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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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Irena Sendler was one of the heroes of the Nazi occupation of Poland.
As a member of Zegota, the Council for Providing Aid to the Jews, an organisation set up by the Polish underground state and financed by the Polish government-in-exile in London, she succeeded in saving around 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto from certain death in the Nazi extermination camps.
At the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, she was also working as a social care nurse for the Warsaw city welfare department.
Sendler was involved in providing assistance to those in need, and in December 1942 - soon after the deportation of Jews had begun to the Treblinka death camp - she became head of the children's department of Zegota.
She was motivated, above all, by her sense of social justice and her feelings of obligation to her Jewish friends.
When the German authorities decided finally to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Sendler was one of a group of around 20 Zegota members who organised the evacuation of children, placing them in Polish families, orphanages and convents.
She was able to move around the ghetto legally, disguised as a public-health nurse responsible for investigating a suspected typhus epidemic.
Sometimes, the children were hidden in a lorry driven by a fellow conspirator, Antoni Dzbrowski. A mechanic reportedly hid babies in his toolbox. At other times, they were given sleeping pills and transported outside the ghetto - in baskets, or chests in ambulances or streetcars. German officials were told they had died of typhus.
The escaping children were provided with false identities, and many of those who remained in Poland were taught Christian prayers so they would blend into the community more easily.
But their real names and details of their families were written down in code and buried in jam jars, which were dug up after the war. This meant that once the conflict was over the children were able to discover who they really were.
In October 1943, at the height of this rescue operation, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. She was brutally tortured in the notorious Pawiak prison and sentenced to death.
But she never revealed details of her contacts and, by bribing her guards, other members of Zegota were able to obtain her release.
After Poland's liberation in 1945, Sendler returned to the Warsaw social welfare department, co-founding an orphanage and an old people's home and organising a service to deal with women and children in need.
She stayed in contact with some of the children she had rescued, many of whom eventually found their way to Palestine.
There was little recognition for Sendler's work in Poland in the immediate aftermath of the war, but in 1965 she was awarded the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem, and in 1991 was granted honorary citizenship by the state of Israel.
In 2006 she was nominated for the Nobel peace prize by an American teacher, Norman Conrad, whose students had written a play and made a documentary film about her, entitled Life in a Jar.
Her work was recognised by the Polish senate, which unanimously passed a resolution praising her work in rescuing "the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology - the Jewish children".
Ill-health prevented her from attending the ceremony, but in a letter to the senate she wrote: "Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful messengers who are today no longer alive is the justification for my existence on this earth, rather than a claim for honour."
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