kitty Nash
Who is your hero? Is it someone who helped build our country
like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? Is it someone who
sought out new worlds like Columbus or Marco Polo? Is it someone
who stood up for justice like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr.? Is it
someone who spread love like Mother Theresa or Pope John Paul II? Is
it someone who ventured into space like Neil Armstrong or Sally Ride?
Is it someone who excels at sports like Michael Phelps or Mia Hamm?
Is it someone who fights for freedom like the men and women of our
Armed Forces? Is it someone who risks his or her life protecting the
people in our community like our firefighters and police officers?
My hero is a tiny little lady. Not even five feet tall, with grey hair
and blue eyes, she doesn’t think she’s a hero, but to me and to 2500
children like me, she is. When I was six years old, my hero saved my
life. My hero’s name is Irena Sendler.
Irena was born in the old city of Warsaw, Poland, on February 15,
1910. Her father Stanislaw Krzyzanowski was a doctor. He moved his
wife and daughter to Otwock, about 15 miles from Warsaw where he
became the director of a hospital. Otwock was a spa town that had
many hospitals and clinics. People came from all around Poland to
recover from various illnesses. Dr. Krzyzanowski taught his daughter
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the importance of loving and caring for
others. He often treated people the
other doctors in town refused to touch –
the poor Jewish patients.
In 1917, when Irena was just 7, a
typhoid epidemic broke out in Otwock.
The disease spread from person to
person, from family to family, from
neighborhood to neighborhood. Many
people died each day from the disease.
Risking his own life, Dr. Krzyzanowski
worked tirelessly to save the victims of this epidemic. Unfortunately,
he soon caught the fever and died.
“I was taught,” she said of her father, “that if you see a person
drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you
can swim or not. It is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality. One
must help him. It is a need of the heart.”
Dedicating her life to helping others, Irena went to college and
became a social worker. In 1939 the German army invaded Poland.
The Social Welfare Department where Irena worked operated food
kitchens where the poor, the homeless, the widows, and the orphans
could come for meals, clothing, and money.
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As the German soldiers took control of the city, they took away
houses and businesses and valuables from the Jewish people. Many
families suddenly found themselves poor and hungry. Irena and her
friends wrote down pretend Christian names for the Jewish families
they helped. In order to trick the German soldiers, they wrote down
that the Jewish families had highly contagious illnesses like typhus and
tuberculosis. The German soldiers were afraid of catching those
diseases, so they didn’t check
up on them.
I was only three when the
German army invaded, but I
remember the hunger. Before
they came, I had lived in a nice
apartment with pretty clothes
and plenty to eat. After the
German soldiers took our home
and belongings, we had to go to
a place with many people and
stand in line for ages to get some food. We took it to a small room we
were renting. All my toys, except for one doll, were gone. I wore the
same dress even though it was soon too small.
In December of 1942 Irena began working for a secret
organization, Zegota, that wanted to help the Jewish people. Two
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years earlier, all the Jewish residents of Warsaw, about 500,000, had
been rounded up and made to live in a 16 block section of the town
called the ghetto. Life in the ghetto was terrible. High walls with
barbed wire at the top were built around the ghetto so no one could
get in or out. The only food available was what the German soldiers
brought in each day, and they didn’t bring in much. Soon many people
were hungry and sick. As many as 5000 people were dying each
month!
The ghetto was worse than the room we had been renting.
There were five families in one small apartment. We were hungry all
the time. We had lice in our hair and fleas in our clothes. I spent much
of my time picking off those bugs. My mother wouldn’t take me out of
the apartment because the streets
were filled with dead and dying
people. It was horrible.
Hundreds were being deported.
They were rounded up by soldiers and
put on trains to Treblinka. Most
Jewish people believed that they were moving to a new town where
they would be given homes and land, but instead, Treblinka was a Nazi
killing center where Jews were being murdered as soon as they got off
the trains.
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Irena was put in charge of Zegota’s children’s bureau. She
convinced friends to help her rescue children from the ghetto. She and
her partner Irena Schultz got passes from the welfare department in
charge of controlling epidemics allowing them to go into the ghetto to
help stop the spread of the deadly diseases. The German soldiers
were afraid of getting sick, so they allowed Irena and her partner to
bring medicines into the ghetto and to take sick patients to the
hospital.
“When the war started, all of Poland was drowning in a sea of
blood. But most of all, it affected the Jewish nation. And within that
nation, it was the children who suffered most. That’s why we needed
to give our hearts to them,” Irena
explained.
Using the code name Jolanta,
Irena and her friends brought Jewish
children out of the ghetto. First, Irena
had to convince parents that their
children would be safer hiding with
Polish families or in orphanages or
convents. Many families were afraid
that the Poles would try to make their
children become Christian or that they would want to keep the children
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when the war was over. Irena told the parents that the foster families
would promise to return the children to their real families when the war
was over and that they would remain Jewish, although the children
would probably have to pretend to be Christian. Many still did not
agree. Many children died with their families.
“There were terrible scenes,” Irena said. “One mother and I
wanted a child to leave the ghetto while the father did not. They asked
what was the guarantee. What kind of guarantee could I give them.
Here I am, a stranger, asking them to place their child in my care.
They ask if I can guarantee their safety. I have to answer no.
Sometimes they would give me their child. Other times they would say
come back. I would come back a few days later and the family had
already been deported.”
My parents argued
fiercely over whether or
not they should let me
go. My mother insisted
that I be saved. My
father wasn’t happy
about the idea. It was his
job to protect his family,
he insisted. My
grandfather was furious,
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declaring that no granddaughter of his was going to be raised by
Gentiles. He was determined that I should not be given to a non-Jewish
family. My mother won the argument. She took my doll and
embroidered my real name under the doll’s hair. “So you won’t forget
who you really are,” she said holding me tight.
Irena and her friends had many ways of getting children out of
the ghetto. Older children were taught Catholic prayers and given nice
clothes. One building that shared a wall with the ghetto was the city
courthouse. Polish police officers were bribed to allow the children to
sneak through the underground halls. They met Irena’s helpers in the
lobby of the courthouse and walked out the front door with new
Christian identities.
A Catholic church also shared a wall of the ghetto. One church
door opened into the ghetto, and another door opened to the city.
Jewish children would go into the church where a priest would give
them new identity papers showing that they were Christians. One of
Irena’s friends would take the children from the church. The children
left the church with new names and new families.
Little children and babies were smuggled out in anything big
enough to hold them. Babies were often given medicine to make them
sleep so they wouldn’t be heard crying. They were hidden in
toolboxes, doctor’s bags, suitcases, potato sacks, and trash wagons.
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They were driven out hidden behind the back seats of empty streetcars
that were returning to the garage for the night.
I was small for my age. I remember liking Irena. She had such a
kind face and a warm voice. She wasn’t tall enough to be scary, but
she was a grown-up, so I trusted her. I was wrapped up in a heavy
sack and put under the floorboards of an ambulance. There was a dog
I remember. It let me pet it before I got into the bag. I was under the
floor right by the driver. The dog sat on top of me. We were stopped
at the gate by the Nazi guards. My heart began to beat so loudly I
thought the guards could hear it. I think I might have cried. As soon
as we stopped, the dog started barking. He barked and howled until
the guards let us go. When we got to the store where I would be
hidden for the day, I asked the driver why it had barked so much. He
told me that he had trained it to bark in case I made any noise. The
guards couldn’t hear me if the dog was making so much noise. I
hugged the dog tight before going into the store.
The children were taken to a safe place, then taken to a first
family to stay with while they learned their new names and the names
of their new pretend
families. Finally they were
taken to homes with their
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new families or to Catholic orphanages or convents where the nuns
took care of them.
Irena wanted to make sure that the children could be found at
the end of the war. She wrote down each child’s name, the child’s new
name, and where the child would be living. She made two copies of
the list and buried them in jars in her neighbor’s yard under an apple
tree. She did all of this right across the street from the building where
the German soldiers were living!
My name was on that list. I was placed in Kobyika, a nearby
town, with an old woman. I was supposed to tell everyone that my
name was Genia. Racinska was my grandmother. My mother’s name
was Switala. She was working for the Germans and couldn’t care for
me. I used to be so afraid of making a mistake that when anyone
asked me about myself, I hid behind Racinska. She told everyone that
I was painfully shy. People believed her, and I never made a mistake.
I lived with Racinska for three years. She had a garden behind
her house with chickens, geese (which bit!), and a goat. She fattened
me up with eggs and goat’s milk. We plucked the geese several times
in the summer (she plucked, I chased feathers), and filled up the most
scrumptiously comfortable feather beds that we slept on each night.
Knowing I was Jewish, she taught me to read from the Old Testament
of her Bible, the history of the Jewish People. Just in case, she also
taught me stories about Jesus.
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On October 20, 1943, German soldiers surrounded Irena’s home.
Terrified of what the soldiers would do to the hidden children, she gave
the list of names to her assistant who hid the list in her underwear.
The soldiers searched the house while the two terrified women
watched. They tore the house apart. In the end, they found nothing.
Irena’s assistant was allowed to leave, but they arrested Irena.
Irena was taken to Pawiak Prison. The guards tortured her,
trying to make her tell them about the others in her organization. She
refused to tell them anything. While working in the laundry of the
prison, Irena came up with a way to get back at the soldiers. She and
the other women put holes in the soldiers’ underwear. When the
women were caught, they were punished, but still Irena stayed strong.
Soldiers broke her legs and feet with wooden clubs. Even though the
pain was terrible, the only thing she would tell them was the false story
that all the workers had made up to tell in case they were captured.
She never revealed anything about Zegota or the children.
“I was quiet as a mouse. I would have rather died than disclose
anything about our operations,” she later said.
