Irena Sendler (Sendlerova in Polish) saved the lives of 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto during the war. The children were from six months to 15 years old. Young children were given sleeping pills and taken out in a truck in boxes with holes for air passage. Older children were hidden in a bag and taken out in the same truck. It was not easy to persuade mothers to give up their children in the name of their salvation. Children were placed in monasteries and Polish families. It was very dangerous to shelter Jewish children - more than 2,000 Poles were executed by the Nazis for their mercy. Irena kept a card index - on thin pieces of paper she wrote down the names of the children, their parents and close relatives, as well as new, Polish names that were given to the children for their salvation and the addresses of the Polish families who gave them shelter for these children. All this data was placed in glass jars and buried in the garden of friend Irena Sendler. After the war, the recordings were given to the chairman of the central committee of Jews in Poland. Irena's information helped to track down children from the ghetto and find their relatives. But most of the children were left orphans and were taken to Israel, to orphanages.
Irena Sendler in 1942.
Warsaw ghetto.
In 1940, the Nazis established a ghetto in a part of Warsaw that historically had a high percentage of Jewish population. 113 thousand Poles were evicted from there, and 138 thousand Jews were settled in their place. By the end of the year, 440 thousand people (37% of the city’s population) lived in the ghetto on an area of 4.5%.
The maniac Hitler sentenced these people to death.
Daily food “standards” were calculated for the death of people from hunger and amounted to 184 kcal (2 kg of bread per month) per person in 1941. People fell and died in the streets. But the Nazis were afraid of epidemics that could arise among weakened people and then spread throughout the occupied territory. This made it possible for employees of the Warsaw Health Department, among whom was Irena Sendler, to frequently visit the ghetto for sanitary treatment.
The photo shows the Warsaw Ghetto. May 1941.
Irena Sendlerova.
Irena inspired great trust among the ghetto residents, otherwise mothers would not have entrusted their babies to this woman. This little woman had to be present at hundreds of personal tragedies, when mothers gave her their children, realizing that they would never see them again. Although, according to the recollections of Irena herself, there were cases when the father agreed, but the mother was not ready to give up the most precious thing in the world. And tomorrow the whole family was sent to the Treblinka concentration camp to be exterminated.
Irena was born on February 15, 1910 in the family of a doctor. Her father, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, died in 1917 while saving people suffering from typhus. Irena often recalled the words of her father spoken to her shortly before his death: “If you see someone drowning, you need to rush into the water to save, even if you don’t know how to swim.”
Young Irena.
Irena understood that you couldn’t do much alone. According to her calculations, at least 12 people living outside the ghetto had to work to save one child: drivers, nurses, city government employees and, finally, foster families. The child first had to be somehow removed from the carefully guarded territory of the ghetto, then he had to make fake documents proving his identity, he needed food cards and he had to find people willing to risk their lives and the lives of their relatives and friends to save someone else’s child.
Žegota (Żegota) .
Irena was the soul and heart of her group. She turned out to be a talented organizer and performer. But without the help of the “big world” she would not have been able to save so many children from certain death. In September 1942, the Provisional Committee for Assistance to Jews was created in Poland, later, for secret purposes, renamed Žegota (a name taken from the work of Adam Mickiewicz). Żegota was organized by two women: the writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and the art critic Wanda Krahelska-Filippowicz. Interethnic relations in pre-war Poland were often tense. In the thirties, following the example of Hitler's Germany, the rights of the Jewish population were significantly limited. For example, universities had special benches at the end of classrooms intended exclusively for Jews. By the way, Irena Sendlerova strongly protested against such discrimination and she was suspended from classes at the university for 3 years. Poles and Jews lived nearby, but professing different religions, having different cultures and mentalities, they were wary and often hostile towards each other. However, the Polish intelligentsia and the Catholic Church, overcoming centuries of hostility, began to do everything in their power to save the Jews.
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka.
Wanda Krahelskaya-Filipovich.
Manifesto by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka.
“In the Warsaw ghetto, separated by a wall from the world, several hundred thousand death row prisoners await their death. They have no hope of salvation. Nobody comes to them with help. The number of murdered Jews has exceeded a million, and this figure is increasing every day. Everyone dies. Rich and poor, old people, women, men, youth, infants... They are guilty only of being born Jews, condemned by Hitler to extermination. The world looks at these atrocities, the most terrible of all that history has known, and remains silent... It is no longer possible to tolerate. Anyone who remains silent in the face of these murders himself becomes an accomplice of the murderers. He who does not condemn allows. Therefore, let us raise our voices, Catholic Poles! Our feelings towards Jews will not change. We still consider them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we are aware that they hate us more than the Germans, blaming us for their misfortune. Why, on what basis - this remains a mystery of the Jewish soul, this is confirmed by constant facts. Awareness of these feelings does not relieve us of the obligation to condemn the crimes... In the stubborn silence of the international Jewish community, in the vomit of German propaganda, which seeks to shift the blame for the massacre of Jews onto the Lithuanians and Poles, we feel an action hostile to us.”
A child died right on the street.
Activities of Zhegota.
Irena Sendlerova had the underground pseudonym “Iolanta.” Her group had to come up with more and more new ways to save children. The children were hidden in bags and baskets with garbage (this is how Irena took out her six-month-old adopted daughter) and in bales with bloody bandages, taken to city landfills. Older children were taken out through sewers. One rescued boy recalled how, after the sentry turned the corner, he had to run headlong to the hatch that opened from below and immediately closed above his head.
The unfortunate people were driven to extermination.
Zhegota’s intense work required considerable funds, including bribing Nazi officials and ransoming arrested underground members. Money came from the Delegation, the representative office of the Polish government in exile (the "London" government), from the Bund and from the Jewish National Committee. In total, Zhegota managed to save up to 60 thousand people, including at least 28 thousand in Warsaw. After the complete destruction of the ghetto, in May 1943, up to 4 thousand people were hiding simultaneously in safe houses in Warsaw.
The underground suffered heavy losses. About 700 members of Žegota were shot. In 1943, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, but she survived and even took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
Arrest of Irena Sendler.
On October 20, 1943, Irena Sendler was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. What does anonymous denunciation mean? The informer was not interested in the material reward for extraditing the underground fighter, which was quite significant at that time of famine. This vile soul only needed a result - to send a brave woman to death. Irena endured all the torture - her arms and legs were broken, but she did not betray anyone. The Gestapo had no idea that this little woman (less than 1m 50cm tall) was a key link in saving Jewish children. In the end, Irena, sentenced to death, was ransomed. The guard took her outside and told her to run. Members of Žegota immediately picked up Irena and took her to a safe house. The next day she found her name in the list of executed Polish patriots published by the occupiers.
