Irena Sendler, or Irena Sendlerova (née Krzyzanowska) is a Polish resistance activist who rescued more than 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. her life seems something unreal, which came to us from the pages of books or movie screens, but this brave woman really did what she did. Every time she took or took a child out of the ghetto, she risked her own life and the lives of her loved ones, but still she never backed down, she was not afraid, giving thousands of innocent children a ticket to life.

Irena was born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw to Stanisław Krzyżanowski (1877-1917) and Janina Karolina Grzybowska (1885-1944). Before the birth of his daughter, Stanisław took an active part in underground activities during the revolution of 1905, he was a member of the PPS (Polish Party of Socialists), he was a doctor by profession. Krzyzhanovsky treated mainly poor Jews, whom other doctors simply refused to help. As a result, in 1917, he died of typhus, which he contracted from his patients. After his death, the Jewish community, which highly appreciated the merits of Dr. Krzyzhanovsky, decided to help his family by offering to pay for Irena's education until she reaches the age of 18. The girl's mother refused to take their money, as she understood how hard many of her husband's patients live, while she told this story to her daughter. Perhaps this is how gratitude and love for these people settled in the girl’s heart, who in the future gave life to thousands of children.

Irena Sendler

After graduating from school, Irena entered the Warsaw University in the department of Polish literature. Then, while studying at the university, she joined the Polish Party of Socialists, as she wanted to continue the work of her father. In pre-war Poland, prejudice against Jews was quite common, while many Poles did not support them and opposed racial prejudice. For example, during Irena’s studies at the University of Warsaw, there were special “Jewish benches” in its lecture halls, they were installed for Jewish students, and they were located in the last rows of university auditoriums, they were also called the “bench ghetto”. Very often Irena Sendler and her friends who shared her views defiantly sat on these benches together with Jewish students. And after Polish nationalists beat up Irena's Jewish friend, she crossed out the seal on her student card and was suspended from school for 3 years. This was Irena Sendler before the outbreak of World War II.

By the time the war began and the occupation of Poland by the Nazi troops, Irena lived in Warsaw (before that she worked in the city departments of social protection of Otwock and Tarchin). At the very beginning of the occupation, back in 1939, Irena Sendler began to help the Jews. Together with the underground, she produced and distributed to the Jewish population about 3 thousand fake Polish passports, which saved their owners first from falling into the ghetto, and then from death.

Until 1939, the Jewish quarter of Warsaw occupied about a fifth of the city, the townspeople themselves called it the northern region and the center of Jewish life in the pre-war capital of Poland, although Jews then lived in other parts of the city. After the occupation of Poland by the Nazis, they thought about creating a ghetto in Warsaw. Their plans began to be put into practice in March 1940, it was then that Governor General Hans Frank decided to create the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis organized it on the territory of the city, where a large percentage of the Jewish population historically lived. 113,000 Poles were evicted from this area, and 138,000 Jews were settled in their place. By the end of 1940, 440 thousand people already lived in the ghetto (about 37% of the total population of Warsaw), while the ghetto area was only 4.5% of the area of ​​the entire city.

Children in the Warsaw Ghetto

Living conditions in the ghetto were monstrous, there was a huge crowding of the population, and food rations were tiny, they were designed to ensure that the inhabitants of the ghetto died of starvation. So in the second half of 1941, the food ration for Jews was only 184 kilocalories per day. But thanks to illegally supplied foodstuffs to the Warsaw ghetto, real consumption here averaged 1125 kilocalories per day.

The death rate in the ghetto was quite high, while the Nazis were afraid of epidemics that could arise among the weakened Jewish inhabitants, after which they could spread to other occupied territories. It was for this reason that at that time Irena Sendler, already an employee of the Warsaw Health Department, could visit the ghetto for sanitization and other measures aimed at preventing epidemics. In particular, she checked the inhabitants of the ghetto for signs of typhus, the spread of this disease was very much feared by the Germans.

