The feat of Irena Sendler. Irena Sendler. The great feat of a little woman The story of Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler (Sendlerova in Polish) saved the lives of 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto during the war. The children were from six months to 15 years old. Young children were given sleeping pills and taken out in a truck in boxes with holes for air passage. Older children were hidden in a bag and taken out in the same truck. It was not easy to persuade mothers to give up their children in the name of their salvation. Children were placed in monasteries and Polish families. It was very dangerous to shelter Jewish children - more than 2,000 Poles were executed by the Nazis for their mercy. Irena kept a card index - on thin pieces of paper she wrote down the names of the children, their parents and close relatives, as well as new, Polish names that were given to the children for their salvation and the addresses of the Polish families who gave them shelter for these children. All this data was placed in glass jars and buried in the garden of friend Irena Sendler. After the war, the recordings were given to the chairman of the central committee of Jews in Poland. Irena's information helped to track down children from the ghetto and find their relatives. But most of the children were left orphans and were taken to Israel, to orphanages.
Irena Sendler in 1942.
Warsaw ghetto.
In 1940, the Nazis established a ghetto in a part of Warsaw that historically had a high percentage of Jewish population. 113 thousand Poles were evicted from there, and 138 thousand Jews were settled in their place. By the end of the year, 440 thousand people (37% of the city’s population) lived in the ghetto on an area of 4.5%.
The maniac Hitler sentenced these people to death.
Daily food “standards” were calculated for the death of people from hunger and amounted to 184 kcal (2 kg of bread per month) per person in 1941. People fell and died in the streets. But the Nazis were afraid of epidemics that could arise among weakened people and then spread throughout the occupied territory. This made it possible for employees of the Warsaw Health Department, among whom was Irena Sendler, to frequently visit the ghetto for sanitary treatment.
The photo shows the Warsaw Ghetto. May 1941.
Irena Sendlerova.
Irena inspired great trust among the ghetto residents, otherwise mothers would not have entrusted their babies to this woman. This little woman had to be present at hundreds of personal tragedies, when mothers gave her their children, realizing that they would never see them again. Although, according to the recollections of Irena herself, there were cases when the father agreed, but the mother was not ready to give up the most precious thing in the world. And tomorrow the whole family was sent to the Treblinka concentration camp to be exterminated.
Irena was born on February 15, 1910 in the family of a doctor. Her father, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, died in 1917 while saving people suffering from typhus. Irena often recalled the words of her father spoken to her 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.”
Young Irena.
Irena understood that you couldn’t do much alone. According to her calculations, at least 12 people living outside the ghetto had to work to save one child: drivers, nurses, city government employees and, finally, foster families. The child first had to be somehow removed from the carefully guarded territory of the ghetto, then he had to make fake documents proving his identity, he needed food cards and he had to find people willing to risk their lives and the lives of their relatives and friends to save someone else’s child.
Žegota (Żegota) .
Irena was the soul and heart of her group. She turned out to be a talented organizer and performer. But without help" big world“She could not have saved so many children from certain death. In September 1942, the Provisional Committee for Assistance to Jews was created in Poland, later, for secret purposes, renamed Žegota (a name taken from the work of Adam Mickiewicz). Żegota was organized by two women: the writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and the art critic Wanda Krahelska-Filippowicz. Interethnic relations in pre-war Poland were often tense. In the thirties, following the example of Hitler's Germany, the rights of the Jewish population were significantly limited. For example, universities had special benches at the end of classrooms intended exclusively for Jews. By the way, Irena Sendlerova strongly protested against such discrimination and she was suspended from classes at the university for 3 years. Poles and Jews lived nearby, but professing different religions, having different cultures and mentalities, they were wary and often hostile towards each other. However, the Polish intelligentsia and the Catholic Church, overcoming centuries of hostility, began to do everything in their power to save the Jews.
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka.
Wanda Krahelskaya-Filipovich.
Manifesto by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka.
