Irena Sendler

Raised to respect and love people no matter their religion, social status and beliefs, Irena Sendler was a Catholic social worker who saved thousands of Jewish children during the Holocaust. She passed away in 2008 but is a massive inspiration for many people for her courage, kind- heart and resilience. 

Irena Sendler was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1910 on 15th February. Her father, Dr. Stanisław Krzyżanowski, was the only local docter. During the typhus epidemic of 1917, he went out and treated the communities who lived in poverty, mainly Jews. Unfortunatly, when Irena was just seven years old, he passed away due to typhus. She later recalled her father saying, on his deathbed: "If you see someone drowning, you must try and save them. Even if you cannot swim.". After Dr. Krzyżanowski's death, the Jewish community leaders offered Irena's mother, Janina, the money to pay for Irena's education, however Janina declined this offer.  

When Poland went under Nazi rule on 1st September 1939, Irena, now a social services directer helped hide her Jewish friends. The Warsaw Ghetto was built in 1940,  to house Jews before dragging them off to a probable death at a Death Camp. At this point the social worker knew that something absolutely awful was going to happen. 

"Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was ordinary"
~ Irena Sandler

Irena became in charge of a secret organisation that rescued Jewish children from the ghetto, gave them fake IDs and gave them to foster parents. The organisation was called Zegotta and her code name was Jolanta. Throughout her time saving children, Irena saved the lives of about 2,500 Jewish children. She wrote their names, biological parents and their new foster parents and addresses on tissue paper and buried them in jars in her neighbours garden under a tree. Eventually, there were two glass jars. Only Irena knew where the jars were! With the help of Zegotta's agents, Irena would go into Warsaw Ghetto as a nurse and smuggle them out. The older children were hidden under stretchers and taken out secretly in ambulances, they were also smuggled out in suitcases, sacks and sometimes even coffins. Occasionally, she would take two bags in put some babies in there and walk out, when she did that, she would take two large dogs. Doing this, no questions were asked by the Nazi officers! Irena once said that the question that she would be asked a lot by heartbroken mothers, was- "What is the guarantee that they will survive?", to which Irena would reply- "None. I don't even know if I will get out of the ghetto alive today. But I will tell you something, if they stay here, they will certainly die." Once out of the ghetto, the children would be renamed, taught Christian prayers and either sent to foster parents or sent to Christian orphanages. Many of the children's parents died at  Treblinka Camp, but those who survived were reunited with their children after the war. Elzbieta Ficowska was only a few months old when she was given to Irena. She never saw her mother again but said that she had three mothers: her natural one, her foster one and Irena Sendler.   

In 1943, Irena was caught by the Germans. She was interrogated and tortured to reveal the names of her fellow agents but she gave only their names that they had practised and arranged to say if anyone was arrested. The woman was sentenced to execution by the firing squad. Yet someone bribed her executioner to help her escape. Irena was left near to death in a forest. A day later, the Nazis pasted posters in Poland telling the public of her 'death'! For the rest of the war, she lived in hiding. When the war was over and Poland became Communist, she was again tortured, causing her to give birth prematurely to a son who died shortly after. Irena did become a Communist. 

In 2008, the 'Female Schindler' passed away aged 98 years old, having said that her only regret was that she could not save more children than she did. During her life she married three times and had three children (of which only two survived). Also she won numerous awards and she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize!