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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, although a very small part of adults and children, managed to escape thanks to the courage and dedication of people who did not abandon 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 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 at 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 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 Association of Children of the Holocaust. 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. 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,” Irena wrote.
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 Assistance 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, believed 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 contacted 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 added to the list of 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, already old people, 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 "The Brave Heart 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, according to him, 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 decisively refuted such opinions.”
May God grant that we, modern Christians, do not lose the salt that protects this world from evil and decay.
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 and crying of the babies, which 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 the terrible choice she had to put before the parents of her children - 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 occurred 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 told Sandler admiringly, “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 common 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.”
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ZhZL: Irena Sendler, 9.4 out of 10 based on 37 ratingsWhen the German fascists occupied Poland in 1939, Irena Sendlerova organized the secret transportation of small children from the Warsaw ghetto to freedom. At the same time, she risked her own life, since helping Jews was considered a crime and was punishable by death.
In 1942, Irena Sendlerova joined the Žegota resistance movement, which operated in the Polish capital. There were 20 people in her group. Over the course of four years, they managed to rescue a total of 2,500 children.
Jews were forbidden to leave the ghetto on pain of death. The babies were taken out in ambulances, carried out through sewers, and once Sendlerova even hid the child under her skirt.
In 1943, the Nazis burned the Warsaw ghetto, dooming all its inhabitants to death.
Torture by the Gestapo
In October 1943, Irena was arrested. She endured torture by the Gestapo and refused to reveal the names of the children taken from the ghetto.
The Nazis sentenced her to death. On the day of the execution, the underground members managed to bribe the SS guards and save their comrade-in-arms.
As BBC Warsaw correspondent Adam Easton reports, Irena Sendlerova 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.
According to her, the hardest thing for her was to persuade parents to decide to separate from their children in order to save their lives.
In 2007, Sendlerova was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize . However, the commission for presenting the awards turned out to be extremely corrupt - It was not elected.
Received her award Al Gore - for a slideshow on global warming... in the hope that he will become president of the United States. And a year later, I received an award Barack Obama for his election promises.
The Polish Parliament declared her a national heroine - "for saving the most defenseless victims of Nazi ideology - Jewish children." The resolution was adopted unanimously.
In the eighties, in Israel she was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Irena Sendlerova died in a Warsaw hospital at the age of 98. Her daughter reported her death.
http://news.bbc.co.uk
The feat of Irena Sendler
This grandmother's name is God's dandelion Irena Sendler. Do you know who she is? Most likely no. Few people knew about it until 2007, when she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But, unfortunately, she then lost. And this perfectly characterized the neglected state of this prestigious award, its politicization and formality. During World War II, as an employee of the Warsaw Health Department, she visited the Warsaw Ghetto, where she looked after sick children. Under this cover she, risking her life, took 2,500 children from the ghetto and thereby saved them from death.
I can't wrap my head around this fact. This is something unearthly and even mystical. Imagine one small, very fragile and weak woman, risking everything, saves small children every day from certain death - about 2,500 souls in total(there is information on the Internet about 3,000 saved people). Yes it Love in its purest form! Dimensionless, not limited by anything, selfless. We can admire this, but it is difficult for us to understand, because we have been different for a long time.
Born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw. During World War II, she was an employee of the Warsaw Health Administration and, in addition, a member of the Polish underground organization - the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota).
To be able to enter the ghetto, Irene managed to get for herself and her accomplice, Irena Schultz, official passes from the Warsaw Department of Epidemic Control. Together they visited the ghetto every day, and soon they managed to establish useful connections there, which helped them in the future to take their children outside the ghetto. together with a friend they brought food, medicine, money and clothes to the ghetto. Later, they managed to involve other concerned organizations in this process. However, given the terrible conditions in the ghetto, where 5,000 people died a month from hunger and disease, they decided to help people, especially children, get out of the ghetto . It was not an easy task. And over time it became even more difficult - the Germans sealed all possible exits in all directions: underground passages, holes in the ghetto wall, etc. - which Irena
I used it in the beginning to breed children. She bribed some guards when she had money, and sometimes she managed to simply throw children over the ghetto fence. Very often, she would hide babies in her toolbox and older children in the back of her truck under a tarp. She always carried a dog in her car, which she trained to bark at the guards when the car was allowed into or out of the ghetto. The dog's bark drowned out the noise or crying of babies. She always carefully noted on paper, in coded form, the original names of the rescued children and stored this information in glass jars, which she buried in her garden. She did this in order to to at some point in the future find the parents of these children and restore families. As a result, in these jars in the garden Sendler has accumulated the names of 2,500 children.