The Germans quit trying to get her to talk and decided just to kill
her. Some of her friends gave one of the guards a lot of money to let
her go. He wrote her name of a list of people who had been shot. The
list of executed prisoners was posted on public bulletin boards so the
Polish people would know what happened to people who worked
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against the Germans. Irena saw her own name on the list. She had to
hide for the rest of the war, but she continued to work to help save
more children.
Racinska was kind, but old. I had no one to play with. I was to
stay inside the house unless I was helping her in the garden. She
never let me play with other children or go shopping with her. I wasn’t
allowed to go school. I didn’t understand until I was older. If I had
said anything that sounded Jewish, everyone would have known she
was hiding a Jewish child, and we both would have been arrested and
killed. Racinska risked her life to save mine. I loved her for it.
She tried to make my life as pleasant as possible. When she
sewed clothes, she helped me sew clothes for my doll, and when she
sewed me a quilt, I made a matching doll quilt. I still have them today.
We would have tea parties with my doll and play checkers by the
fireplace. We made bread animals and funny shaped potato pancakes.
And she told me stories - Polish folk tales and fairy tales, stories from
the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible, stories from her childhood and
her daughter’s childhood, and when they ran out, she made up stories
about what my life would be like after the war. Racinska spent her
days trying to keep me happy. I loved her for it.
When the war ended in 1945, Irena dug up the list of children’s
names. Unfortunately, most of the children’s families were dead.
Some children went to live with relatives. Some decided to stay with
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their adopted families. Many went to Israel. About 400 or more
children had disappeared and have never been found.
I waited and waited for my parents to come get me. Racinska
told me that I could stay with her if I wanted. I loved her, but I wanted
my parents back. I was almost 10 when my aunt Rachela came to get
me. Rachela had lived in Krakow. I had only seen her once before the
war, and I had been too young to remember. She had been sent to
Auschwitz, a terrible camp where hundreds of thousands of people had
died. Miraculously, she had managed to survive. My parents, my
grandparents, and all my other relatives were dead. She and I were
the only ones of our family left alive.
After the war, Irena and her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler
divorced. She married Stefan Zgrzembski and had three children.
The first baby boy died several days after his birth. Her son Adam
grew up, got married, and had a daughter, but died in 1999 at the age
of 48. Her youngest was a daughter
named Janina. Their father died when the
children were still young, and Irena worked
hard to support her family. Almost no one
knew what she had done during the war.
Aunt Rachela and I decided to move
to America. It took us three years to get a
visa, the permission required to move to
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another country. Once in the U.S., I wrote letters twice a year to
Racinska, telling her about my life and sending her pictures and gifts.
She died in 1983. I never went back to
Poland.
In 1965 an group in Israel called Yad
Vashem honored Irena, naming her one of
the “Righteous Among the Nations” as a
non-Jewish person who had helped save
Jews during the Holocaust. The Polish
government, which was Communist at the
time, did not allow her to go to Israel for
the ceremony in which a tree was planted in her honor. Still, almost no
one knew what a hero she was.
In 2000, four American teenage girls in Uniontown, Kansas, were
writing a play for a history contest. They found mention of Irena
Sendler and researched her story. They wrote a play called “Life in a
Jar”. It turned out to be an amazing success. The newspapers and
television picked up the story.
I sat stunned as I watched the television program about the girls.
The face in the photograph on the screen, the
young Irena Sendler, brought memories flooding
back. I recognized her! She was the woman who
had taken me out of the ghetto. I watched as the
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four American girls visited my hero in her apartment in Warsaw. She
was still tiny. Her brown hair was now silver, but her eyes were just as
blue.
I couldn’t afford to fly to Poland, so I called her on the phone. “I
remember your face,” I said, tears running down my cheeks. “You
took me out of the ghetto. You saved my life. You saved my children’s
lives and my children’s children’s lives. Thank you. You are my hero.”
“A hero is someone doing extraordinary things.” Irena said.
“What I did was not extraordinary. It was the normal thing to do.” I
believe that is what makes her such a hero. She didn’t agree. “Every
child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret
messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my
existence on this earth, and not a title to glory. We who were rescuing
children are not some kind of heroes. That
term irritates me greatly. The opposite is
true – I continue to have qualms of
conscience that I did so little. I could have
done more. This regret will follow me to my
death.” The 2500 children she rescued would
disagree.
Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008, in
Warsaw, Poland. She was survived not only by her daughter and
granddaughter, but by the Jewish children she saved and their
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children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren. For this,
she will always be my hero.
I remember her every day. My whole family celebrates her life.
Every year when we celebrate the feast of Passover and remember
how our hero Moses helped the Jewish people escape the slavery of
Egypt, we also remember how my hero Irena Sendler helped the Jewish
children escape the slavery of the Nazis.
Little Irena Sendler, my hero. May she rest in peace.
Author’s Notes
To learn more about Irena Sendler, visit the following websites.
www.irenasendler.org
http://www1.yadvashem.org/righteous_new/sendlerova.html
All the quotes are Irena’s words, taken from books and websites.
Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but lost to Al Gore.
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Pictures taken without permission from internet.
Sorry.
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