In 1942, Irena began to cooperate with the Polish underground organization Żegota - the Council for Assistance to Jews (her pseudonym in the organization is Jolanta). Visiting the ghetto, Sendler was literally torn apart in order to help as many people in need as possible. According to her, there was a real hell inside, hundreds of people in the ghetto were dying right on the streets, and the whole world silently looked at it. Irena organized a whole system of assistance for the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, using the money of the city administration and charitable Jewish organizations for this purpose. She smuggled food, coal, clothing, and essentials into the ghetto. In the summer of 1942, when the mass deportation of Jews from the ghetto to the death camps began, she realized that it was time to act decisively, there was no more time to waste.

Irena on Christmas Eve 1944

By that time, the Polish underground organization Żegota had organized a large-scale campaign to save Jewish children. Irena Sendler, who knew many people in the ghetto, became an important component of this action, ensuring its successful implementation. On the territory of the ghetto, Irena went from house to house, barracks, cellars and everywhere she tried to find families with children. According to the recollections of the heroine, the most difficult thing was to persuade the parents to give up their children. They asked Irena - can she guarantee their safety? And what could she guarantee them, only that if the children remained in the ghetto, inevitable death would await, and outside its walls they would have a chance for salvation. In the end, the parents gave her children, and literally the next day they could become victims of massacres in the ghetto or be sent to death camps.

Irena was able to use the fascists' fear of an epidemic in the ghetto and found various roads leading children out of this hell. At the same time, she did not act alone, in all the stories about her activities in the ghetto, other people are mentioned, there were really many of these people. For example, a truck driver is known, in the back of which babies were taken out of the ghetto under a tarpaulin. The truck carried disinfectants to the ghetto. The truck driver had a dog that he put in the cab with him. According to one version, he trained her to bark when leaving the ghetto, according to another, he simply stepped on the dog's foot, after which it barked plaintively. The barking was supposed to drown out the crying of small children if it was heard at that moment from the back of a truck. Helped by Sendler and volunteer nurses, who gave the kids a small dose of sleeping pills, after which, along with the corpses, they took the children to the city. There was also the famous tram number 4 "tram of life", as it was also called, it ran throughout Warsaw and made stops inside the ghetto. The nurses hid babies in perforated cardboard boxes to prevent them from suffocating under the seats of this tram, shielding them with their bodies. In addition, Jewish children were taken out of the ghetto in bales and garbage bags with bloody bandages and garbage destined for city dumps. That is how, in July 1942, Irena Sendler took her adopted daughter Elzhbetta Ficowska, who was only 6 months old, out of the ghetto in a trash basket. The girl's parents were killed by the Nazis.

Warsaw Ghetto: Jews cross the bridge that connects parts of the ghetto, photo: waralbum.ru

Toddlers were taken out of the ghetto, also using sewers. Once Irena was able to hide the child even under her skirt. Older children were often led through secret passages through the houses that adjoined the ghetto. Such operations were calculated literally in seconds. For example, one boy rescued from the Warsaw ghetto said that he, hiding, waited around the corner of the house until the German patrol passed, after which, having counted to 30, he ran across the street to the sewer hatch, which by that time was already open from below. After that, he jumped into the manhole and through the sewers went outside the ghetto.

For such actions, all those involved were expected to die, but Irena and her comrades took the risk, because they understood that if the kids remained in the ghetto, they would almost certainly die. Sendler calculated that in order to save one child from the ghetto, about 12 people would be needed outside of it, working in complete secrecy. They were drivers of various vehicles, and Warsaw employees who took out ration cards, and numerous nurses. We also needed Polish families or religious parishes that were ready to host Jewish children, giving them shelter and food for a while. Rescued children were given new names and placed in sympathetic families, nunneries, hospitals and orphanages. Later, Irena recalled that no one refused her to shelter the rescued children.

This small round-faced woman with a smile on her face was not only a very brave person, but also a very responsible worker and a good organizer. For each child rescued from the Warsaw ghetto, she issued a special card, which indicated his former name, as well as a new fictitious name, the address of the foster family and information about which family the children originally belonged to. Addresses and numbers of orphanages were also entered here, if children were transferred to them. Irena placed all the data about the rescued children in glass jars, which she buried under a tree in her friend's garden. All this was done so that after the end of the war, children could be returned to their families. It was only after the war that it became known that there was no one to return many children to. The Nazis killed not only their parents, but also relatives. But even so, the information that Sendler kept was not in vain, as the children received their history, knew who they were and where they came from, kept in touch with their past and their people.

