Irene Sendler was the daughter of a doctor and was working in the Polish capital when the establishment of the ghetto horrified her. With great courage, she devised a ruse to gain entry and save children from certain death. Her task was doubly difficult: in addition to finding different ways to bypass security, she had to convince her parents to part with them. Sendler never sought recognition.
By Matias Bauso
They called her the female Oskar Schindler. Or the Angel of Warsaw. Irena Sendler (Irena Stanislawa Sendlerowa) saved around 2500 children from the Nazis. With her courageous and patient work she managed to rescue them from the Nazis. Irena managed to give a future to 2500 children who had no future. When asked why she had acted in this way, why she had risked her life, she answered naturally: “I was taught this at home. A person who needs help must be helped without looking at his religion or nationality.”
It was a silent job, for which never sought recognition, which for decades was buried under the oblivion and pettiness of the politics of her time. She did not care. She refused honours and went on with her life. She continued doing what she always did: what was right.
In October 1940, Nazi forces created the Warsaw ghetto. The area was equivalent to 2% of the total city of Warsaw. They did not mind cramming 30% of the population in there. They locked up the Polish Jews. They isolated them in inhumane conditionsThe ghetto population was then fed with other Jews deported from different destinations.
The Ghetto came to gather 400.000 people. That number decreased over the years. Deportations to the camps, hunger and disease took care of that. The number was reduced to 50.000. The Warsaw Ghetto was also the scene of the first major revolt against Nazism, of the first act of mass rebellion against the Third Reich and its men.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943. It was almost a month of unequal fighting. After an initial attack that surprised the Germans and forced them to retreat, a fierce response came. As the resistance fighters had attacked from deserted buildings, with snipers, the Nazis decided to set fire to each building. The ghetto burned with its inhabitants insideThousands died in the mass killings. 35.000 were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. It is estimated that only about 8.000 survived.
The numbers are overwhelming. There was little chance of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto. You could either die there or it served as a (hellish) intermediate station before certain death. Every life that could be stolen from the murderous system was a victory. Irena Sendler devotedly dedicated herself to achieving this. His daily task was to do the extraordinary, to achieve the impossible day after day.
There was not much space, nor energy, for rebellion. Every gesture, every act was worth twice as much. It was an affirmation of hope, it was a challenge to life, it was showing the monster its fallibility, its inability to cut off all hope.
As she stated, she learned at home that one should help the weak and needy. The price she paid was very high. Her father was a doctor. He died in the middle of an epidemic. He treated patients who because of their racial or religious origin were rejected by other doctors. Her sacrifice was recognized by the leaders of the Jewish community in her city who offered to pay for the education of Irena, Dr. Sendler's orphan. But she did not accept injustice. She was suspended for three years from Polish university because she protested against discriminatory measures by the authorities against Jewish students.
In the late 1930s, Irena worked as a nurse and in soup kitchens. After the Nazi invasion, the work in these soup kitchens increased. Not only did they feed more and more people, they got them shelter, clothing, medicine. Any Pole could receive the help that she and her companions provided. She was horrified when the ghetto was established. She could not understand how so many people who had done nothing wrong could be treated in this way.
Considering her profession as a nurse, He devised a ruse to gain entry into the Ghetto. Together with a friend of hers, she obtained passes. She used her charm and firmness to convince the Germans that the overcrowding would not only kill the Jews they had packed in there, but also those who were supposed to guard them. The Nazis believed that these diseases were their worst enemy, the only ones that could harm them. They let the two nurses in, and they quickly obtained passes for more.
Simultaneously, Irena Sendler joined Zegota, an underground resistance group financed by the Polish government in exile (in London) that aimed to help Jews. Its members were Poles who were angry at the daily abuses and who were fighting to recover their land.
The woman realized that her help was not enough. For most people, death was inevitable, just a matter of time. It occurred to him that he could at least save some children. She had to get them out of the ghetto so that they would have a chance to live. However, her idea was not well received at first. Neither inside nor outside. Her colleagues told her that it was madness, that she would alert the Nazis; Jewish mothers would not accept giving up their sons and daughters under any circumstances. They could not understand how they could be safer, more protected than with them. This added (understandable) extra work to Irena. deterrence of relatives. She often had to be raw and sincere to the point of being painfully honest so that they understood that death was only on the horizon. Often, when she returned to look for a family, she could no longer find them: the Nazis had put all of its members on a train bound for Auschwitz.