Problems with the new authorities.
Irena Sendler, who was exclusively involved in rescuing children in the underground, did not take part in the outbreak of the civil war, but still she, a pregnant woman, was actively interrogated by the special services, which ended in premature birth and the death of her little son, who did not live even two weeks. Sandler faced the threat of a death sentence due to the fact that her activities were financed by the “London” government. When Irena’s daughter grew up and wanted to go to college, she was not accepted because of Sendler’s activities during the war.
In 1965, the Israeli National Memorial of Catastrophe and Heroism awarded Irena Sendler its highest honor - the title of Righteous Among the Nations and invited her to Israel. But the communist government did not let her out of the country. And in general, in Poland they learned about Irena’s feat only in 2000, when 4 American schoolgirls, who began researching the life of Irena Sandler at the suggestion of a history teacher, wrote a play about her - “Life in a Bank”, and then, with the help of the international press, made it a feat known throughout the world.
Irena Sendler's rescued children have grown up.
Irena became the national heroine of Poland. In 2003, she received the country's highest award - the Order of the White Eagle. In 2006, the President of Poland and the Prime Minister of Israel jointly submitted her candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize. But the Nobel Committee made a shameful decision to award the prize to US Vice President A. Gore for a series of lectures on global warming, for which he received a lot of money. And the modest heroine huddled with her family in a one-room apartment. This once again demonstrates that big awards, as a rule, do not go to those who deserve them.
Still from the film.
In 2009 (a year after her death), the film “The Braveheart of Irena Sendler” was released. It's worth watching, although it requires good nerves.
She always smiled.
I shared with you the information that I “dug up” and systematized. At the same time, he is not at all impoverished and is ready to share further, at least twice a week. If you find errors or inaccuracies in the article, please let us know. My e-mail address: [email protected]. I will be very grateful.
In the fall of 2008, the film “Irena Sendler’s Braveheart” was shown in the United States. He talked about a woman who died quietly in May of the same year in Warsaw at the age of 99. Most viewers could not hold back their tears while watching the film, Irena Sendler’s story was so touching and tragic.
Childhood
Irena Krzyzhanovskaya was born into the family of a doctor who was a member of the teaching staff, who was in charge of a hospital and often provided medical care to poor Jews who were unable to pay for treatment. Even before the birth of his daughter, he was an active participant in anti-government protests. When Irena was 7 years old, her father died of typhus, having become infected from patients. The Jewish community, which highly valued the merits of Dr. Krzyzanowski, decided to help his family by offering to pay for Irena’s education until she came of age - 18 years old. The girl’s mother refused, because she knew how hard life was for many of her husband’s former patients, but she told her daughter about it. Thus, gratitude and love settled in Irena’s heart forever, which later gave life to thousands of children.
At the university, the girl joined the Polish Socialist Party because she wanted to continue her father’s work.
In 1932, Irena married Mieczysław Sendler, but the marriage did not last long, although they did not formalize a divorce.
Feat
When the Holocaust began in Poland, Irena Sendler was an employee of the Warsaw Health Department. Along with this, she was a member of the Polish underground organization “Zhegota”, which was involved in providing assistance to Jews.
Due to her professional activities, the young woman regularly visited the Warsaw Ghetto and provided assistance to sick children. Using this cover, Irena Sendler and other members of Žegota rescued 2,500 Jewish children, who were then transferred to monasteries, private families and orphanages.
According to the recollections of the participants in those events, the babies were placed in boxes with holes, after being given sleeping pills, and then taken away from the ghetto in cars in which disinfectants were delivered. As for older children, they were carried out in sacks and baskets, through the basements of houses and buildings adjacent to the area designated for Jewish residence.
Arrest
Irena Sendler also made sure that after the war the rescued children could find their parents. She wrote down their names on pieces of paper and put them in a glass jar, which she buried in a friend's garden.
In 1943, Irena Sendler was arrested based on an anonymous denunciation. The young woman was tortured, trying to find out who from her circle led the Resistance movement or was simply part of its underground organization. At the same time, Irena was shown a thick folder with denunciations and messages about her activities, signed by people she knew well. The goal of the Nazis was to find out the names of other participants in the child rescue operations and the places where the children were hidden. Despite the beatings, the fragile Irena did not betray her comrades and did not tell the Gestapo where the lists with the names of little Jews were, since in this case they would have been sent to death.
"Execution" and escape
Having failed to achieve a result, the Nazis sentenced Irena to death. Fortunately, Sendler remained alive - members of the anti-fascist resistance in Poland saved her by bribing her guards. They, in turn, reported to the command that the execution had taken place, so they were not looking for Irena.
According to the woman’s recollections, before the execution she was called in for a final interrogation. The soldier accompanying her did not take Irena to the Gestapo building, but pushed her into an alley and ordered her to run. There were Polish underground fighters there who took her to a safe place. “As a souvenir” of her stay in Nazi dungeons, Irene was left with poor health, and she spent the end of her life in a wheelchair.
Completing the mission
Irene Sendler had to hide until the very end of the war. After the liberation of Poland, she was able to transfer data on the rescued children to Adolf Berman, who was chairman of the Central Committee of the Jews of Poland from 1947 to 1949. Thanks to a long search, it was possible to reunite families who were victims of the Holocaust. As for the orphaned children, after long ordeals they were eventually transported to Israel.
Life in the post-war years
It would seem that with the advent of peace in Europe, Irena Sendler’s brave heart could calm down, and she would finally live a calm family life. However, fate decided to deal her another blow: the state security authorities of the People's Republic of Poland found out about her connections with the Regional Army and began to persecute her. In 1949, during a harsh interrogation, a pregnant Irena gave birth prematurely to a child who died a few days later.
Belated recognition
Although over time the Polish authorities left Irena Sendler alone, she felt the hostility of the authorities towards her person until the fall of the communist regime. So, when in 1965 Israel's Yad Vashem decided to award Irena Sendler the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations, she was not allowed to visit the country in which the boys and girls she had once saved lived, who had already become adults and considered her their second. mother.
Only in 1983 did the Polish authorities lift the ban on her traveling abroad, and Irena Sendler was able to visit Israel, where she planted her tree on the memory lane.
