Our Common Concern

Early 1942. Warsaw, Poland. Irena Sendler, a minute Roman Catholic social worker employed by the city, watched as Nazis imprisoned 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, thousands of whom were children. Mrs. Sendler, posing as a nurse, began smuggling food, clothing and medicine to those trapped inside. But that wasn’t enough. Deciding she could do more, Mrs. Sendler recruited 10 friends to rescue children behind the ghetto’s imposing walls.

Using potato sacks, coffins, bribes, and dogs as necessary, Mrs. Sendler and her friends smuggled babies and older children through underground corridors, renamed and rehomed them to conceal their indentity. It was an extremely dangerous affair, and in 1943 Nazi soldiers tortured Mrs. Sendler repeatedly, breaking her feet and legs. Nazis demanded that she release the names of her friends and the children she saved. Mrs. Sendler refused.

At the war’s end, the former social worker tried to locate families of the rescued children, but most had perished in the ghetto or concentration camps. Her story was largely ignored by the Polish government until it was revived in a school play, “Life In a Jar”, based on the jar she filled with the real names of the rescued children.

All told, Irena Sendler rescued nearly 3,000 children. When finally honored by the Polish Senate in 2007, Mrs. Sendler wrote, “”Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.”

Mrs. Sendler died Monday in Warsaw at the age of 98.

Irena Sendler, a Profile In Courage.

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For more on this story, see articles by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. There is also an upcoming TV movie based on Mrs. Sendler’s life, “The Irena Sendler Story“, scheduled to air on CBS. And you can learn more about the foundation in her name, “Life In a Jar“, and the play based on her life of the same name.