Irena Sendler | Mother of Holocaust Children
I can’t explain why, but stories about Holocaust have continued to absorb my attention ever since. I think it was not only me, but many of us are also affected by these stories even if we are from another generation and different nationality.
Stories like the Beautiful Life, of Pope John Paul II, from time to time Diary of the Survivors or Victims are coming out and being publish. Stories of pain, suffering, grieving, and many heroic acts.
Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto. Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.
Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
Irena Sendler was held captive by the Nazzis and was severely tortured, just to reveal about their secret operation but she chose to remain silent and accepted her fate that they would kill her.
Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.
Mrs. Sendler died at 98 last May 12, 2008.
“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,”
Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.