And even after this, few people in the world knew that in a modest apartment in Warsaw lived an old woman who had accomplished a feat that deserved all the highest awards and honors. However, fate wished that Irena Sendler would live to see the day when her story would be learned in different parts of the world.
Moreover, everything happened by pure chance in 1999, and the initiators were again children - four schoolgirls from the American town of Uniontown. They were preparing a report for the History Day project, and the teacher showed them a newspaper article from five years ago entitled “The Other Schindler.” The interested girls began to look for information about Irena Sendler and discovered that she was alive. With the help of family and teachers, they wrote the play “Life in a Jar,” which was staged in various theaters in the USA, Canada, and later in Poland. The girls even came to Warsaw, where they saw their idol. Their friendship with Irena Sendler lasted several years, during which they visited Mother several times
Awards
The merits of Irena Sendler were very belatedly recognized by the Polish government, which awarded her the Order of the White Eagle in 2003. Before Sendler, European monarchs, including Peter the Great, famous military leaders and the Pope, became recipients of this highest award. The order was restored in Poland only in 1992, and among those awarded over the past 24 years, hardly anyone was as worthy of it as Mrs. Sendler.
In addition, a year before Irena’s death, the Prime Minister of Israel proposed to the Nobel Committee to award her the Peace Prize. Sendler's award did not take place because the committee at that time did not change the rules requiring the award to be given for actions that were committed within the last two years.
As one Polish journalist wrote, “the prize has been disgraced.” Those who presented it bypassed the man who deserved it more than anyone else to honor Al Gore, who gave a presentation on the problems of global warming.
And back in 2007, Mrs. Irene was awarded the Order of the Smile medal. As always in Irena’s life, children intervened: she was presented as a contender for the award by the boy Szymon Plocennik from Zielona Góra. The Order of the Smile was established in Poland in 1968 and is awarded to people who bring joy to children. In 1979, the award was given international status, and since then applicants for its receipt have been selected by a commission consisting of representatives of 24 countries.
Film "Braveheart of Irena Sendler"
The film, which has already been mentioned, was filmed in Latvia. When American journalists told Irena that they were going to make a film about her life during the war, she said that she agreed. At the same time, the woman asked that the picture be truthful and show the Americans what that war really was like, what the Warsaw ghetto looked like and what happened there. The role of Irena Sendler in the film was played by New Zealand actress Anna Paquin, who in 1994 was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. According to the audience, the film turned out to be very poignant and truthful. Irena Sendler’s daughter, Yanina, also liked the picture, who was initially against the idea of creating a cinematic version of her mother’s biography.
Resistance movement in Poland
When talking about Sendler’s feat, it should be understood that the courageous woman could not act alone. According to the recollections of Mrs. Irena herself, to save one child she needed the help of at least 12 people: drivers, medical workers, security guards, shelter workers, officials who issued forged documents, etc. The role of Polish nuns was completely special. It is known that 500 children saved by Irena Sendler were able to survive only thanks to their help. At the same time, many sisters paid for their Christian humanism, shown in relation to children of other religions, with their lives and even became martyrs. So, in 1944, at a Warsaw cemetery, the Nazis doused a group of nuns who helped Jews with gasoline and burned them alive.
No less touching is the story of how Wojciech Zukawski and Alexander Zelverowicz hid 40 children from the ghetto in the zoo, where they had to hide among the enclosures with animals.
Now you know who Irena Sendler was, the film about whom is definitely worth watching, especially since it is available in Russian translation.
The world has not become immoral just now - it has always been like this... The reward is not always given to the one who deserves it more than others.
On May 12, 2008, a woman named Irena Sendler died at the age of 98, although by birth, being Polish, she bore the name Irena Sendlerova.
Irena was born on February 15, 1910 in the city of Warsaw, in the family of a doctor, but grew up in the city of Otwock, where her father ran a clinic. From childhood, Irena absorbed his position towards people, including Jews, whose position in Poland before the war was not the best. Her father died in 1917 of typhus, contracted from Jewish patients he treated because other doctors had abandoned them. After his death, the Jewish community, whose members were often treated by Irena's father, offered financial assistance to the needy family for Irena's education. After finishing school, Irena Sendler entered the University of Warsaw, where she openly declared her negative attitude towards the so-called “bench ghetto” (Ghetto benches) - the official method of segregation practiced in all Polish educational institutions, starting with the Lviv Polytechnic in 1935. This measure consisted of a separate bench at the end of the classroom into which students of Jewish descent were seated. As a sign of protest, Jewish students and non-Jewish opponents of similar laws listened to lectures while standing. After her Jewish friend was beaten by Polish nationalists, Irena crossed out the stamp on her student card indicating her non-Jewish origin. For this she was suspended from studying at the University of Warsaw for a year. All these facts indicate that by the time the Nazi regime was established in Poland, Irena Sendler was already an accomplished young woman with her own clear political and social convictions.
Therefore, at the beginning of the occupation, she began to help Jews avoid deportation to the ghetto. Irena, with her group of like-minded people, produced more than 3,000 fake documents to help Jewish families and their children. In the process of this activity, they joined the underground resistance group Żegota, the so-called Council for Aid to Jews ( Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Zydom) and in 1942 this resistance group invited her to carry out an operation in the Warsaw ghetto, during which she saved more people than the legendary Oskar Schindler.
As you know, the Warsaw ghetto was one of the hallmarks of Nazi anti-Semitism: in 1940, in one of the central blocks of Warsaw, on an area of 4 kilometers, about 400,000 Jews were gathered (about 30% of the city’s population were housed in an area of 2.4% of its area, At the same time, the living density was, on average, 9 people per room). All these people remained there until the deportation in 1942, which began during the Grossaktion Warschau operation, which lasted from July 23 to September 21, 1942. From the ghetto, people were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where about 300,000 people were killed. The operation was carried out under the direct leadership of the head of the Warsaw district, SS Oberführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg. But even while awaiting deportation, there was an extremely high mortality rate in the ghetto, since in addition to the atrocities committed by the SS, the inhabitants of the ghetto were given an insignificant ration, consisting of only 253 calories of nutritional value (2 kilograms of bread for a month), against 669 for the Poles and 2612 for the Germans . In addition, typhus was raging in the ghetto, whose epidemic at some point began to threaten the Germans, and for this reason they allowed social workers into the ghetto to distribute medicines and vaccinate residents. One of these workers was Irena Sendler. During her visits to the ghetto, she began to remove children from there using all possible means. She worked in a children's hotel of the Municipal Social Service and the only legal way was to take out sick and weak children in a medical van; she and the members of her group took out the rest under the threat of their own exposure and death. Children were secretly taken out in the beds of a social service medical van, taken out through underground communications, taken out on carts, covered with bales and clothes. Young children were given sedatives to make them sleepy and transported away in crates and boxes, passed off as cargo. The truck driver specially got and trained the dog so that it would bark, drowning out the rustling sounds and cries of the babies that they could make if they accidentally woke up. She also used the abandoned courthouse, located on the border of the ghetto, as one of her escape routes. At the same time, before Irena began to lead children out of the ghetto, she arranged an escape for several children. IN THE GHETTO: the Germans began arresting orphans on the streets of Warsaw and for several children, who turned out to be Jewish boys, since they did not pass the “removal of pants” test, she organized an escape from the Germans and led them into the ghetto, through a hole in the wall.