After a few weeks, mothers and grandmothers, with horror, They recognized that the only possibility was on the other side of the walls. Outside the boys would live in the homes of Catholic Poles, as their children, with new adulterated documentation to avoid Nazi persecution.
Irena Sendler took the first children out using a simple method. She put them in the ambulances and declared them seriously ill with typhus. But this method had two limitations. On the one hand, if the same excuse was always given (and if the patients transferred were only children), the German soldiers would become suspicious. On the other hand, the trickle of rescued people was too slow for the speed of the massacre.
Irena decided to take more risks. The escape methods of her little charges became more diverse. Any way that would ensure that the children would get out of the Ghetto was accepted. A baby of a few weeks old placed in a wooden box with holes to allow air to circulate, camouflaged among a load of construction materials; leaving small gaps in the fences and waiting for them in the middle of the night on the other side; making them walk among the workers who in the mornings went out en masse to work; or taking them out hidden in burlap bags, among loads of potatoes, among the garbage, under bales of grass or alfalfa, or under mountains of clothing stolen from the victims, in the sewers. Or in coffins.
The only thing that mattered was getting them to safety.
The danger was growing, but both the Jewish families and Irena and her companions accepted it.
Staying was worse.
The children ended up living with Polish families, in orphanages or in convents.
In almost two years, Irena created and directed a network that managed to save 2500 children. Give them a new life. But she knew that, regardless of age, whether a baby of weeks or a teenager, everyone had the right to live and the right to an identity. To protect that right, she devised a system to safeguard their real names, their origin. So that this new life would not mean forgetting who they really were. Not giving the perpetrator the right to erase the victims' past.
He wrote down the real name of the rescued child on a list. (and that of the parents, in cases where it was known) and next to it the new name, the one invented in the apocryphal documents and that of his new adoptive families. Then he would make a copy and bury two bottles or jars with the papers inside, in the ground of a neighbor's garden (there were two as a backup in case one was lost).
That was a double message. The search to preserve the origin. And also the hope that evil would not triumph, that it would be defeated, that those infernal days and years would end, and the children would be able to reunite with their parents.
In 1943, the Gestapo discovered this clandestine network facilitated by the timid-looking nurse. She was arrested and accused of having taken people out of the Ghetto. She denied the accusations. She was tortured, but did not give the names of the children or the families who took them in. She was sentenced to death.
The day she was to be taken to the gallows, an infiltrated member of Zegota in the official forces He helped her escapeThe next day, when the Nazis published the names of those executed publicly, they added Irena to the list.
After the war, Irena, who had spent her last years Two years as a refugee in a convent, her life was not much better. The communist regime did not treat her well. She was an opponent and wanted individual freedoms to return to Poland.
His story spread among those who had benefited from his courageous actions. In 1965, Israel named her Righteous Among the Nations and an honorary citizen of the country.
But unlike others who managed to save Jewish lives during Nazism, such as Raoul Wallenberg or Oskar Schindler, Irena Sendler's story was not widely publicized. The way in which the world became aware of her work was peculiar. In 1999, a group of students from Kansas wrote a theater piece recounting the case they had heard about by reading a short article in an old newspaper. From that small school work, the story began to spread and become known throughout the world.
With the fall of communism and her story becoming known, the world got to know Irena when she was already an old woman. In the new century she received many tributes, especially in Poland, her native land.
One of the boys she rescued said that Irena was her third mother and who was also the one who had found his second mother, after the Nazis took his biological mother away from him. “What do I think of her? What you can think and feel about someone to whom you owe your life,” he told the English newspaper. The Guardian, Michal Glowinski, a literature teacher who was one of the boys whose name was on those two glass jars she buried in that garden in Warsaw.
In 2007 she was belatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The lady is 97 years old. She listens, with some difficulty, sitting up. Her back is slightly hunched, her gaze serene, her expression mischievous. Someone with enthusiasm - perhaps too much for her standards - informs her that she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The lady smiles incredulously. She doesn't understand what purpose it can serve. With a grimace she seems to say that everything happened too long ago. And that she did what she had to do, that's all. They tell her, they call her, the female Schindler. She doesn't want to hear anything about it. She's not a fictional character in a movie. She had a real life. And she thinks it was better when nobody knew her.
Irena Sendler rejected the tributes. “I get tired of these things, I'm old now,” she said without false humility. And she added: “It bothers me when they call me a hero. I'll tell you more. It's the opposite: every day I reproach myself for not having done more for those who needed it.”
Irena Sendler died in 2008. She was 98 years old.