Originally published 2019-07-26.
Irena Sendler (1910–2008) was a Polish social worker who, during the German occupation of Warsaw, helped organise the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and hid them under false identities with Polish families, in orphanages and in convents. She worked within a network of colleagues and, from 1943, with Żegota, the underground Council to Aid Jews. Arrested and beaten by the Gestapo, she refused to betray anyone. Sendler later said that about 2,500 children were saved; historians still debate the exact figure, but there is no doubt that she and her colleagues saved many lives.
Who Irena Sendler was
Sendler was born in Warsaw on 15 February 1910 and grew up partly in Otwock, where her father, a doctor, treated poor patients, many of them Jewish. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 she was working for the social welfare department of the Warsaw city administration. That job turned out to matter enormously: it gave her contacts, paperwork and, crucially, a reason to enter places that ordinary Poles could not.
She is often called a nurse, and she did wear a nurse's uniform at times, including while caring for the wounded in a field hospital during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Her main profession, though, was social work.
Irena Sendler in a nurse's uniform. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising she cared for the wounded in a field hospital, although her wartime rescue work was done mainly as a city social worker.
Life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto
In October 1940 the German authorities ordered the creation of a ghetto in Warsaw, and in November they sealed it off. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded into about 1.3 square miles. Food rations were set far below what people needed to survive, and around 83,000 people died of hunger and disease between 1940 and mid-1942.
Then came the mass deportations. Between 22 July and 21 September 1942, SS and police units sent about 265,000 Jews from the ghetto to the Treblinka killing centre. In April 1943, the remaining fighters of the ghetto rose up against the final liquidation, a revolt the Germans needed almost a month to crush.
Two children sitting on a pavement in the Warsaw Ghetto. Scenes like this, of starving and orphaned children in the streets, were part of daily life inside the walls before the 1942 deportations.
How the children were smuggled out
Sendler and her colleagues obtained passes that let them into the ghetto, officially to check for contagious diseases such as typhus, which the Germans feared would spread. Inside, they met parents and asked them to make an impossible choice: to hand over their children to strangers, with no guarantee of seeing them again, in exchange for a chance that they might live.
The methods of escape were varied and dangerous. Small children were carried out in ambulances, sometimes sedated so they would not cry; others left hidden in sacks, boxes or toolboxes, through the courthouse on the edge of the ghetto, or through cellars and sewers. Older children who could speak Polish and pass as Christians were taught prayers and new names.
Once outside, each child needed forged documents, a safe place to live and money for food. According to Wikipedia's summary of the research, roughly a quarter were placed with Polish families and about three quarters with orphanages and convents, many run by Catholic nuns who took great risks of their own. In occupied Poland, hiding a Jew was punishable by death, often for the whole household.
From December 1942 the underground Żegota (Council to Aid Jews) gave the work money and structure. Sendler coordinated the welfare department's network from January 1943 and led Żegota's children's section from the autumn of that year.
The lists in the jars
Sendler knew that rescue was only half the task. If the children were to have their real names, families and faith back after the war, someone had to remember who they were. She and her co-workers kept coded records listing each child's original name alongside the new identity, and some of these lists were buried in jars in a friend's garden.
The image of the jars became famous decades later through Life in a Jar, a play created in 1999 by students at a high school in Uniontown, Kansas, with their teacher Norman Conard. Their research, and more than 200 performances, helped make her story known around the world.
Many reunions never happened. Most of the children's parents were murdered at Treblinka or elsewhere, and some children grew up with adoptive families or were placed in Jewish orphanages after the war.
A portrait of Irena Sendler in her younger years. She was in her early thirties when she began rescuing children from the ghetto.
Arrest, torture and escape
On 18 October 1943 the Gestapo came to her flat. She managed to pass the list of children to a friend, who hid it in her clothing. Sendler was taken to Gestapo headquarters and to Pawiak prison, where she was beaten repeatedly. She did not give up the names of her colleagues or the hiding places of the children.
She was sentenced to death. Żegota then raised a bribe: according to accounts gathered on Wikipedia, the money came via Maria Palester from Żegota chief Julian Grobelny, and the guards escorting Sendler to her execution let her go. Her name was then announced on lists of executed prisoners, and she spent the rest of the occupation living under a false identity, still helping the network.
Popular retellings often say that both of her legs were broken under torture and that she was left unconscious by a roadside. Those details come from later recollections and vary between versions; what is well documented is that she was badly beaten and that her injuries affected her for the rest of her life.
How many children did she save?
The figure of 2,500 comes from Sendler herself, who first mentioned it in 1979 and named two dozen other people who worked with her. Historians treat it with caution. A 1947 report by the Central Committee of Polish Jews spoke of "at least several dozen" children rescued by the welfare network, and the master list she said she handed to Jewish community leader Adolf Berman after the war has never been found.
None of this makes her less of a hero. It is a reminder that rescue in occupied Poland was a group effort: liaison women who carried children through the city, families who sheltered them, nuns, forgers and couriers, many of whose names are barely remembered. Sendler herself insisted she had done nothing special and often spoke of the others who had worked beside her.
One of the children was Michał Głowiński, later a well-known literary scholar. He survived the war as a child with her help and, when writing his memoir The Black Seasons, included the story at her insistence.
Irena Sendler in old age. She lived in Warsaw until her death on 12 May 2008, at the age of 98.
Recognition and legacy
Under communist rule, Sendler's wartime links to the Polish underground made her suspect, and her story was little told in Poland for decades. Recognition came slowly but steadily:
- 1946: Gold Cross of Merit for saving Jews.
- 1965: Recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations; a tree was planted in her honour in 1983.
- 1991: Honorary citizenship of Israel.
- 2003: The Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration, and the Jan Karski Award.
- 2007: Honoured by the Polish Senate and awarded the Order of the Smile, chosen by children.
Her own words, widely quoted, sum up how she saw it: "Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory."
Irena Sendler surrounded by visitors and flowers in her final years. Rescued children, students from the Life in a Jar project and well-wishers visited her in Warsaw.
What her story teaches
It is tempting to compare Sendler with Oskar Schindler, and the comparison helps people remember her. But her story is less about one remarkable person than about what ordinary professionals can do with ordinary tools. She used the access her job gave her, the paperwork she understood and the trust of colleagues to save lives inside a system designed to end them.
Visitors to Warsaw can learn more at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, built on the site of the former ghetto, and Yad Vashem's online database of the Righteous Among the Nations tells the stories of thousands of other rescuers.
Sources: Wikipedia: Irena Sendler (photos via Wikimedia Commons); United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Warsaw; Inspire More.
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