“In the Warsaw ghetto, separated by a wall from the world, several hundred thousand death row prisoners await their death. They have no hope of salvation. Nobody comes to them with help. The number of murdered Jews has exceeded a million, and this figure is increasing every day. Everyone dies. Rich and poor, old people, women, men, youth, infants... They are guilty only of being born Jews, condemned by Hitler to extermination. The world looks at these atrocities, the most terrible of all that history has known, and remains silent... It is no longer possible to tolerate. Anyone who remains silent in the face of these murders himself becomes an accomplice of the murderers. He who does not condemn allows. Therefore, let us raise our voices, Catholic Poles! Our feelings towards Jews will not change. We still consider them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we are aware that they hate us more than the Germans, blaming us for their misfortune. Why, on what basis - this remains a mystery of the Jewish soul, this is confirmed by constant facts. Awareness of these feelings does not relieve us of the obligation to condemn the crimes... In the stubborn silence of the international Jewish community, in the vomit of German propaganda, which seeks to shift the blame for the massacre of Jews onto the Lithuanians and Poles, we feel an action hostile to us.”
A child died right on the street.
Activities of Zhegota.
Irena Sendlerova had the underground pseudonym “Iolanta.” Her group had to come up with more and more new ways to save children. The children were hidden in bags and baskets with garbage (this is how Irena took out her six-month-old adopted daughter) and in bales with bloody bandages, taken to city landfills. Older children were taken out through sewers. One rescued boy recalled how, after the sentry turned the corner, he had to run headlong to the hatch that opened from below and immediately closed above his head.
The unfortunate people were driven to extermination.
Zhegota’s intense work required considerable funds, including bribing Nazi officials and ransoming arrested underground members. Money came from the Delegation, the representative office of the Polish government in exile (the "London" government), from the Bund and from the Jewish National Committee. In total, Zhegota managed to save up to 60 thousand people, including at least 28 thousand in Warsaw. After the complete destruction of the ghetto, in May 1943, up to 4 thousand people were hiding simultaneously in safe houses in Warsaw.
The underground suffered heavy losses. About 700 members of Žegota were shot. In 1943, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, but she survived and even took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
Arrest of Irena Sendler.
On October 20, 1943, Irena Sendler was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. What does anonymous denunciation mean? The informer was not interested in the material reward for extraditing the underground fighter, which was quite significant at that time of famine. This vile soul only needed a result - to send a brave woman to death. Irena endured all the torture - her arms and legs were broken, but she did not betray anyone. The Gestapo had no idea that this little woman (less than 1m 50cm tall) was a key link in saving Jewish children. In the end, Irena, sentenced to death, was ransomed. The guard took her outside and told her to run. Members of Žegota immediately picked up Irena and took her to a safe house. The next day she found her name in the list of executed Polish patriots published by the occupiers.
Problems with the new authorities.
Irena Sendler, who was exclusively involved in rescuing children underground, did not take part in the outbreak civil war, but still, she, a pregnant woman, was actively interrogated by the special services, what ended premature birth and the death of a little son who did not live even two weeks. Sandler faced the threat of a death sentence due to the fact that her activities were financed by the “London” government. When Irena’s daughter grew up and wanted to go to college, she was not accepted because of Sendler’s activities during the war.
In 1965, the Israeli National Memorial of Catastrophe and Heroism awarded Irena Sendler its highest honor - the title of Righteous Among the Nations and invited her to Israel. But the communist government did not let her out of the country. And in general, in Poland they learned about Irena’s feat only in 2000, when 4 American schoolgirls, who began researching the life of Irena Sandler at the suggestion of a history teacher, wrote a play about her - “Life in a Bank”, and then, with the help of the international press, made it a feat known throughout the world.
Irena Sendler's rescued children have grown up.
Irena became the national heroine of Poland. In 2003, she received the country's highest award - the Order of the White Eagle. In 2006, the President of Poland and the Prime Minister of Israel jointly submitted her candidacy for Nobel Prize peace. But the Nobel Committee made a shameful decision to award the prize to US Vice President A. Gore for a series of lectures on global warming, for which he received a lot of money. And the modest heroine huddled with her family in a one-room apartment. This once again demonstrates that big awards, as a rule, do not go to those who deserve them.
Still from the film.
In 2009 (a year after her death), the film “The Braveheart of Irena Sendler” was released. It's worth watching, although it requires good nerves.
