Life In A Jar, The Irena Sendler Story

This is an amazing true story (although it seems unbelievable) of a lesser known, Irena Sendler (in Polish- Irena Sendlerowa ).

First, what inspired this article to be written.

I received an email from a friend recently, it had been forwarded to me and several others. I almost deleted it; rarely going through the so many “forwards” containing “funny’s”, chain mail, etc. received. This one was short, and looked interesting. I wondered if it, or maybe parts of it, might even be true. You may have received the email as well; it’s going around the internets at the moment. This was the content of the email that I received from my friend:

The subject line of the email read simply:

“Irena”

The body of the email was this:

98 year old lady named Irena:
There recently was a death of a 98 year old lady named Irena.
During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.
She had an ulterior motive…
She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German).
Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger kids).
She also had a dog in the back, that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in, and out of the ghetto.
The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.
During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.
She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, and arms, and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.
After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunite the family.
Most of course had been gassed.
Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes, or adopted.
Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize….
She LOST.
Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.

I decided to research the subject of the email, Irena, to see if this person even existed since I hadn’t heard of the story before.

If she had existed, what parts, if any, of the contents in the email were true.

This is what I learned.

Did “Irena” Even Exist?

Irena Sendler did in fact exist, she passed away this year, on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98.

Irena Sendler, born on Febrary 15, 1910, was raised by her Catholic parents to respect and love people regardless of their ethnicity or social status. Her born name was Irena Krzyzanowska. Irena Sendler’s first husband was Mieczyslaw Sendler, and she later married Stefan Zgrzembski, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. One of the her sons died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of heart failure in 1999. Her daughter survives today. Irena’s father had been a physician. He died from typhus that he contracted during an epidemic in 1917. Irena’s father was the only doctor in his town near Warsaw who would treat the poor, mostly Jewish victims of this tragic disease, typhus.

As her father was dying, he told the then 7 year-old Irena,

“If you see someone drowning you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim.”

Words from her father that would shape her future… and that of many others.

After World War II the Communist government had suppressed any recognition of the courageous anti-fascist partisans, most of whom were also anti-Communists. Irena Sendler’s story and those of other courageous Poles were therefore buried, to be forgotten.

Irena’s courage and resourcefulness had been recognized by Israel back in 1965 when she was awarded the Yad Vashem medal given to Righteous Gentiles who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. At that time Poland’s Communist leaders would not allow her to travel to Israel, and she was unable to collect the award until 1983. In 1983 a tree was planted in Israel in Irena Sendler’s honor.

Irena Sender 1983 - Yad Vashem

But in general, the world remained silent and unknowing about Irena Sendler.

How The World Discovered Irena

Irena Sendler’s story remained largely unknown for several more years. She became the focus of wider interest after four students in the United States from Uniontown, Kansas, Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Jessica Shelton, were encouraged by their high school teacher, Norman Conard, in 1999 to investigate the life of Irena Sendler.

These students at their rural Uniontown, Kansas High School had been looking for a National History Day project. The National History Day Project was a year-long project for the National History Day Competition that would, among other things, extend the boundaries of the classroom to families in the community, contribute to the learning of history, and meet the classroom motto, “He who changes one person, changes the entire world.”

Their teacher Norman Conard provided them a short paragraph about Irena Sendler from a 1994 U.S. News and World Report story entitled “The Other Schindlers”, and the girls decided to research Irena Sendler’s life.

Their internet search in 1999 for Irena’s life provided just one web site that even mentioned Irena Sendler’s name. That was only nine years ago. One mention. Within the whole of the internet. My own name is on the internet more than once.

With the help and inspiration of their teacher Norm Conard, the students began to reconstruct the remarkable achievements of this forgotten hero of the Holocaust, Irena Sendler. Based on their findings, these students wrote and staged a play about this heroic woman, titled “Life in a Jar”, winning the 2000 Kansas state National History Day competition.

It is these “Life In A Jar” students who brought Irena’s story to worldwide attention.

The Kansas students assumed Irena Sendler must be dead and searched for her burial site while researching Irena’s life. To their joy and amazement, they discovered that she was still alive. Then 90-years-old, Irena was living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw.