Irena Sendler herself later recalled what a terrible choice she had to face with the children’s parents - to separate, most likely forever, without the slightest guarantee of salvation, because any help to the inhabitants of the ghetto would result in inevitable execution. Irena organized a chain of assistants, consisting of 24 women and one man, who helped her in rescuing the children and furthering the cover operation. Children were placed in Polish families, orphanages and Catholic monasteries. Documents and baptismal certificates were forged, priests taught children to be baptized so as not to betray their origin. In addition, Irena Sendler compiled a card index of rescued children, with the intention of uniting them with their parents after the war. The main part of the rescue operation took place in the 3 summer months of 1942, at the time of the punitive deportation of Jews from the ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. During the entire operation, 2,500 children were saved, but this includes not only those taken from the ghetto, but also children whose children Irena and her group hid even before the operation began in the ghetto, transporting them from place to place.
Irena Sendler was arrested on October 20, 1943 and placed in Pawiak prison. During the arrest, by a lucky coincidence, Irena was able to give the lists of rescued children that she kept at home to her friend, who escaped arrest and hid them under her clothes. In the dungeons, Irena was subjected to a series of brutal interrogations, during which the Gestapo tried to enter the Zhegot underground, but despite the fact that her legs and arms were broken under torture, Irena did not betray anyone from the underground, and when it became clear that interrogation and It was useless to torture her; she was sentenced to death. But the underground did not abandon Irena, and by bribing the guards, they arranged for her to escape while being transported to the place of execution, so that according to the lists she was listed as executed and for the remaining time until the end of the war, she lived under forged documents and under a false name. But she was already careful not to keep the lists of rescued children at home, and kept them in a bottle buried in the yard. She dug up this bottle in January 1945, when Poland was liberated, and gave it to the Zigot council so that they could try to reunite Jewish families. But as it turned out, most of the parents of the rescued children died in the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.
After the war, Irena Sendler got married, gave birth to two children and continued her work as a social worker, despite the fact that after suffering torture at the Gestapo, movement was difficult for her. Due to the fact that during the war Irena collaborated with the Home Army and the Polish government in exile “Delegature”, which financed the Žegota council, she was prohibited from leaving the country until 1983, when she was allowed to visit Jerusalem, where the National Memorial Disaster and Heroism "Yad Vashem" a tree was planted in her honor as Righteous among the Nations. This status was assigned to her in absentia back in 1965.
The story of Irena Sendler became known throughout the world thanks to the efforts of four Kansas schoolgirls: 9th graders Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Cambers, Jessica Shelton and 11th grader Sabrina Coons, who in 1999 took on school work that their teacher suggested to them - to dig a little more information from a short article from 1994 in News and World Report that read, “Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-43.” The teacher believed that the reporter was mistaken because he had never heard of such a person as Irena Sendler, and suggested that the students conduct more detailed research. After this, the girls, believing that Irena had died long ago, began research, but could only find one note about this person on the Internet (now there are more than 300,000). But nevertheless, they did not abandon their work, but continued their search and unexpectedly learned that a man named Irena Sendler lived in a small apartment in the center of Warsaw. According to the collected material, the girls wrote the play “Life in a Jar,” which was performed more than 250 times in the USA, Canada and Poland. The girls visited Irena Sendler in Warsaw several times, and the last time was on May 3, 2008, 9 days before her death.
As Megan Stewart described her first meeting with this woman: “We ran into the room and rushed to hug this woman. She just took us by the hands and said that she would like to hear about our lives. Cambers admiringly told Sandler, “We adore you! Your heroic deed is an example for us! You are our hero! and this tiny old woman in a wheelchair, less than one and a half meters tall, answered: “A hero is someone who performs outstanding deeds. And there is nothing outstanding in what I did. This is a normal thing that had to be done."
In 2003, Pope John Paul II sent Irena Sendler a letter of gratitude for her contribution to saving lives during the Second World War, and on October 10, 2003, she was awarded the highest Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle.
In 2007, Irina Sendler was nominated by Poland and Israel for the Nobel Peace Prize. But she was not chosen because members of the Nobel Committee decided to award the prize to US Vice President Al Gore for his film on global warming, with the interpretation: “for his efforts to collect and widely disseminate as much knowledge as possible about climate change caused by human activities.” , and laying the groundwork for countermeasures against such changes.”
Used materials:
ZhZL: Irena Sendler, 9.4 out of 10 based on 37 ratings“Every child saved with my help is not a basis for glory, but a justification for my existence on earth.”
Irena Sendler
“... the fifth - to those who will make a significant contribution to the unity of peoples, the abolition of slavery, the reduction in the size of existing armies and the promotion of a peace agreement.
...My special wish is that the awarding of prizes should not be influenced by the nationality of the candidate, so that the most deserving ones will receive the prize, regardless of whether they are Scandinavian or not.
Paris, November 27, 1895."
Look at this woman - and remember her forever! The world has not become immoral just now - it has always been like this... The reward is not always given to the one who deserves it more than others.
3 years ago, at the age of 98, a woman named Irena Sandler died. During World War II, Irina received permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumber/welder. She had "ulterior motives" for this.
Being German, she knew about the Nazi plans for the Jews. She began carrying small children out of the ghetto in the bottom of her tool bag, and in the back of her truck she had a bag for older children. There she also drove a dog, which she trained to bark when the German guards let the car in and out through the ghetto gates. The soldiers, naturally, did not want to mess with the dog, and its barking covered up the sounds that the children could make. During this activity, Irina managed to take 2,500 children out of the ghetto and thereby save. She recalled: “I witnessed terrible scenes when, for example, the father agreed to part with the child, but the mother did not. The next day it often turned out that this family had already been sent to a concentration camp.”
She was caught; the Nazis broke her legs and arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she carried out, and she kept the lists in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to find all possible surviving parents and reunite families. But most of them ended their lives in gas chambers. The children she helped were placed in orphanages or adopted.
The world generally knew little about Irena Sendler (Krzyzanowska) until 1999, when several teenage girls from Kansas in the USA, Liz Cumbers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood discovered her story.
These students from Uniontown Rural High School were looking for a theme for the National History Day Project. Their teacher, Norman Conrad, gave them a piece to read called "The Other Schindler" about Irena Sendler from the 1994 US news and world report. And the girls decided to research her life. An Internet search turned up only one website that mentioned Irina Sendler (there are now over 300,000). With the help of their teacher, they began to reconstruct the story of this forgotten hero of the Holocaust. The girls thought that Irena Sendler had died and were looking for where she was buried. To their surprise and delight, they discovered that she was alive and living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw. They wrote a play about her called Life in a Jar, which has since been performed more than 200 times in the US, Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they visited Irina for the first time in Warsaw and through the international press made Irina's story known to the world. Since then they have visited Irina in Warsaw four more times. The last time was May 3, 2008, 9 days before her death.
The life of Irina Sendler was also the subject of the biography “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irina Sendler” by Anna Miskovskaya. In April 2009, the television film “Irena Sendler’s Braveheart,” filmed in the fall of 2008 in Latvia, was released on American television screens.
The story of the Mother of the Children of the Holocaust is described in more detail in the articles by Yarover El P and Alexey Polikovsky .
..In the ghetto, Irena Sendler wore an icon that said “I believe in God.” With this icon she ended up in the Gestapo. Irene Sendler's arms and legs were broken by the Gestapo. The Germans wanted to know how Žegota worked and who was behind it. This, by the way, is what any government officials who are obsessed with their power want to know. They cannot understand that no one is behind people, that people act of their own free will, at their own free discretion. I do not compare anyone with anyone, I do not, in any way, compare the Nazi power in Poland with anyone. I am only talking about some mental traits that are characteristic of some people in similar social positions. When I wrote about the shareholders who went on hunger strike in Domodedovo, one government representative convinced me with heat and ardor that there was someone behind the hunger strikers. The fact that people could fight for their rights themselves seemed impossible to him.
..In 2006, when Irena Sendler was 96 years old, the Polish government and the Israeli government nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. In connection with her nomination for the prize, newspapers wrote about her for the first time that year. It was then that Irena Sendler and her story became known to many people. I read several newspaper publications in which she was written about as a laureate even before the award was awarded. But the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore for his lecture on energy conservation.
Of course, it is surprising that when choosing between Irena Sendler and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee chose Gore. It seems to me that after this the Nobel Peace Prize can no longer be awarded. This is a dummy that has no meaning, but only money. The prize has been disgraced. It is even more surprising to me that Al Gore, a respectable man living in a big house, not needing anything, belonging, as they say, to the powers that be, accepted the prize. The rich became even richer, the well-fed became even more well-fed, the world nomenklatura divided another piece among themselves, and the little quiet woman, as she lived in her one-room apartment in Warsaw, remained to live there.
I knew about Irena Sendler for a long time. I read about her in various sources. And every time I read about her, I told myself that I needed to write about her, but every time I put it off. Because I felt the inconsistency of this whole story with the arsenal of words at my disposal. I'm not sure I can put it into words. About a young woman who went to the ghetto day after day, about a driver, about a dog, about a glass jar buried in the garden. Before certain topics and events, the human tongue - at least my tongue - swoons.
A. Polikovsky
A note specifically for readers who do not like Jews (no matter for what reason, it’s an everyday matter), who, reading that Irina Sendler saved Jewish children, will say, well, Jewish children need to be saved, but others don’t? (I encountered such an aberration of perception in one of the readers). So, Irina Sandler saved the children of the Warsaw ghetto without asking whether they were Jews or not. Surely she saved and placed in orphanages many other children who could have come across to her on the streets and in the bombed-out houses of Warsaw. But in order to save other children, there was no need to hide them “in boxes of carpenter’s tools,” and there was no threat of execution for their salvation. Therefore, she and her assistants are honored precisely for saving the children of the Warsaw ghetto, whom the Nazis doomed to destruction simply because they were the children of Jews.
And Al Gore, as you know, received the Nobel Prize in 2007, and for this: “for his efforts to collect and widely disseminate the maximum amount of knowledge about climate change caused by human activity, and to lay the foundation for measures to counter such changes.”
Yarover El P
P.S. 66 years have passed since the end of World War II in Europe. This publication is like a chain of memory - the memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, ten million Christians and 1900 Catholic priests who were killed, shot, raped, burned, starved and humiliated.
Content:
The leadership track is often very crowded. But not everyone is meant to be a leader. There is always room for “quiet” service. And there you can meet the true heroes of the faith. Heroism can be different, including spontaneous, stupid, and unjustified... But there can be true, conscious, pleasing to God! As a rule, such heroism is not recognized during the lifetime of the person who demonstrates it. True heroism does not trumpet itself, does not want to attract attention. And only over time do people appreciate
the nobility and courage of souls who risk to save their neighbors.
The wise Solomon calls: “Save those taken to death, and will you really refuse those doomed to be killed?”
Of the 6 million Jews tortured by the Nazis during World War II, about one and a half million were children. But some, albeit a very small part of adults and children, managed to escape thanks to the courage and dedication of people who did not give up on those doomed to be killed.
On May 12, 2008, at the age of 98, a woman namedIrena Sandler. Then many publications wrote about it: The Times, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times. During the war, she saved more than two and a half thousand Jewishchildren, much more than the famous Oskar Schindler. Amazing is the faith that has found refuge inone small fragile female soul.
As BBC Warsaw correspondent Adam Easton reports, Irena Sandler was categorically against her life being called “heroic.” She said that she had done too little and that was why her conscience was tormenting her.
