Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mother Teresa
Archbishop Oscar Romero
Dorothy Day
Martin Luther King Jr.
Father Ben Beltran.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
David Nitschmann
May the lamb that was slain receive the reward of HIs suffering
Irena Sendler: Social Worker, Emissary & Hero of The Warsaw Ghetto
Prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Irena Sendler was your typical social worker laboring for Warsaw's Department of Social Wellbeing. As an administrator, she oversaw the organization's programs that aided many poor, Jewish families.
Once Hitler's forces had seized control of the country, she immediately began forging thousands of documents giving Jewish families new identities and legal emigration status. Then, in 1940, the German military partitioned off sixteen blocks of Warsaw, an area equal to the size of New York City's Central Park, creating the Warsaw Ghetto. Over 400,000 Jews representing 30% of Warsaw's population were forced inside this settlement only 2% of the city's size. The ghetto's chief purpose was to contain the Jewish population until they could be transferred to extermination camps. As a result, no one was allowed to leave the ghetto, which was surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, and very little food or health supplies were permitted inside, which led to rampant disease and starvation.
Around this time, ZEGOTA, Poland's underground resistance, approached Irena and asked her to lead the organization's Division of Child Welfare. She agreed and organized a team of approximately 25 people who were committed to saving the lives of the ghetto's children. In order to gain access to the ghetto, she leveraged her position as a social worker to gain a permit which authorized her to conduct routine inspections of the ghetto's health and sanitation conditions. Nazi officials permitted this - not because they cared about the Jews - but because they feared that unmitigated degradation of the ghetto might lead to typhus outbreaks that would harm them. During her routine inspections, Irena smuggled children out of the ghetto in ambulances, coffins, trunks, suitcases, toolboxes, burlap sacks, secret passages and underground sewer canals. On several occasions she even utilized a specially trained dog to bark and deflect guards' attention from weeping infants hidden in bags. Once the children had safely escaped, Irena's team provided them with documentation granting them German identities and new homes in the form of orphanages, foster homes and convents who were part of the polish resistance.
In 1943, an informant alerted the Gestapo to Irena's activities and she was swiftly arrested, but not before she was able to bury a jar containing the true identities of the children she had saved. At this time Poland was notorious for its strict penalties related to aiding Jews. In keeping with its reputation, Irena was sent to the infamous Pawiak Prison where she was severely tortured and permanently disabled. Despite her brutal interrogations, however, she never forfeited any information related to her conspirators or the children she rescued. During her time in prison, she drew a great deal of strength from a picture of Jesus she found under her cot which read, "Jesus, I Trust In Thee." On the day of her execution, a guard who had been bribed by ZEGOTA helped her escape and Irena remained in hiding until the end of the war.
In the post-war era, Irena was the target of continual harassment by Poland's newfound government as it fell into the hands of the Soviet Union, which was not amused by her former action against the state. She was branded a Facsist, blacklisted and her story was deliberately buried. Despite the opposition, Irena spent much of her time attempting to reunite the children she had saved with their families, but this proved to be a difficult task as she discovered that nearly all of their parents were executed during Warsaw's occupation. In fact, more than 200,000 of the ghetto's residents had been moved to Treblinka, a nearby extermination camp, and over 100,000 had died as a result of deplorable living conditions. Nonetheless, over the course of two years Irena and her team had managed to rescue over 2,500 children from certain death - all of whom survived the war. This was confirmed by the small jar of names she was able to bury before her arrest.
Due to the government's efforts to suppress Irena's story, she went unrecognized for many years until 1965 when the organization Yad Vashem honored her with one of Israel's most prestigious awards "Righteous Among the Nations." Decades later, Irena's story became more popular as she was honored by the Pope and nominated on several occasions for the Nobel Peace Prize. Ironically, on May 12, 2008, Irena passed away while under the care of a nurse who happened to be one of the very children she rescued.
"Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal." -Irena Sendler