In 2001, students Elizabeth, Megan, Sabrina and Jessica got on a plane and left from the United States to visit Poland with their teacher Norman Conard to personally meet with Irena Sendler in her Warsaw apartment.

“Your performance and work is continuing the effort I started over 50 years ago. You are my dearly beloved girls,”

wrote Irena Sendler in one of her letters to the girls. The photographs of the four girls stood by her bed. The “Life In A Jar” students would visit Irena in Warsaw, Poland on three more occasions. Their final visit with Irena was on May 3, 2008.

Irena, at the age of 98, would pass away on May 12, 2008 of pneumonia.

As of March 2008, there had been over 240 performances, gaining International Attention; first in Kansas, then throughout the United States, Canada, and Poland, as the “Life In A Jar” students continue even today to share Irena Sendler’s legacy and the “Life In A Jar” play with people all over the world.

Although the children Irena Sendler rescued had known her only by her code name, “Jolanta”, as Irena’s story became publicized, she began to receive calls from people who recognized her face from the photos: “I remember your face! You took me out of the Ghetto!”

Irena Sendlerowa is now a Polish national hero. As more Polish Righteous Gentiles have become inspired to break their silence, Poland is beginning to come to terms with the painful legacy of the war and the Holocaust.

Irena Is (Not) A Hero

Irena Sendlerowa was named a national hero by Poland in March 2007 for her secret underground work in the Warsaw ghetto. A hero, however, is a description of Irena she herself refuses to accept.

“The term ‘hero’ irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”

Despite risking her own life in order to save the 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi death camps, she always felt she should have done more. The people she saved total more than twice those sheltered by Oskar Schindler.

Even before the war, Irena had strong loyalties towards the Jewish community. In the 1930s, at Warsaw University, she stood up for her Jewish friends. Jews were forced to sit separately from “Aryan” students. One day, Irena went to sit on the Jewish side of the room. When the teacher told her to move, she answered, “I’m Jewish today.” She was expelled immediately. Decades later, under Communist rule, she was considered a subversive; her son and daughter were refused entry into Warsaw University.

During the war, Irena Sendler had coaxed Jewish parents and grandparents imprisoned in the “Warsaw Ghetto” to relinquish their children to her. She knew that the children would die in the Ghetto or in the death camps.

She takes the crying baby into her arms, turns her back on the hysterical mother, and walks off into the night. If she’s caught, she and the baby will die. “Promise me my child will live!” the mother cries desperately after her. She turns for a moment. “I can’t promise that. But I can promise that if he stays with you, he will die.”

Many parents would ask her why they should trust her. “You shouldn’t trust me,” she would agree. “But there’s nothing else you can do.”

She established a plan to smuggle the children past Nazi guards by putting them in body bags, saying they were dead or had typhus. She smuggled the children out by hiding them in ambulances; an ambulance driver who smuggled infants beneath the stretchers in the back of his van kept his dog beside him in the front seat, having trained the animal to bark to mask any cries from his hidden passengers. More children were smuggled through the sewer pipes or other underground passageways, wheeling them out on a trolley in suitcases or boxes, inside potato sacks, while still others were placed in coffins, even buried inside loads of goods. A mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox.

This, the time of the Holocaust, when so many abandoned the Jewish community to their fate, Irena Sendler felt she did so little.

Irena Learns To Swim

In 1939 the Nazis had swept through Poland and imprisoned the Jews in ghettos where they were starved to death or systematically murdered in killing camps.

At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in every district of the city. Initially, the canteens provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the destitute.

Then, through Irena, the canteens began providing clothing, medicine and money for the Jews. Irena saw the Jewish people “drowning” and resolved to do what she could to rescue as many as possible, especially the children. (shhh…) They were registered under fictitious Christian names; and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families whose children were removed from the camp were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis.

As a social worker, Irena Sendler had access to the 16-block area known as the Warsaw Ghetto, set up in November 1940 to segregate the city’s Jews.

In 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto. Social workers were no longer allowed to enter the ghetto. Fearing an epidemic, the Germans allowed only sanitation services to enter. The Ghetto was sealed with the Jewish families behind its walls, to await certain death. Irena Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue Jewish children. Through Zegota, Irena now had the funding, in addition to many other resources, to aid her underground effort in rescuing children.

