A True Heroine
Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under Antisemitism, Europe, Freedom, Freedom of Religion, Germany, History, Hitler, Holocaust, Human Rights, International, Irena Sendler, Israel, Jerusalem, Jews, Justice, Liberty, Poland, Racism, Religion, War, World War II, Yad Vashem, prejudice, violence | 1 Comment
In this day and age when the average person’s idea of a hero is a successful highly paid athlete, football, baseball, or soccer player, when the definition of real heroism has long lost its true meaning for so many, it is heartwarming to read the story of Irena Sendler:
Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who organized the rescue of some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis and was later honored by Yad Vashem memorial, has died.
Sendler’s daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, told The Associated Press her mother died at a Warsaw hospital Monday morning. She was 98.
Sendler had lived at a Warsaw nursing home run by the Catholic Brothers of St. John of God since 2003, but had been in the hospital since last month with pneumonia.
Sendler was born Irena Krzyzanowska in Warsaw on 15 Feb. 1910. As a social worker with Warsaw’s welfare department, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany’s brutal World War II occupation.
Records show Sendler’s team of some 20 people saved almost 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto’s sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and her assistants entered in search of children who could be smuggled out and be given a chance to survive by living as Catholics.
Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.
In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families – most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps – Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.
When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips – which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.
“It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child,” Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler’s team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2007. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”
After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.
In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles that the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem honored for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel, and she collected the award only in 1983.
Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler largely remained forgotten in her homeland. Only in her final years, confined to a nursing home, did she finally become one of Poland’s most respected figures, with President Lech Kaczynski and other politicians backing a campaign that put her name forward for the Nobel Peace Prize. [...]
Without any attempt to minimize their tremendous accomplishments, while fully recognizing the work, the hardship, the concentration and iron will it takes to achieve their athletic distinctions there is nothing heroic about athletes. True… their resolution, their tremendous drive, are to be envied and emulated but their achievements are nothing compared with those of simple, unassuming folks who will risk all and everything to shield another from oppression and certain death.
The Jewish Sages said that he who saves even one life has saved a whole universe. What then can be said about someone who endangered herself to save 2500 lives? How many universes, how many advances in the sciences, etc… will be made by those she rescued and their descendants?!?!? Who can say how many tens of thousands of lives those 2500 really represent? Mrs. Sendler acted not for personal glory, she did not expect the multitudes at a stadium to stand up and cheer… and they didn’t. She didn’t get paid millions for her deeds, in fact she didn’t get paid at all! She was arrested by the German murderers and would probably have perished in their claws as an immediate reward for her deeds, had the war not ended with the Nazis defeat two years later.
It took a long time for Poland to recognize Irena Sendler’s quiet greatness, it took a long time for Poland to acknowledge its own sometime complicity with the Nazi crimes against Jews. But… even in that bleakest of times, even surrounded by the almost general hatred of Jews, there were quite a few courageous individuals who put the welfare of those threatened with death above their own wellbeing. Many Poles have been recognized as Righteous Gentiles by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem for saving Jews during WWII. They acted unselfishly and at great peril at a time when in German-occupied Poland, all household members were punished by death if a hidden Jew was found in their house. This was the most severe legislation in occupied Europe. Out of 22,211 people recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, for their efforts in saving Jews, 6,066 were Polish. No other country came close to that number!
Who is a true hero, gentle reader? Only someone who will defy danger, someone who will stand up against overwhelming odds, someone who will not concern him or herself with one’s safety nor will look for glory and huge financial rewards while saving a universe!
As a child of Holocaust survivors, as someone who was never held by any of his grandparents, never met most of his uncles and aunts, as one who never saw his own older brother, all murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi hordes… as the emotions take over… I humbly thank you Irena Sendler!
Chaim
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One Response to “A True Heroine”
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What a modest and wonderful woman Sendler was!
Our young people need today should be emulating her instead of the morally-bankrupt personalities and celebrities they tend to worship.