Jews being driven by SS soldiers to the loading area (Umschlagplatz) during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, photo: waralbum.ru

Still, Sendler's luck couldn't last forever. In the second half of October 1943, she was captured by the Gestapo on the denunciation of the previously arrested owner of the laundry, which housed one of the points of secret meetings. After her arrest, she was kept in the "Serbia" building of the Pawiak prison. In prison, she was terribly tortured, but she did not betray any of her acquaintances, and also did not tell about the saved Jewish children. As soon as the Germans found her archives buried in glass jars, the rescued children would have to say goodbye to life. Ultimately, Irena was sentenced to death, but she was saved. The guards who were supposed to accompany her to the execution were bribed by "Zhegota" and on November 13, 1943 she was secretly taken out of prison, while in official documents she was listed as executed. Until the end of the war, she hid under a false name, without ceasing to help Jewish children.

Irena Sendler's list included more than 2,500 children rescued from the Warsaw ghetto, this list was about twice as long as Oskar Schindler's famous list. After the war, she unearthed her hiding place and gave her lists to Adolf Berman, chairman of the Central Committee of Polish Jews (from 1947 to 1949). With the help of these lists, the committee staff managed to return some of the children to their relatives, and the orphans were placed in Jewish orphanages, from where they were later able to go to Israel.

The list of rescued children was brought to Irene in 1965 honorary title"Righteous among the Nations" and the medal of the same name, however, she had to wait another 18 years before she could visit Israel in order to plant her tree on the alley of memory. The authorities of communist Poland simply did not let the woman out of the country. In 2003, Irena Sendler was awarded the Order of the White Eagle - the highest state award of Poland, she was also an honorary resident of Warsaw and the city of Tarczyn. In addition, in 2007 she was awarded the international Order of Smile, becoming the oldest recipient. The Order of the Smile is an award given to famous people bringing joy to children. Irena Sendler was very proud of this order. Also in 2007, she was nominated by the President of Poland and the Prime Minister of Israel for Nobel Prize world for saving almost 2,500 children's lives, but the award committee did not change the rules according to which it is issued for actions committed over the past two years.

Irena Sendler in 2005

Irena Sendler lived a long and interesting life, who died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98. She definitely had something to be proud of, while she never boasted about what she did during the Second World War, considering it absolutely normal and mundane - to help those who were dying. For her, this has always been a sore subject, Irena was sure that she could do even more for them ...

Based on materials from open sources

In the fall of 2008, Irena Sendler's Braveheart was shown in the United States. He talked about a woman who died quietly in May of that year in Warsaw at the age of 99. Most of the viewers, while watching the picture, could not hold back their tears, the story of Irena Sendler was so touching and tragic.

Childhood

Irena Kshizhanovskaya was born into the family of a doctor who was a member of the PPS, who ran a hospital and often provided medical assistance to poor Jews who were unable to pay for treatment. Even before the birth of his daughter, he was an active participant in anti-government actions. When Irene was 7 years old, her father died of typhus, having contracted it from patients. The Jewish community, highly appreciating the merits of Dr. Krzyzhanovsky, decided to help his family by offering to pay for Irena's education until she reaches the age of 18. The girl's mother refused, because she knew how hard many of her husband's former patients live, but she told her daughter about it. So, gratitude and love forever settled in Irena's heart, which later gave life to thousands of children.

At the university, the girl joined the Polish Socialist Party, as she wanted to continue her father's work.

In 1932, Irena married Mieczysław Sendler, but the marriage did not last long, although they did not file an official divorce.

Feat

When the Holocaust began in Poland, Irena Sendler was an employee of the Warsaw Health Authority. Along with this, she was a member of the Polish underground organization "Zhegota", which was engaged in helping Jews.

By virtue of professional activity a young woman regularly visited the Warsaw ghetto and helped sick children. Using this cover, Irena Sendler and other members of the "Zhegota" rescued 2,500 Jewish babies, who were then transferred to monasteries, private families and orphanages.

