Incredibly brave ‘mother’ of Warsaw’s Holocaust children

May 14, 2008

IRENA SENDLER, SOCIAL WORKER

15-2-1910 — 12-5-2008

IRENA Sendler, who is credited with having saved the lives of about 2500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II and was tortured by the Gestapo, has died. She was 98.

By 1942, the Germans had herded about 500,000 Polish Jews into an area of about one square kilometre to await transportation to extermination camps. Starvation and disease, especially typhoid, were endemic.

In December that year, Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker in the city who had links with Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews, took charge of its children’s department. Wearing nurses’ uniforms, she and a colleague, Irena Schultz, went into the ghetto with food, clothes and medicine, including a vaccine against typhoid. It soon became clear that many of the Jews would be sent to the Treblinka death camp, and Zegota decided to try to save as many children as possible.

Using the codename “Jolanta”, and wearing a Star of David armband to identify herself with the Jewish population, Sendler became part of an escape network: one baby was spirited away in a mechanic’s toolbox; some children were transported in coffins, suitcases and sacks; others escaped through the city’s sewer system. An ambulance driver who smuggled infants under stretchers in the back of his van kept his dog on the seat beside him, having trained the animal to bark to mask any cries from his hidden passengers.

In later life Sendler recalled the heartbreak of Jewish mothers having to part from their children: “We witnessed terrible scenes. Father agreed, but mother didn’t. We sometimes had to leave those unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I’d go back there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to the death camps.”

The children rescued by Sendler were given new identities and placed with convents, sympathetic families, orphanages and hospitals. Those who were old enough to talk were taught Christian prayers and how to make the sign of the Cross, so that their Jewish heritage would not be suspected.

Like the more celebrated Oskar Schindler, Sendler kept a list of the names of all the children she saved, in the hope that she could one day reunite them with their families.

On the night of October 20, 1943 her house was raided by the Gestapo, and her immediate thought was to get rid of the list. “I wanted to throw it out of the window but couldn’t, the house was surrounded by Germans. So I threw it to my colleague and went to the door. There were 11 soldiers. In two hours they almost tore the whole house apart. The roll of names was saved due to the great courage of my colleague, who hid it in her underwear.”

The Nazis took Sendler to the Pawiak prison, where she was tortured; although her legs and feet were broken, and her body left permanently scarred, she refused to betray her network of helpers or the children whom she had saved. Finally, she was sentenced to death.

She escaped thanks to Zegota, one of whose members bribed a guard to set her free. She immediately returned to her work using a new identity. Having retrieved her list of names, she buried it in a jar beneath an apple tree in a friend’s garden. In the end it provided a record of about 2500 names, and after the war she attempted to keep her promise to reunite the children with their families. Most of the parents, however, had been gassed at Treblinka.

Sendler was born Irena Krzyzanowska in Warsaw into a Catholic family. Her father was a physician who ran a hospital; a number of his patients were impoverished Jews. He died of typhus in 1917, but his example was of profound importance to his daughter, who later said: “I was taught that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not.”

After the war, she continued in her profession as a social worker and also became a director of vocational schools. In 1965, she became one of the first Righteous Gentiles to be honoured by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. At that time, Poland’s communist leaders would not allow her to travel to Israel, and she was unable to collect the award until 1983.

In 2003, she was awarded Poland’s highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle; and last year she was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, eventually won by Al Gore. A play about her wartime experiences, called Life in a Jar, was written in 2000 by a group of American schoolgirls, and was performed in the US, Poland and Canada. She was also the subject of a biography, Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler (the Polish book jacket is pictured in the background, left). Last year it was reported that her exploits in Warsaw were to be the subject of a film, starring Angelina Jolie.

In her latter years, Sendler was cared for in a Warsaw nursing home by Elzbieta Ficowska, who in July 1942, when six months old, had been smuggled out of the ghetto by Sendler in a carpenter’s workbox.

Sendler reflected: “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.”

Sendler’s first marriage to Mieczyslaw Sendler was dissolved; later she married Stefan Zgrzembski, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. One boy died in infancy, the other in 1999. Her daughter survives her.

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