The other day, I was blogging about the movie The Pianist and how at the end, a Nazi officer actually helped Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman right before the war ends. There were many Holocaust heroes during that time – people who risked their own lives to save others. One of them, Irena Sendler, has just passed away recently at the age of 98.
Irena was a Polish social worker during World War II. Irena began offering Jewish families food and shelter in 1939. Soon, her job as a social worker would allow her to help more Jews. Saying she was conducting inspections, Sendler and some associates were allowed to go into the ghetto. Then, they smuggled out babies and small children. The babies and children were often disguised as packages or put in suitcases to get them out. Once out of the ghetto, the children were placed with other Polish families and in Roman Catholic orphanages. To keep track of the children, Sendler made lists of their names, including new identities, and buried those lists in jars.
Sendler was captured by the German Gestapo in 1943. They tortured her and sentenced her to death, but she escaped by bribing the German guards on the way to her execution. Her name remained on the execution list, but she actually lived in hiding until the war was over. At that time, she dug up her jars and tried to match the almost 2,500 children she and her team of 20 others had helped save. Unfortunately, most of the children’s parents had died at the Treblinka death camp.
After World War II ended, Sendler worked as a social welfare officer. In 1965, she was honored as one of the first “Righteous Gentiles” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Because Poland was under communist rule at the time, Sendler was not allowed to travel out of the county to receive her award until 1983.
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