Who was Irena Sendler? Irena Kzhizhanovskaya (married Sendler) was born on 15February 1910in the family of the doctor Stanislav Kzhizhanovskyin the city of Otwock near Warsaw. Her father was a doctor and the head of a hospital. He treated the poor for free. Then the family moved to the town of Tarchin. From early childhood, parents instilled in their daughter the idea that people are divided into good and bad, regardless of race, nationality or even religion. And the girl turned out to be a good student. The Krzyzanowskis themselves were Christians. When Irena was seven years old, her father passed away into eternity.He died of typhus in 1917, contracted from patients his colleagues avoided treating.Later, Irena often recalled her father’s parting words, spoken shortly before his death: “If you see someone drowning, you need to rush into the water to save, even if you don’t know how to swim.”
The girl was left alone with her mother. Some time later, representatives of the local Jewish community came to their house. People were very grateful to Irena’s father for free medical care and decided to somehow help his family, which was left without a breadwinner. They offered to pay for the girl's education until she turned eighteen. The mother, who knew firsthand about the poverty that reigned among the Jews at that time, refused the generous offer, but did not fail to inform her daughter about it. This made an indelible impression on Irena.
In 1920, mother and daughter left for Warsaw, where Irena’s mother made paper flowers and embroidered napkins. This barely saves them from poverty.Prejudice against Jews was widespread in pre-war Poland. But many Poles opposed these prejudices. One of the most courageous was Irena Sendler.In the lecture halls of the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish language and literature, she and her associates deliberately sat on benches “for Jews.”(In the last rows of university classrooms in Poland, in the 1930s, special benches were installed for Jewish students, the so-called “ghetto łakowie” - “bench ghetto.” When nationalist thugs beat up Irena’s Jewish friend, she crossed out the stamp on her student card that allowed her to sit in the "Aryan" seats. For this, she was suspended from school for three years. This was Irena Sendler by the time the Germans invaded Poland. She always acted on the call of her heart.
Irena Sendler was thirty years old when Nazi Germany occupied Poland. Under the Nazi occupation, the Jews of Warsaw and small towns were herded like a herd of cattle into an urban ghetto: four square kilometers for approximatelyfive hundred thousand Jews, children and adults. Their living conditions were monstrous.
Irena Sendler got a job in the social security department of the capital's municipality and went to the Warsaw ghetto. She secretly brought food, medicine, and clothes to its inhabitants. Soon the Germans issued a ban on non-Jews visiting the ghetto. Then she started going there as a sanitation worker.
Since 1942, the Polish underground Organization for the Relief of Jews - "Zhegota" assisted Irena Sendler in a large-scale rescue campaign for Jewish children. Irena acted under the pseudonym “Iolanta”. She knew people in the ghetto - this served as a good basis for the success of the action.
In the ghetto, Irena Sendler walked from house to house, basement, barracks and looked for families with children everywhere.
Since March 1943, overcrowded trains left the Warsaw ghetto every day for the gas chambers of the Treblinka concentration camp. Three hundred thousand people were killed there in five months.But not everyone waited for transportation; hunger killed before. Even before the deportation to the Treblinka concentration camp began, death in the ghetto had become an everyday occurrence - from poverty and half-starvation (the monthly portion of bread was two kilograms).The liquidation of the ghetto continued for a whole year. Only teenagers and young people working in military factories were left in Warsaw. To exterminate the Jews, the Nazis had two reliable comrades - typhus and hunger.
Every morning Irena saw Jewish children asking for a piece of bread on the street. In the evening (when she returned home) these children were already lying dead, covered with paper.“It was real hell - hundreds of people died right on the streets...” Irena realized that children must be saved at any cost. The Nazis feared epidemics and allowed medical workers from the Warsaw Health Department to contact Jews. They had access to the heavily guarded ghetto to distribute the medicine. In the ghetto, Irena wore the Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jews.This “legal” loophole allowed her to save many Jews. Irena organized the secret transportation of children - aged from several months to fifteen years - from the Warsaw ghetto to freedom.
Irena used the Nazis' fear of the epidemic and found four roads leading children out of hell.Sandler did not act alone. In all the stories about her activities in the ghetto, other people are also mentioned. The driver of the truck in the back of which the children were taken out is known. The driver had a dog and he took it into the cab with him. As soon as he saw the Germans, he mercilessly pressed the dog’s paw, and the poor thing began to bark pitifully. The barking should have drowned out the crying if it had come from the back at that moment. Dogs learn quickly, and soon she was already barking at the first movement of her owner's leg. This dog also took part in rescuing children... There was not only a truck driver and not only a dog with a wet nose and shiny, hungry eyes.Volunteer nurses gave the babies a small dose of sleeping pills and took them to the city along with the corpses. There was also the famous tram number 4, the “tram of life” as it was also called, which ran throughout Warsaw and made stops in the ghetto. The nurses hid the babies in cardboard boxes under his seats and shielded him with their bodies. Children were also taken out of the ghetto in garbage bags and in bales of garbage and bloody bandages destined for city garbage dumps. That's exactly how Irena took her out of the ghetto in a trash basket.in July 1942 his adopted daughter Elzbetta Ficowska. She was not even six months old then.The girl's parents were killed by the Nazis. Subsequently, the rescued child had to change his name and family. “I wouldn’t have survived without Sandler,” says the former girl, who is now in her sixties and only learned the truth at age 17. “The biggest trauma for me was the realization that the woman I had loved as a mother all my life was not really a mother.” Elzbetta runs the Holocaust Children's Association. Having learned the truth about her fate at a young age, she never stopped dealing with the consequences of those terrible events. Many learned that they were born Jews only at the age of 40-50, and this could not but lead to a reassessment of life values. Elzhbetta provided moral support to such people. She then courted Irena Sendler for many years, whom she rightfully considered her third mother.
Babies were also carried out through sewers. Once Sendler even hid the child under her skirt.The older children were led through secret passages through the buildings surrounding the ghetto. Operations were calculated in seconds. One rescued boy told how he, hiding, waited around the corner of the house until a German patrol passed, then, having counted to 30, he ran headlong into the street to the sewer hatch, which by that moment had been opened from below. He jumped and was taken out of the ghetto through sewer pipes.
Irena Sendler recalled what a terrible choice she had to confront Jewish mothers, whom she offered to part with their children.“Will they be saved?” - Sendler has heard this question hundreds of times. But how could she answer it when she didn’t know whether she herself would be able to save herself? No one could guarantee that they would leave the ghetto alive.
