During World War Two, she risked her life in an heroic effort to save Jewish kids from the German death factories. "She is the last surviving person from the group she worked with that ran an underground network to save these children ...."
On October 12, 2007, will the Nobel Committee honor a true heroine?
Or, will they
Via Polonia NewsIrena Sendler for Nobel Peace Prize
Irena Sendler is a Polish heroine who risked her life to save lives of Jewish children from Gestapo and Nazi death camps during World War II.
In German-occupied Poland, a Pole assisting Jews would get a death sentence.
Irena worked as senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department that ran the canteens of the city, when Germany invaded the country in 1939. The canteens not only provided food, financial aid and other services for orphans, elderly, and poor but also clothing, medicine and money for Jewish families. To avoid inspections, they were registered under fictitious Catholic names and they were reported as patients suffering highly contagious diseases such as typhus or tuberculosis.
In 1942, with the designation of a closed area to herd Jews, known as the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish families could only wait for a certain death. In October 1942, when the Council for Aid to Jews - codename Zegota - was organized by the Polish Underground, Sendler was one of its first recruits.
Irena managed to get a pass from the Warsaw Epidemic Control Department to be able to enter the ghetto legally. She and her co-conspirator, Irena Schultz, visited ghetto daily with the aim of reestablishing contacts, bringing food, medicines and clothes. However, given the terrible conditions in the Ghetto, where 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease, the two decided to help people, particularly children, to get out of the Ghetto.
Persuading parents to separate from their children was a horrible task for Irena, a young mother herself. Finding families on the Christian - so called Aryan side - willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk being executed if the Germans ever found out, was also not easy.
She started to smuggle children in an ambulance as victims of typhus, but also in gunnysacks, garbage cans, toolboxes, loads of goods, potato sacks, coffins. Other methods included a church with two entrances, one opened into the ghetto and the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. Children entered the Church Jews and exited as Christians. Irena could recruit at least one person from each of the ten Centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures, giving the Jewish children temporary identities.
It was easier to escape the ghetto than to survive the Aryan side. The rescue of a child required help of at least ten people.
As a rule, the children were first placed in a temporary shelter, then to a foster home after they had somewhat recovered from their period of destitution. There was also a need to wait for them to receive from the Polish Underground false identity papers that were good enough to pass German muster. Each child had to be provided with a factitious birth and baptismal certificate and a family history of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. which the children, if old enough, had to commit to memory. "I sent most of the children to religious establishments," she recalled. "I knew that I could count on the Sisters." Irena kept record, in coded form, of the children and their true identities.
The only record of their true identities was kept in jars buried beneath an apple tree in the neighbor’s back yard, across the street from the German barracks. She hoped she could someday locate the children and inform them of their past.
In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children...
On October 20, 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. Although subjected to beatings and torture during which both of her feet and legs were broken, but not her spirit: she revealed nothing. Never again would she be able to walk without crutches. Irena spent three months in the Pawiak prison where she was sentenced to death.
She was rescued by Zegota which, fearful that she would break down and reveal the location of the children, managed to bribe a guard to check off her name on a list of those already executed. As a result, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those on whom a sentence of death had been carried out.
Rescued, she had to assume a completely new identity and live an entirely new life. She could not visit her dying mother, nor attend her funeral. But she did again become deeply involved in the work of Zegota.
At the end of the war, Irena dug up the jars and used the notes to find the 2.500 children she had given to adoptive families. She reunited them with their relatives scattered across Europe, but most of them had lost their families in Nazi concentration camps.
After the war she worked for Social Welfare; she helped create houses for elderly people, orphanages and an emergency service for children.
In 1965 the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem awarded her with the title Righteous Among the Nations and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel."If Sendler actually wins, this will be the first time a Nobel prize would have been awarded in connection to the Holocaust." (haaretz.com)
Also at abcnews.com
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