Obtaining a Polish sanitary worker ID wasn’t a problem for the Polish conspirators. A pass from Warsaws Epidemic Control Department enabled Irena to continue entering the ghetto. Wearing nurses’ uniforms, they secretly carried in food, clothes, money and medicine, including a vaccine against typhoid fever. Sometimes they would go the ghetto two to three times a day; often rescuing… smuggling, a child out of the Warsaw Ghetto at their departure.

Zegota prepared false names and documents for the rescued children. The best were Catholic baptismal certificates provided by trusted priests. The smuggled children were first placed in apartments called “emergency rooms”, where the older children had to learn their new names. They were taught Christian prayers and how to make the sign of the cross, so that their Jewish heritage would not be suspected. They were then sent to Polish families, orphanages and convents. The children knew Irena only by her code name, “Jolanta”.

Life In A Jar

Irena Sendler noted the real names of each of the children rescued onto cigarette papers, as well as their temporary false names, and the location each child was hidden. Noting them twice for security, she sealed them in two glass bottles which she buried in a colleague’s garden next to an apple tree. This act is what led to the title of the play by the Uniontown, Kansas students, “Life In A Jar”.

Note however, that helping the Jews during this period in Poland was punished with torture and death. The Nazis did eventually become aware of Irena’s activities, and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested, imprisoned in the Pawiak Prison and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her both of her feet and both legs as well. They tortured her in their desperation for the names of the children brought out of the Ghetto, the people hiding them, and any other people involved with helping the Jews. Irena never provided them with the answers they brutally tried to obtain, willing to suffer and sacrifice  herself in order to protect the children.

It was a bribe by the Zegota team that saved Irena from her for-certain fate. A guard receiving the bribe faked her murder, and Irena Sendler was freed to live in hiding until the end of the war. The bribed guard recorded Irena’s name on the list of those who had been executed. On the following day, the Germans loudly proclaimed the news of her death.

Irena Sendler on May 1, 1948 in a Social Welfare Department vehicle.

After the war Irena dug up the bottles; the lists containing the children’s real names were handed to Jewish representatives. Attempts were made to reunite the children with their families, however most of the families had perished. Those children who had surviving relatives were returned to them after the war.

Rene Lichtman at 2 years old with his parents. Rene’s father was killed shortly after this photo was taken. Rene is one of the children Irena saved, pictured as an adult in photos below. (Second from left)

Of the remaining orphans, some 400 were taken to Israel with Adolph Berman, a leader in Zegota. Many others chose to stay with their adopted parents. Despite Irena Sendler’s efforts to trace them, some 400 to 500 children are still missing; presumably they either did not survive or they are living somewhere in Poland or elsewhere, perhaps unaware of their Jewish identity to this very day.

Below are just a few of the now grown children saved by Irena Sendler and the Zegota team, along with Irena herself. Clicking on any of the below images will bring it to a larger view. Mouse over images for description:

Irena’s comment and the connection with the kids from Kansas:

“My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me…. I can’t find the words to thank you, my dear girls… Before the day you have written the play ‘Life in a Jar’, nobody in my own country and few in the whole world knew about my person and my work during the war …”

Because of Irena Sendler, four Protestant Kansas students and a teacher, many more people now know “the value of one”.

The below video is of Irena Sendler meeting the students on their trip to Poland, as well as some of the children she saved, now grown, and bits of the play “Life In A Jar”.

In 2007, Irena Sendler was indeed nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, just as I had read in that “forward” email sent to me by my friend.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded:

“to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Irena passed away just recently, on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98.

In an interview earlier in 2007 with ABC News, Irena Sendler voiced some of her frustrations about how little anything has changed in the world:

“After the Second World War it seemed that humanity understood something, and that nothing like that would happen again. Humanity has understood nothing. Religious, tribal, national wars continue. The world continues to be in a sea of blood. But the world can be better, if there’s love, tolerance, and humility.”

Irena Sendler was laid to rest on May 15, 2008, as her casket was followed… by children.

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