According to the recollections of participants in those events, babies were placed in boxes with holes, after drinking sleeping pills, and then they were taken away from the ghetto in cars that delivered disinfectants. As for the older children, they were carried out in bags and baskets, taken out through the basements of houses and buildings adjacent to the area reserved for Jewish habitation.

Arrest

Irena Sendler also made sure that after the war the rescued children could find their parents. She wrote their names on slips of paper and put them in a glass jar, which she buried in a friend's garden.

In 1943, Irena Sendler was arrested, the reason was an anonymous denunciation. A young woman was tortured, trying to find out who from her entourage led the Resistance movement or simply belonged to its underground organization. At the same time, Irena was shown a thick folder with denunciations and reports about her activities, signed by people she knew well. The goal of the Nazis was to find out the names of other participants in the children's rescue operations and the places where the children were hidden. Despite the beatings, the fragile Irena did not betray her comrades-in-arms and did not tell the Gestapo where the lists with the names of little Jews were located, since in this case they would have been sent to and died.

"Execution" and escape

Failing to achieve a result, the Nazis sentenced Irena to death. Fortunately, Sendler survived - members of the anti-fascist resistance in Poland saved her by bribing the guards. Those, in turn, reported to the command that the execution had taken place, so Irena was not wanted.

According to the recollections of the woman, before the execution she was summoned for the last interrogation. The soldier accompanying her did not bring Irena to the Gestapo building, but pushed her into an alley and ordered her to run. There were Polish underground workers who took her to a safe place. “In memory” of her stay in Nazi dungeons, Irene was left with poor health, and she spent the end of her life in a wheelchair.

Mission Completion

Irene Sendler had to go into hiding until the very end of the war. After the liberation of Poland, she was able to pass the data on the rescued children to Adolf Berman, who from 1947 to 1949 was chairman of the Central Committee of the Jews of Poland. Thanks to a long search, it was possible to reunite the families that became victims of the Holocaust. As for the orphaned children, after a long ordeal, they were finally transferred to Israel.

Life in the postwar years

It would seem that with the advent of peace in Europe, the brave heart of Irena Sendler can calm down, and she will finally live a calm family life. However, fate decided to deal her another blow: the state security organs of the PPR found out about her connections with the Home Army and began to persecute her. In 1949, during a tough interrogation, a pregnant Irena gave birth prematurely to a child who died a few days later.

belated recognition

Although over time, the Polish authorities left Irena Sendler alone, she felt the hostile attitude of the authorities towards her person until the fall of the communist regime. So, when in 1965 Israel's Yad Vashem decided to award Irena Sendler the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations, she was not allowed to visit the country where the boys and girls she had once saved lived, who had already grown up and considered her their second mother.

Only in 1983, the Polish authorities lifted the ban on her travel abroad, and Irena Sendler was able to visit Israel, where she planted her tree on the alley of memory.

And even after that, few people in the world knew that an old woman lives in a modest apartment in Warsaw, who has accomplished a feat that deserves all the highest awards and honors. However, fate wanted Irena Sendler to live to see the day when her story is known in different parts of the world.

Moreover, everything happened by pure chance in 1999, and the children again became the initiator - four schoolgirls from the American town of Uniontown. They were preparing a report for the History Day project, and the teacher showed them a five-year-old newspaper article titled "The Other Schindler." The interested girls began to look for information about Irena Sendler and found that she was alive. With the help of their relatives and teachers, they wrote the play Life in a Bank, which was staged in various theaters in the United States, Canada, and later in Poland. The girls even came to Warsaw, where they saw their idol. Their friendship with Irena Sendler continued for several years, during which they repeatedly visited Mother

Awards

The merits of Irena Sendler were very belatedly appreciated by the Polish government, which in 2003 awarded her the Order of the White Eagle. Before Sendler, European monarchs, including Peter the Great, famous military leaders and the Pope, became holders of this highest award. The order was restored in Poland only in 1992, and among those awarded over the past 24 years, hardly anyone was as worthy of it as Mrs. Sendler.

In addition, a year before Irena's death, the Prime Minister of Israel proposed to the Nobel Committee to award her the Peace Prize. Sendler's award did not take place, as the committee at that time did not begin to change the rules that require awarding an award for actions that have been committed within the past two years.

As one of the Polish journalists wrote, "the prize has been dishonored." Those presenting it went around the most deserving person to honor Al Gore for his presentation on global warming.

And in 2007, Pani Irena was awarded the Order of a Smile medal. As always in Irena's life, children intervened: she was presented as a contender for an award by a boy, Shimon Plotsennik from Zielona Góra. The Order of Smile was established in Poland in 1968 and is given to people who bring joy to children. In 1979, the award was given international status, and since then applicants for it have been selected by a commission consisting of representatives of 24 countries.

Irena Sendler's Braveheart movie

The motion picture, which has already been mentioned, was filmed in Latvia. When American journalists told Irena that they were going to make a film about her life during the war years, she said she agreed. At the same time, the woman asked that the picture be true and show the Americans what that war really was, what the Warsaw ghetto looked like and what happened there. The role of Irena Sendler in the film was played by New Zealand actress Anna Paquin, who in 1994 was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. According to the audience, the film turned out to be very poignant and truthful. The picture was also liked by Irena Sendler's daughter, Yanina, who was initially against the idea of ​​creating a cinematic version of her mother's biography.

Resistance movement in Poland

Talking about the feat of Sendler, it should be understood that a courageous woman could not act alone. According to Pani Irena herself, to save one child, she needed the help of at least 12 people: drivers, medical workers, security guards, shelter workers, officials who issue fake documents, and others. The role of Polish nuns was quite special. It is known that 500 children rescued by Irena Sendler could only survive thanks to their help. At the same time, many sisters paid for their Christian humanism, shown in relation to children of another religion, with their lives and even became martyrs. So, in 1944, in the Warsaw cemetery, the Nazis doused with gasoline and burned alive a group of nuns who helped Jews.

No less touching is the story of how Wojciech Zhukavsky and Aleksander Zelverowicz hid 40 children from the ghetto in the zoo, where they had to hide among enclosures with animals.

Now you know who Irena Sendler was, a film about which you should definitely watch, especially since it is available in Russian translation.

This letter has been circulated on social media.
I just copied it from here http://www.tovievich.ru/news/12.02.2010/1715.htm, because I was inspired by the history of her life, which they began to talk about a lot in the context of receiving / not receiving the Nobel Prize.
And this is also a story that every day someone works miracles and performs feats ...

The fate of Irina Sandler is somewhat close to the fate of Janusz Korczak. Fortunately, unlike Korczak, Irina Sandler was not tortured in a concentration camp, she lived for almost 100 years and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As usual, other people received the award.
But Nobel laureates come and go, but the ascetics and their deeds remain in the historical memory of the saved world. Let this memory become a part of the personal-biographical memory of each of us.
VC.

Recently, at the age of 98, a woman named Irina died. During World War II, Irina received a permit to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumber/welder. She had "ulterior motives" for it. Being German, she knew about the plans of the Nazis regarding the Jews. At the bottom of the tool bag, she began to carry the children out of the ghetto, and in the back of the truck she had a bag for older children. She also drove a dog there, which she trained to bark when the German guards let the car in and out through the gates of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, did not want to mess with the dog, and its barking covered the sounds that children could make.

During this activity, Irina managed to take out of the ghetto and thereby save 2,500 children. She was caught; the Nazis broke her legs and arms and severely beat her. Irina kept a record of the names of all the children she carried, she kept the lists in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to find all possible surviving parents and reunite families. But most of them ended their lives in the gas chambers. The children she helped were placed in orphanages or adopted. Last year, Irina Sandler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not chosen. Al Gore got it for a slideshow on global warming. I am making my small contribution by forwarding this letter to you. I hope you do the same. More than 60 years have passed since the end of World War II in Europe.