Irena recalled: “I witnessed terrible scenes when, for example, the father agreed to part with the child, but the mother did not. Screaming, crying... The next day it often turned out that this family had already been sent to a concentration camp.” “Yes, these mothers were the real heroes,” said Irena, “who trusted me with their children.”All They knew one thing: if the kids remained in the ghetto, they would probably die. Irena calculated that in order to save one child, 12 people were required outside the ghetto, working in complete secrecy: vehicle drivers, employees who obtained food cards, nurses. But in most cases it was families or religious parishes that could shelter the fugitives. The children were given new names and placed in nunneries, sympathetic families, orphanages and hospitals.“No one ever refused me to take in Jewish children who needed shelter,” wrote Irena.
One day, a little boy whom Sendler was handing over to a Polish family after spending several months in an orphanage where he was looked after by a nun asked Irena, “How many mothers can a person have?” Indeed, everyone who took care of him was his mother.
The Union for Aid to Jews “Zhegota” helped to settle the children in freedom, which during 1943 took in four thousand adults and two and a half thousand children for its support.In total, “Zhegota” saved about 80 thousand Jews.
A tragic paradox: it was sometimes easier to snatch a child from the ghetto than to keep him alive in freedom. The kids were hidden in the most unexpected places. One of the hiding places was the Warsaw Zoo, where actor Alexander Zelwierowicz and mountaineer Wojciech Zukawski hid forty children. The real heroines were the Polish nuns. Helping Sendler, the sisters saved 500 Jewish children and paid for it with their own lives: in 1944, at a Warsaw cemetery, the Nazis doused them with gasoline and burned them alive.
Irena Sendler risked her own life and the life of her mother, since helping Jews was considered a crime and punishable by death.
This small, round-faced woman was not only a brave person, but also a very organized and responsible worker. For each child, she kept a card where she wrote down his previous name, his new name, and the address of the adoptive family. Much has been written and much is known about Polish anti-Semitism during the war, but there were also families who took children in during this time of famine. Irena Sendler also wrote down the address and number of the orphanage on the card. It was a whole system of salvation that worked in the very center of despair, hopelessness, hunger, darkness and destruction. Irena, like the midwives of the Old Testament, saved the future of the Jewish people - their children - from the hands of a merciless enemy.In 1943, following an anonymous denunciation, Irena Sendler was arrested. G
The Estapoites arrived on October 20, at her name day. Irene and handed the papers with the names of the children to her friend so that she could hide them while she went to open the door. The friend was not arrested. The Gestapo, unable to find documents, considered that Irena was only a small cog, and not the central figure of the ghetto rescue network. She was taken away.Novaya Gazeta columnist who researched the biography of Irena Sendler, Alexei Polikovsky, writes: “Irena Sendler was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. The anonymous identity has not yet been revealed and will never be revealed again. This man goes into the darkness of time without a name or surname. Just a figure without a face or voice, just a dark silhouette against a light window. Remaining anonymous, he refused the reward. This means that he was not motivated by self-interest. He could not have any personal enmity towards Irena Sendler. So what motivated him, this man? Only a professional doctor with rubber gloves and a professional writer with an interest in any manifestations of life can delve into the slippery tangle of concepts that lived in his soul.
Perhaps there was not just one motivation, but several. Firstly, anti-Semitism. He could not allow a Polish woman, his compatriot, to save Jewish children at the moment when the Germans were exterminating them. Secondly, vigilance and a passion for order. You cannot break the laws established by the authorities, even German ones... Everything could have been completely different... How to call that dull meanness that happens in people. He was a cautious, prudent man. He didn’t want to prance around with his denunciation in the light of everyone’s viewing. I understood that it was better to stay away from the Germans. And it’s also better to stay away from the Poles, you never know how things might turn out. He told where he needed to go, showed vigilance, satisfied his passion for order... and move on with your life in peace...”
Alexey Polikovsky continues: “She did not reveal to the Germans the location of the tree under which the jar with the names and addresses of the children was buried, and thus prevented them from finding the children she saved and sending them to Treblinka. She also did not betray her comrades from the municipality who did the documents for the children. She also did not betray those who helped her take the children out through the courthouse adjacent to the ghetto. Not only did she not betray anyone, she also never forgot how to smile. Everyone who met her writes that she always smiled. In all the photographs there was a smile on her round face» .
The Nazis kept Irena in Pawiak prison for three months and then sentenced her to death.Then the underground reached out to one of the senior Gestapo officers and bribed him. Irena was released, officially announcing her death. Polikovsky writes: “The vaunted German bureaucracy turned out to be corrupt. It’s fortunate that bureaucrats can be corrupt; corruption in some conditions is the only way leading to saving lives...”
This happened inlate February 1944. Irena, along with other suicide bombers, was sent to the Gestapo on Shukha Street. A few hours before the execution, a German soldier called in redeemed Ire well, Sendler with broken arms and legs and a face swollen from beatingsto the investigator for questioning. But there was no interrogation.The soldier pushed her out and shouted in Polish: “Run away!”The people from "Zhegota" picked her up. The underground provided her with documents under a different name.The next day, Sandler found her name on the hit list. They didn’t look for her anymore - the prayers of the rescued children kept their deliverer. She lived until the end of the war, hiding, but continuing to help Jewish children.Irena later said: “The underground organization valued me, but first of all it was about the children. Only I owned the entire list. On small pieces of tissue paper, so that they could be easily hidden, the data was written down: “Helenka Rubinstein, new surname - Glowacka and encrypted address.”
After the war, Irena Sendler opened her glass jar. She was a very stubborn woman. She took out her cards and tried to findrescued children and their parents.
Irena handed over the entire card index to Adolf Berman, who was the secretary at Žegota, and in 1947 became the head of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. The committee searched for rescued Jewish children and took them to Israel.
In post-war Poland she was also threatened with a death sentence because her wartime work was financed by the Polish Government in exile in London.
After the war, Irena Sendler continued to work in Social Patronage, creating shelters for children and old people. She created the Mother and Child Care Center.
Irena was not allowed to travel abroad. In the USSR and in the countries of “people’s democracy,” to which post-war Poland also belonged, travel abroad required permission from the “security authorities” under the ruling communist parties. And there were blacklists of those who were not allowed to leave, no matter what.
Irena's daughter, Janina, passed the entrance exams to the University of Warsaw, but was denied admission due to her mother's past - helping Jews. I had to receive my education by correspondence. “What sins have you committed on your conscience, Mom?” - asked her daughter. Only after some time did she find out about everything. In one of the interviews, Irena Sendler answered a question from an American journalistU. S. News“Did your daughter know about your help to Jewish children?” she replied that she never boasted about it to anyone, because she believed that it was normal to help those who were dying. This was a very painful topic for her. She was sure that she could have done more... The daughter learned all the details about her mother’s feat only when she visited Israel.