She always smiled.
I shared with you the information that I “dug up” and systematized. At the same time, he is not at all impoverished and is ready to share further, at least twice a week. If you find errors or inaccuracies in the article, please let us know. My e-mail address: [email protected]. I will be very grateful.
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 Sendler'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.
Content:
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 this: “The Times”, “ NY Times, 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 the 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. Parents with early childhood 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 the 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 on 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 the 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 deportations to the Treblinka concentration camp began, death in the ghetto had become everyday life- 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 Holocaust Children's Association. 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. The children were given new names and placed in convents, in sympathetic families, shelters and hospitals.“No one ever refused me to take in Jewish children who needed shelter,” wrote Irena.
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 Aid 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 our 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 the whole system salvation, which 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, considered 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 reached out to 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 included in the list of the 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, when they were already elderly, 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 strong of the world That said, I accepted the award. 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 "Braveheart 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 former ambassador Israel in 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, he said, 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 resolutely refuted such opinions.”
May God grant that we, modern Christians, do not lose the salt that protects this world from evil and decay.
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| Irena Sendler (2005). Photo by Mariusz Kubik | |
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Irena Krzhizhanovska |
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Order of the White Eagle |
Irena Sendler (Irena Sendlerova, Irena Sendlerowa; 1910, Otwock, Poland - May 12, 2008, Warsaw) - Polish resistance activist, Righteous Among the Nations.
early years
Irena Sendler (Krzyzanowska) was born in 1910 in Otwock, about 25 km southeast of Warsaw. She was strongly influenced by her father, a doctor who was one of the first Polish socialists. His patients were mostly poor Jews.
The feat of Irena Sendler
She recorded the coded data of all 2,500 rescued children and hid this list in a glass jar buried under an apple tree in a neighbor's yard, hoping to find the children's relatives after the war.
On October 20, 1943, she was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. She was severely beaten, both legs and both arms were broken and she was sentenced to death. She was saved - the guards who led her to the place of execution were bribed. Official papers declared her executed. She lived in hiding until the end of the war, but continued to help Jewish children.
After the war
After the war, she unearthed a cache of jars and tried to find the parents of the rescued children. However, most of the parents died in the camps.
After the establishment of the communist regime in Poland, Irena Sendler was arrested by communist authorities for her collaboration with the Polish government in exile and the Home Army. When Sendler was interrogated in 1948, she was in her last month of pregnancy. The child was born premature and died.
In 1965, she was one of the first to receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations from the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem. 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.
Last years throughout her life, Irena Sendler lived in a one-room apartment in the center of Warsaw. She passed away on May 12, 2008, at the age of 98.
International recognition
The children only knew her underground nickname, Iolanta. In 2000, a group of high school students from the Kansas town of Unitetown, under the guidance of their history teacher, conducted a study of Irena Sendler's feat and won a science project competition. The material of their work received wide international fame; Irena Sendler attracted the attention of the press and the world community. She was found by those of the rescued children who remembered the face and saw it in photographs in the press.
In 2003 she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle. 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.
This letter was distributed through a social network
I simply copied it from here http://www.tovievich.ru/news/12.02.2010/1715.htm, because I was imbued with the story of her life, which began to be talked about a lot in the context of receiving/not receiving the Nobel Prize.
And this is also a story about how every day someone works miracles and accomplishes feats...
The fate of Irina Sandler is somewhat close to the fate of Janusz Korczak. Fortunately, unlike Korczak, Irina Sandler was not tortured in a concentration camp, she lived for almost 100 years and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As usual, other people received the prize.
But Nobel laureates come and go, but ascetics and their exploits remain in the historical memory of the saved world. Let this memory become a piece of the personal and biographical memory of each of us.
VC.
Recently, a woman named Irina died at the age of 98. During World War II, Irina received permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumber/welder. She had "ulterior motives" for this. Being German, she knew about the Nazi plans for the Jews. She began carrying children out of the ghetto in the bottom of her tool bag, and in the back of her truck she had a bag for older children. There she also drove a dog, which she trained to bark when the German guards let the car in and out through the ghetto gates. The soldiers, naturally, did not want to mess with the dog, and its barking covered up the sounds that the children could make.