_____________________________________________________
Irena Sendler (Irena Krzyzanowska) was born in Otwock on February 15, 1910. Her father was a doctor in charge of a hospital in Otwock.
The daughter of a doctor, she grew up in a home that was open to anyone who was sick or in need, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. In lecture halls at the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish language and literature, she and her associates deliberately sat on benches "for the Jews." (In the 1930s, special benches for Jewish students were installed in the last rows of University auditoriums in Poland in the 1930s (the so-called lavkow ghetto - "bench ghetto"). As a sign of protest, they and non-Jews who supported them listened to lectures standing up. (http:// www.eleven.co.il/article/15411).The university authorities fled "ahead of the father" Adolf Hitler. A few years later he himself came to Poland to personally supervise their amateur activities).
When her Jewish friend was beaten up by nationalist thugs, Irina crossed out the stamp on her student card that allowed her to sit in "Aryan" seats. For this, she was suspended from school for three years. Such was Irina Sendler by the time the Germans invaded Poland.
Irina was, as her friend said, "selfless by birth, not education." Of course, she inherited good genes. Her great-grandfather, a Polish rebel, was exiled to Siberia. Her father died of typhus in 1917, contracted from patients his colleagues avoided treating.
(Irina recalled her father's parting words, spoken shortly before her death: "If you see that someone is drowning, you need to jump into the water to save, even if you can't swim") Many of them were Jews. The Jewish community offered financial assistance to her needy mother to pay for young Irina's education.
Like many socially active people in pre-war Poland, Ms. Sendler was a member of the Socialist Party, not, as she said, because of her political convictions, but because it combined compassion for her with an aversion to the power of money. Her motivation was not related to any religion. She acted "z potrzeby serca", at the call of her heart.
Under the Nazi occupation, the Jews of Warsaw were herded like cattle into the city's ghetto: four square kilometers for about 400,000 souls.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1950450/Irena-Sendler.html
Even before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp began, death in the ghetto was a daily routine. But, paradoxically, there was also a crack for hope. Poverty and a half-starved existence (the monthly portion of bread was two kilograms) created ideal conditions for the spread of typhus, an epidemic of which could also threaten the Germans. Therefore, the Nazis allowed Mrs. Sendler and her colleagues access to the heavily guarded ghetto to distribute medicine and vaccinations.
And this "legal" loophole allowed her to save more Jews than the much more famous Oskar Schindler. It was extremely dangerous. Some children managed to be smuggled out in trucks, or in trams, returning empty to the base. More often, however, they were led through secret passages from buildings in the surrounding ghettos.
Children were given new names and placed in nunneries, sympathetic families, orphanages and hospitals. Those who were older and could speak were taught to be baptized so as not to arouse suspicion of their Jewish origin. Babies were sedated to keep them from crying when they were surreptitiously carried out. A medical van driver taught his dog how to bark loudly to drown out the crying of babies he hauled out under the bottom of the van.
Operations were calculated in seconds. One rescued boy told how he, hiding, waited around the corner of the house until the German patrol passed, then counted to 30, ran headlong into the street to the sewer hatch, which by that moment had been opened from below. He jumped down there and was taken out of the ghetto through the sewer pipes.
According to other sources, She got a job as a plumber welder in the ghetto. First, she went to a plumbing store, where she bought herself a tool. Then I stowed it neatly in my bag so that there was enough space. At the bottom of this bag, she carried the children out of the ghetto. For older children, she had a bag.
Irina Sandler rode in a truck, where a dog was sitting in the back seat, which always barked when the truck was let out of the ghetto gate. The soldiers could not learn anything, because they were afraid of the dog, and because of its barking, they could not learn anything about the children.
Irina Sendler later recalled what a terrible choice she had to face Jewish mothers, whom she offered to part with their children. They asked if she could guarantee that the children would be saved. Of course, there could be no question of any guarantees, not to mention the fact that each time there was no certainty that it would be possible to get out of the ghetto at all. The only certainty was that if the children had remained, they would almost certainly have died. Irina said: "I witnessed terrible scenes when, for example, the father agreed to part with the child, but the mother did not. The next day it often turned out that this family had already been sent to a concentration camp." She calculated that it would take 12 people outside the ghetto, working in complete secrecy, to save one Jewish child: vehicle drivers, priests issuing fake baptismal certificates, employees getting ration cards, but most of all these were families or religious parishes, who could shelter the fugitives. And the punishment for helping Jews was immediate execution.