In the same interview, she was asked what was the scariest moment in her life? She replied that one picture would always remain in her memory: a column of Jewish orphans from the ghetto, dressed in smart suits and dresses that they wore to worship, and in front of the column was a clergyman. He went with them to death.
In 1965, the Israeli National Memorial of Holocaust and Heroism "Yad Vashem", which translated means "Memory and Name", awarded Irena Sendler the highest honor that a non-Jew can receive: she was included in the list of the Righteous Among the Nations and invited to plant a new one on the Alley of the Righteous tree. Only in 1983 did the Polish authorities lift the travel ban on her and allow her to come to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her honor.
In 2003, Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski awarded her the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor.It was a little late for her to be recognized in her homeland...
The world generally knew little about Irena Sendler until 1999, when several teenage girls from Kansas in the USA, Liz Cumbers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Koons and Janice Underwood discovered her story. These schoolgirls are from a rural high school in the city.UniontownWe were looking for a theme for the National History Day project. Their teacher, Norman Conrad, gave them a piece to read called "The Other Schindler" about Irena Sendler from the newspaper "USnewsandworldreport"for 1994. The leitmotif of the school project was the words from Jewish wisdom: “Whoever saves one person saves the whole world.” And the girls decided to explore her life. An internet search turned up only one website that mentioned Irena Sendler. (Now there are over three hundred thousand). With the help of their teacher, they began to reconstruct the story of this forgotten hero of the Holocaust. The girls thought that Irena Sendler had died and were looking for where she was buried. To their surprise and delight, they discovered that she was living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw. They wrote a play about her called Life in a Jar, which has since been performed more than two hundred times in the USA, Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they visited Irena for the first time in Warsaw and through the international press made Irena's story known to the world.Megan Stewart described her first meeting with Irena Sendler: “We ran into the room andrushed to hug this woman. She just took us by the hands and said that she would like to hear about our lives. Liz Cumbers admiringly told Sandler, “We love you so much! Your heroic deed is an example for us! You are our hero!” Then this tiny old woman in a wheelchair, less than one and a half meters tall, answered: “A hero is someone who performs outstanding deeds. And there is nothing outstanding in what I did. These are ordinary things that had to be done.” She knew Whom she served; in her heart lived the humility of a slave, worthless, faithful to her Master. Lech Kaczynski and the Children of the Holocaust Society petitioned for Irena Sandler to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.In this regard, newspapers wrote about her that year.Many of the children she saved, when they were already elderly, tried to find her to thank her.
However, Irena Sendler did not become a Nobel laureate - the committee considered her merits insufficient.And received the Nobel PrizeUS Vice President Al Gore for his lecture on energy conservation,"for his efforts to collect and widely disseminate as much knowledge as possible about human-caused climate change and to lay the foundation for countermeasures against such change."
Journalist Alexey Polikovsky commented on this: “The prize has been disgraced. This is a dummy that has no meaning, but only money. It is even more surprising that Al Gore, a respectable man living in a big house, not needing anything, belonging, as they say, to the powers that be, accepted the prize. The rich became even richer, the well-fed became even more well-fed, the world nomenklatura divided another piece among themselves, and the little quiet woman, as she lived in her one-room apartment in Warsaw, remained to live there. It is difficult to describe in words the feat of this woman. She dedicated her youth to going to the ghetto day after day. This is a simple and at the same time majestic story about a woman who risked her life to save Jewish children, about a driver, about a dog, about a glass jar buried in the garden. Before certain topics and events, the human tongue simply goes numb..." On April 11, 2007, 97-year-old Irena Sendler - on the proposal of teenager Szymon Plocennik from the city of Zielona Gora - was awarded the Order of the Smile. According to tradition, before receiving the award she had to drink a glass of lemon juice and then smile. She valued this award very much, because it was given by her children.On May 24, 2007 she was awarded the title of Honorary Resident of Warsaw and the CityTarchina.
When American journalists told Irena that they wanted to make a film about her life, she replied: “Make this film to help Americans understand what this war really was, what the ghetto looked like, what kind of battle took place there. And so that the soul of everyone who saw all this could weep.” Her daughter was against making a film about her mother, but then, when she saw the result, she was shocked.
On July 30, 2008, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution in memory of Irena Sandler, the Heroine of Poland.
In April 2009, when Irena was no longer alive, the television film "Braveheart of Irena Sendler", filmed in the fall of 2008 inLatvia.The world has not become immoral just now - it has always beensuch - from the moment of the Fall... The reward is not always received by the one who deserves it more than others.The life of Irena Sendler is a confirmation of how many humble heroes live among us, testament to love for one's neighbor, which in trouble realizes itself as heroism.
For the former Israeli Ambassador to Poland, Professor Shevach Weiss, Irena Sendler wasthe embodiment of the righteous of the world. He wrote: “She will probably ask God: “Lord, where were You in those terrible times?” And God will answer her: “I was in Your heart.”
In an interview with the Polish Radio News Agency, Professor Mark Edelman said: “Irena Sendler is an extraordinary person, a person with a big heart, who can be an example for everyone.”
Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich is confident that Irena Sendler showed with her life that the main thing is helping another person.
And here are the words of the chairman of the Shalom Foundation, Golda Tenzer, said after the death of Irena Sendler: “It was a great happiness for me that I knew her.” Tenzer emphasized that Irena retained her youthful spirit until the end of her life. “She was a wonderful person with a dove’s heart. The world is crying for her."
The head of the Union of Jewish Communities, Petr Kadlicik, noted that Irena Sendler saved the future of the Jewish people. She, he said, was a person who perfectly understood what the purpose and meaning of human life was.
The newspaper “Žiče Warsaw” quotes the opinion of the Bishop of Lublin, Joseph Zycinski: “...The life of Irena Sendler is a quiet valor without an atmosphere of hype... It is a pity that she is no longer there. Let's hope that God in heaven will reward her for what she did on earth. And we ourselves must learn to look for moral authorities around us, although some argue that the only reality is nihilism and emptiness. With her life, Mrs. Irena resolutely refuted such opinions.”
May God grant that we, modern Christians, do not lose the salt that protects this world from evil and decay.