On October 20, 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. She was beaten and tortured, during which both legs and both arms were broken. But the Gestapo failed to break her spirit: they did not receive any information from her. Since then, I used it in the beginning to breed children. She bribed some guards when she had money, and sometimes she managed to simply throw children over the ghetto fence. Very often, she would hide babies in her toolbox and older children in the back of her truck under a tarp. She always carried a dog in her car, which she trained to bark at the guards when the car was allowed into or out of the ghetto. The dog's bark drowned out the noise or crying of babies. could only walk on crutches. Gestapo sentenced Irena Sendler to death penalty, but she was saved by the organization Zegota who bribed a guard to add her name to the list of those already executed. Thus, until the end of the war Irene Sendler I had to hide.
Much later, after the end of the war, she said: “I could have done more, saved more children... and this regret for what was not done will follow me for the rest of my life.” Well, what can I say. Irena Sendler is a saint!
She died in 2008, at the age of 98, shortly after losing the Nobel Peace Prize, which the Nobel Committee gave to US Vice President Al Gore, who lost the presidential election. Circus.
The life of Irena Sendler is a very difficult, but surprisingly beautiful story. A story of great love, incredible courage and extraordinary valor.
http://adsence.kiev.ua
, Irena Sendlerova(Polish Irena Sendlerowa(full name Irena Stanislava Sendlerova(Polish Irena Stanisława Sendlerowa), born Krzyzanowska(Polish Krzyżanowska)); 15 February 1910, Warsaw - 12 May 2008, Warsaw) - Polish resistance activist who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.
Early life
Irena was born into the family of Stanisław Krzyżanowski (1877-1917) and Janina Karolina Grzybowska (1885-1944). Before Irena was born, her father participated in underground activities during the revolution of 1905, was a member of the teaching staff and was a socialist doctor who treated mainly poor Jews, whom other doctors refused to help. He died of typhus contracted from patients. After his death, representatives of the Jewish community offered to help his wife pay for Irena's education. Sendler entered the University of Warsaw to study Polish literature and joined the Polish Socialist Party.
The Second World War
During World War II, Irena Sendler, an employee of the Warsaw Health Department and a member of the Polish underground organization (under the pseudonym Jolanta) - the Council for Aid to Jews (Zhegota), often visited the Warsaw Ghetto, where she looked after sick children. Under this cover, she and her comrades took 2,500 children from the ghetto, who were then transferred to Polish orphanages, private families and monasteries.
The babies were given sleeping pills, placed in small boxes with holes in them to prevent them from suffocating, and taken out in cars that carried disinfectants to the camp. Some children were taken out through the basements of houses directly adjacent to the ghetto. Gutters were also used for escapes. Other children were carried out in bags, baskets, and cardboard boxes.
She hid the babies in a toolbox, the older children under a tarp in the back of a truck. In addition, there was a dog in the back, trained to bark when the car was allowed into or out of the ghetto; according to another version, the dog was sitting in the cab, and the driver, when leaving the gate, stepped on its paw to make the dog bark. The barking of the dog drowned out the noise or crying made by the babies.
Irena Sendler wrote down the data of all rescued children on narrow strips of thin paper and hid this list in a glass bottle. The bottle was buried under an apple tree in a friend’s garden, with the goal of finding the children’s relatives after the war.
On October 20, 1943, she was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. After torture, she was sentenced to death, but she was saved: the guards who accompanied her to the place of execution were bribed. Official papers declared her executed. Until the end of the war, Irena Sendler went into hiding, but continued to help Jewish children.
After the war
After the war, Sendler unearthed her cache of data on the rescued children and handed them over to Adolf Berman, chairman of the Central Committee of Polish Jews from 1947 to 1949. Using this list, committee staff found the children and handed them over to their relatives. The orphans were placed in Jewish orphanages. Later, a significant part of them were transported to Palestine, and eventually to Israel. After the establishment of the communist regime in Poland, Irena Sendler was persecuted by the authorities of the Polish People's Republic for her collaboration with the Polish Government in Exile and the Home Army. When Sendler was interrogated in 1949, she was pregnant. The boy (Andrzej) was born prematurely (11/9/1949) and died 11 days later.
Due to political differences with Israel, the Polish government did not allow Irena Sendler to leave the country at the Israeli invitation. She was able to visit Israel only after the fall of the communist regime and the change of government in Poland.