During this activity, Irina managed to take 2,500 children out of the ghetto and thereby save. She was caught; the Nazis broke her legs and arms and beat her severely. Irina kept a record of the names of all the children she carried out, and she kept the lists in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to find all possible surviving parents and reunite families. But most of them ended their lives in gas chambers. The children she helped were placed in orphanages or adopted. Last year, Irina Sandler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not elected. Al Gore received it for his slideshow on global warming. I am making my small contribution by forwarding this letter to you. I hope you will do the same. More than 60 years have passed since the end of the Second World War in Europe.
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Irena Sendler (Irena Krzyzanowska) was born in Otwock on February 15, 1910. Her father was a doctor and head of a hospital in Otwock.
The daughter of a doctor, she grew up in a home that was open to anyone who was sick or in need, Jew or non-Jew. In the lecture halls of the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish language and literature, she and her associates deliberately sat on the 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 lavkowe - “bench ghetto”). As a sign of protest, they and the non-Jews who supported them listened to lectures while standing. (http:// www.eleven.co.il/article/15411).The university authorities fled "before Adolf Hitler's father. A few years later, he himself came to Poland to personally supervise their amateur activities).
When nationalist thugs beat up her Jewish friend, Irina crossed out the stamp on her student card that allowed her to sit in “Aryan” seats. For this she was suspended from school for three years. This was Irina Sendler by the time the Germans invaded Poland.
Irina was, as her friend said, “selfless by birth, not by education.” Of course she inherited good genes. Her great-grandfather, a Polish rebel, was exiled to Siberia. Her father died of typhus in 1917, contracted from patients his colleagues avoided treating
(Irina 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.”) Many of them were Jews. The Jewish community offered financial assistance to her struggling mother to pay for young Irina's education.
Like many socially active people In pre-war Poland, Mrs. Sendler was a member of the Socialist Party, not, as she said, because of her political convictions, but because for her it combined compassion with a rejection of the power of money. Her motivation was not related to any religion. She acted "z potrzeby serca", at the call of her heart.
Under the Nazi occupation, Warsaw's Jews were herded like a herd of cattle into the city's ghetto: four square kilometers for approximately 400,000 souls.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1950450/Irena-Sendler.html
Even before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp began, death was an everyday occurrence in the ghetto. But, paradoxically, there was also a chink for hope. Poverty and half-starvation (the monthly portion of bread was two kilograms) created ideal conditions for the spread of typhus, the epidemic of which could also threaten the Germans. So the Nazis allowed Mrs. Sendler and her colleagues access to the tightly guarded ghetto to distribute medicine and vaccinations.
And this "legal" loophole allowed her to save more Jews than the much more famous Oskar Schindler. It was extremely dangerous. Some children were smuggled out in trucks or trams that returned empty to the base. More often, however, they were led through secret passages from buildings in the surrounding ghettos.
The children were given new names and placed in nunneries, sympathetic families, orphanages and hospitals. Those who were older and could speak were taught to cross themselves so as not to arouse suspicion of their Jewish origin. The babies were sedated to prevent them from crying as they were carried out in secret. A medical van driver trained his dog to bark loudly to drown out the cries of the babies he was wheeling out under the bottom of the van.
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 counted to 30, ran headlong into the street to the sewer hatch, which by that moment had been opened from below. He jumped down there and was taken out of the ghetto through sewer pipes.
According to other sources, She got a job as a plumber and welder in the ghetto. First, she went to a plumbing store, where she bought herself a tool. Then she carefully placed it in her bag so that there was enough space. At the bottom of this bag she carried children out of the ghetto. For older children she had a bag.
Irina Sandler drove a truck with a dog in the back seat, which always barked when the truck was allowed out of the ghetto gates. The soldiers could not find out anything because they were afraid of the dog, and because of its barking they could not find out anything about the children.
