Irena Sendler was a Catholic social worker in Warsaw who obtained a pass to enter the Jewish ghetto under the pretext of checking for typhus. What she was really doing was organizing one of the largest rescue operations of the Holocaust.
Working with a network that included the Ε»egota (the Council for Aid to Jews), Sendler smuggled approximately 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto between 1940 and 1943. The methods were extraordinarily creative and heartbreaking.
The Methods
Infants were sedated and placed inside toolboxes, suitcases, and even coffins. Older children were led through the sewer system or through the basement of a courthouse that straddled the ghetto wall. One ambulance driver kept a dog in his vehicle trained to bark whenever they passed through checkpoints β the barking covered the sounds of crying children hidden in compartments.
Each child was given a new identity and placed with a Polish family, in a convent, or in an orphanage. Sendler recorded each child's real name and new identity on slips of tissue paper, which she preserved in glass jars buried under an apple tree in her colleague's garden.
Torture and Survival
In October 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. She was taken to the notorious Pawiak prison, where she was tortured. Her legs and feet were broken. She refused to reveal any names β not of the children, not of her network. She was sentenced to death.
Ε»egota bribed a guard to let her escape on the day of her execution. For the rest of the war, she lived under a false identity but continued her rescue work.
After the war, Sendler dug up the jars. She spent years trying to reunite the children with their families β but in most cases, the parents had been killed at Treblinka. Of the 2,500 children she saved, most of their parents had perished.
The Communist government suppressed her story for decades. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 but lost to Al Gore. She died in 2008 at the age of 98.