Irena Sendler was married twice. In 1932, she married Mieczysław Sendler (1910-2005), but even before the start of the war they separated, although they did not file for divorce. During the war, Mieczysław was captured. After his repatriation in 1947, they divorced and in the same year Irena married Stefan Zgrzębski (in reality the Jew Adam Zelnikier, 1905-?), whom she met as a student and with whom she began an affair just before the German attack . They had three children: Andrzej, Adam (1951-1999) and Janina. They divorced in 1959.
The last years of her life, Irena Sendler lived in a one-room apartment in the center of Warsaw.
Awards
- In 1965, the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena Sendler the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
- In 2003 she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle.
- In 2007, the Polish president and the Israeli prime minister nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize for saving nearly 2,500 children's lives, but the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore for his work on global warming, since the prize is awarded for actions committed in over the past two years.
- In 2007, she was awarded the International Order of Smile, becoming the oldest recipient.
- Honorary citizen of the city of Warsaw and the city of Tarczyn.
Perpetuation of memory
In art
- 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 role of Irena was played by New Zealand actress Anna Paquin.
- Irena's life was also reflected in songs. For example, the Irish group Sixteen Dead Men performed the song “Irena” in 2009 (HFWH Records).
In numismatics
- The portrait of Irena Sendler together with Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Matilda Getter is placed on the Polish silver coins of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations (see image).
Irena Sendler, an employee of the Warsaw Health Department, often visited the Warsaw ghetto, where she looked after sick children. Under this cover, she and her comrades took 2,500 children from the ghetto, who were then transferred to Polish orphanages, private families and monasteries.
The babies were given sleeping pills, placed in small boxes with holes in them to prevent them from suffocating, and taken out in cars that carried disinfectants to the camp. Some children were taken out through the basements of houses directly adjacent to the ghetto. Gutters were also used for escapes. Other children were carried out in bags, baskets, and cardboard boxes.
Irene hid the babies in a toolbox, the older children under a tarp in the back of a truck. In addition, there was a dog in the back, trained to bark when the car was allowed into or out of the ghetto. According to another version, the dog was sitting in the cab, and the driver, when leaving the gate, stepped on its paw to make the dog bark. The barking of the dog drowned out the noise or crying made by the babies.
Irena Sendler wrote down the data of all rescued children on narrow strips of thin paper and hid this list in a glass bottle. The bottle was buried under an apple tree in a friend’s garden, with the goal of finding the children’s relatives after the war.
On October 20, 1943, Irena was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. After torture, she was sentenced to death, but she was saved: the guards who accompanied her to the place of execution were bribed. Official papers declared her executed. Until the end of the war, Irena Sendler went into hiding, but continued to help Jewish children.
After the war, Sendler unearthed her cache of data on the rescued children and handed them over to Adolf Berman (chairman of the central committee of Jews in Poland). Using this list, committee staff found the children and handed them over to their relatives. The orphans were placed in Jewish orphanages. Later, a significant part of them were transported to Palestine, and eventually to Israel. After the establishment of the communist regime in Poland, Irena Sendler was persecuted by the authorities of the Polish People's Republic for her collaboration with the Polish Government in Exile and the Home Army.
When Sendler was interrogated in 1949, she was pregnant. The boy (Andrzej) was born prematurely (11/9/1949) and died 11 days later.
Due to political differences, the Polish government did not allow Irena Sendler to leave the country at the Israeli invitation. She was able to visit Israel only after the fall of the communist regime and the change of government in Poland.
The last years of her life, Irena Sendler lived in a one-room apartment in the center of Warsaw.
In 1965, the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena Sendler the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
In 2003 she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle.
In 2007, the Polish president and the Israeli prime minister nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize for saving almost 2,500 children's lives, but the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore for his work on global warming.
In 2007 she was awarded the International Order of Smile.
Honorary citizen of the city of Warsaw and the city of Tarczyn.
Irena Sendler (Sendlerova, née Krzyzanowski) was an underground movement activist who rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. The Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena the title of Righteous Among the Nations, along with Nikolai Kiselyov and Oskar Schindler. This woman, with the help of the Zegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw, provided children with false documents and, with a team of like-minded people, secretly took them out of the ghetto, giving them to orphanages, private families and monasteries.
Irena Sendler was born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw into a Polish Catholic family, but grew up in the city of Otwock. Her father, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, was a doctor. Stanislav died of typhus in February 1917, having contracted the disease from a patient of his who his colleague refused to treat. Many of these patients were Jewish. Stanislav taught his daughter: if a person is drowning, you need to try to save him, even if you yourself don’t know how to swim.
After the death of her father, Irena and her mother move to Warsaw. Jewish community leaders suggested that Irena's mother pay for her daughter's education. The girl sympathized with Jews from childhood. At that time, in some universities in Poland there was a rule according to which Jews were supposed to sit on the benches reserved for them at the end of the lecture hall. Irena and some of her like-minded people sat at such benches together with the Jews as a sign of protest. In the end, Irena was expelled from the university for three years.
In 1931, Irena married Mieczysław Sendlerow, a member of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Warsaw. However, she would later divorce him and marry Stefan Zgrzembski, with whom Irena would have a daughter, Janka, and a son, Adam.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (previously she worked in the city departments of Social Security of Otwock and Tarczyn). In early 1939, when the Nazis took over Poland, she began helping Jews. Irena and her assistants created approximately 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families before joining the underground resistance organization Zegota. Helping Jews was extremely risky; the entire household would be immediately shot if a Jew was found hiding in their home.
In December 1942, the newly created Council for Aid to Jews "Zegota" invited Irene to head their "children's unit" under the fictitious name Iolanta. As a social welfare worker, she had special permission to enter the Warsaw ghetto. According to her position, she had to check the residents of the ghetto for signs of typhus, because the Germans were very afraid that the infection could spread beyond its borders. During such visits, Irena wore a headband with the Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jews, and also in order not to attract unnecessary attention to herself.
She carried children out of the Jewish ghetto in boxes, suitcases, and also on carts. Under the pretext of checking sanitary conditions during outbreaks of typhus epidemics, Sendler would come into the ghetto and take small children out of it in an ambulance, sometimes disguising them as luggage or carry-on luggage. She also used the old courthouse on the outskirts of the Warsaw Ghetto (which still stands) as the main point for the transfer of children.
Children were left in Polish families, Warsaw orphanages or monasteries. Sendler worked closely with social worker and Catholic nun Matilda Getter.
Irena wrote down information about the removed children and put them in jars, which she buried under a tree in her friend’s garden. These banks contained information about the children's real and fictitious names, as well as information about where they were taken and what family they originally belonged to. This was done so that after the end of the war the children could be returned to their families.
In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured and sentenced to death. She didn't give anyone away. Fortunately, "Zegota" saved her by bribing the German guards on the way to the site of her execution. Irena was abandoned in the forest, unconscious, with broken legs and arms. Sendler's name was on the list of those executed. She had to hide until the end of the war, but she continued to save Jewish children. After the war, Irena retrieved buried jars containing 2,500 records of children. Some children were returned to their families, but, unfortunately, many of the parents were exterminated in concentration camps or went missing.
After the war, Irena Sendler continued to be persecuted by the secret police, as her activities during the war were sponsored by the Polish government. Interrogations of the pregnant Irena eventually led to the miscarriage of her second child in 1948.
In 1965, Sendler was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem. Only this year, the Polish government allowed her to leave the country to receive the award in Israel.
In 2003, John Paul II sent Irene a personal letter. On October 10, she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor; as well as the Jan Karski Award for Brave Heart, given to her by the American Center for Polish Culture in Washington.
In 2006, the Polish President and the Israeli Prime Minister nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore.
Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008 in her room in a private hospital in Warsaw. She was 98 years old.
In May 2009, she was posthumously awarded the Audrey Hepburn Philanthropy Award. Named after the famous actress and UNICEF Ambassador, this award recognizes people and organizations that help children.
Sendler was the last survivor of the "Children's Section" of the Zegota organization, which she headed from January 1943 until the end of the war.
American director Mary Skinner began working on a documentary film based on the memoirs of Irena Sendler in 2003. This film will include the last interview of Irena herself, made shortly before her death. Three of Irena's assistants and several Jewish children whom they rescued took part in the filming of the film.
The film, shot in Poland and America with cinematographers Andrei Wulf and Slawomir Grunberg, will recreate the places where Irena lived and worked. This is the first documentary about Sandler's feat. Mary Skinner recorded nearly 70 hours of interviews for the film and spent seven years poring over archives, speaking with experts on the story, as well as witnesses in the United States and Poland, to uncover previously unknown details about Irena's life and work. The film will premiere in the United States in May 2011.