Irina Sendler later recalled what a terrible choice she had to confront Jewish mothers, whom she offered to part with their children. They asked if she could guarantee that the children would be saved. Of course, there could be no talk of any guarantees, not to mention the fact that each time there was no certainty that it would be possible to leave the ghetto at all. The only thing that was certain was that if the children had remained, they would almost certainly have died. Irina said: “I witnessed terrible scenes when, for example, the father agreed to part with the child, but the mother did not. The next day it often turned out that this family had already been sent to a concentration camp.” She calculated that to save one Jewish child, 12 people were required outside the ghetto, working in complete secrecy: vehicle drivers, priests who issued fake baptismal certificates, employees who obtained food cards, but most of all these were families or religious parishes, who could shelter fugitives. And the punishment for helping Jews was immediate execution.
But what was even more dangerous, Ms. Sendler tried to preserve records of the children's origins to help them later find their families. These notes were written on pieces of tissue paper, a packet of which she kept on her night table so that she could quickly throw them out of the window if the Gestapo came.
The Nazis actually arrested her. 11 Gestapo men arrived on the night of October 20, 1943. Irina wanted to throw the pack out of the window, but saw that the house was surrounded by Germans. Then she threw the pack to her friend and went to open the door herself, and she hid the pack under her armpit. They didn't take her.
But they, unable to find the documents her friend was hiding, believed that she was a small cog rather than a central figure in the ghetto rescue network. Under torture she didn't reveal anything
The Nazis held Irina in Pawiak prison, where she was tortured and then sentenced to death. They also say that in prison she worked in the prison laundry and, together with other similar prisoners, spoiled the linen of German soldiers, which they washed. When the Germans discovered this, they lined up the women and shot every second one.)
Irina Sendler escaped execution.
Her name was added to the list of those executed; she was officially executed in early 1944.
and all the records about the origin of the children were buried in the ground in glass jars (under the apple tree in her friend’s garden)
For the rest of the war, Mrs. Sendler lived under an assumed name.
She never wanted to be called a heroine. She said: "I still feel guilty that I didn't do more." In addition, she felt that she was a bad daughter, risking the life of her elderly mother, a bad wife and mother. Her daughter, in order to be able to see her, once even had to ask to be allowed to visit the orphanage where her mother worked after the war.
In post-war Poland, she was also threatened with a death sentence because her wartime work was funded by the Polish Government-in-exile in London, and she helped soldiers of the Home Army. Both the Polish Government in London and the Home Army were then considered imperialist puppets. In 1948, when she was in her last month of pregnancy, interrogations by the secret police cost her the life of her second child, born prematurely. She was “restricted to travel abroad,” and her children were not allowed to enroll full-time at the University. “What sins have you committed on your conscience, Mom?” her daughter asked.
(In the USSR and, apparently, 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 black lists of those who were not allowed to travel, regardless of what. These were “restricted to travel”)
Only in 1983, the Polish authorities lifted the travel ban on her and allowed her to come to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her honor at the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum of the Catastrophe of European Jewry in Jerusalem
Many of the children she saved, now elderly, tried to find her to thank her, and also to try to find out something about their lost parents.
Irena Sendler spent her last years in the Warsaw private sanatorium of Elzbieta Ficowska, whom she rescued from the ghetto in July 1942 at the age of six months: she was carried out in a box of carpenter's tools.
In 2003 she received Poland's highest award, the Order of the White Eagle.
The world knew little about Irina Sendler until 1999, when several teenage girls from Kansas in the USA, Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood discovered her story. These schoolgirls are from the countryside high school The town of Uniontown was looking for a theme for a National History Day project. Their teacher, Norman Conrad, gave them a piece to read called "The Other Schindler" about Irena Sendler from the 1994 US news and world report. And the girls decided to research her life. An Internet search turned up only one website that mentioned Irina Sendler. (Now there are over 300,000) 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 alive and 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 200 times in the US, Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they visited Irina for the first time in Warsaw and through the international press. made Irina's story known to the world. Since then they have visited Irina in Warsaw four more times. The last time was on May 3, 2008, 9 days before her death.
The life of Irina Sendler was also the subject of the biography “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irina Sendler” by Anna Miskovskaya. Last year (2007) it was reported that Irina Sendler's feat was to become the plot of a film with Angelina Jolly in leading role.
In 2007, Irina Sendler was nominated by Poland for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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