But what was even more dangerous, Ms. Sendler tried to keep records of the children's origins in order to help them later find their families. These entries were made on pieces of tissue paper, a stack of which she kept on her nightstand so that she could quickly throw them out of the window if the Gestapo were to turn up.
The Nazis did indeed arrest her. 11 Gestapo men raided on the night of October 20, 1943. Irina wanted to throw a pack out of the window, but saw that the house was surrounded by the Germans. Then she threw a pack to her friend and went to open the door herself, and she hid the pack under her arm. They didn't take her.
But they, unable to find the documents that her friend was hiding, considered that she was a small cog, and not the central figure of the ghetto rescue network. Under torture, she did not reveal anything.
The Nazis held Irina in the Pawiak prison, where she was tortured and then sentenced to death. It is also said that in prison she worked in the prison laundry and, together with other similar prisoners, spoiled the linen of German soldiers, which they washed. When the Germans discovered this, they lined up the women and shot every second woman.)
Irina Sendler escaped execution.
Her name was added to the list of those executed; she was officially executed in early 1944.
and all the records of the origin of the children were buried in the ground in glass jars (under the apple tree in her friend's garden)
For the rest of the war, Mrs. Sendler lived under an assumed name.
She never wanted to be called a heroine. She said, "I still feel guilty that I didn't do more." In addition, she felt that she was a bad daughter, risking the life of her elderly mother, a bad wife and mother. Her daughter, in order to be able to see her, once even had to ask to be allowed to visit the orphanage where her mother worked after the war.
She also faced the death penalty in post-war Poland for having been funded by the Polish Government-in-Exile in London during the war and aiding Home Army soldiers. Both the Polish Government in London and the Home Army were then considered imperialist puppets. In 1948, when she was in her last month of pregnancy, interrogations by the secret police cost her the life of her second child, born prematurely. She was "restricted to travel abroad", and her children were not allowed to enter the full-time department of the University. "What sins have you taken on your conscience, Mom?" asked her daughter.
(In the USSR and, apparently, in the countries of "people's democracy", to which post-war Poland also belonged, permission was required from the "security agencies" under the ruling communist parties to travel abroad. And there were black lists of those who were not allowed to leave regardless of what. They were "not allowed to travel abroad")
Only in 1983, the Polish authorities lifted her travel ban and allowed her to come to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her honor at the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum of the Catastrophe of European Jewry in Jerusalem
Many of the children she saved, already elderly people, tried to find her in order to thank her, as well as to try to find out something about their lost parents.
Last years Irena Sendler spent in the Warsaw private sanatorium Elizaveta Fikowska (Elzbieta Ficowska), whom she rescued from the ghetto in July 1942 at the age of six months: she was carried out in a box with carpentry tools.
In 2003 she received Poland's highest award, the Order of the White Eagle.
The world generally knew little about Irina Sendler until 1999, when several teenage girls from Kansas in the United States, Liz Cambers (Elizabeth Cambers), Megan Stewart (Megan Stewart), Sabrina Koons (Sabrina Coons) and Janice Underwood (Janice Underwood) opened her story. These schoolgirls from the countryside high school Uniontown was looking for a theme for a National History Day project. Their teacher, Norman Conrad, gave them an article called "The Other Schindler" about Irena Sendler from the US news and world report in 1994. And the girls decided to explore her life. An Internet search turned up only one website, which mentioned Irina Sendler. (Now there are over 300,000) With the help of their teacher, they began to restore the story of this forgotten Holocaust hero. The girls thought that Irena Sendler had died and were looking for where she was buried. To their surprise and delight, they found that she was alive and living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw. They wrote a play about her called Life in a Bank, which has since been played over 200 times in the US, Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they first visited Irina in Warsaw and through the international press. made the story of Irina known to the world. Since then, they have visited Irina in Warsaw four more times. Last time May 3, 2008 9 days before her death.
Irina Sendler's life was also the subject of Anna Miskovskaya's biography Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irina Sendler. Last year (2007) it was reported that Irina Sendler's exploit was to be the subject of a film starring Angelina Jolly.
In 2007, Irina Sendler was nominated by Poland for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her list of 2,500, twice as long as Oskar Schindler's famous list, earned her the Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965. She had to wait 18 years before she was able to travel to Israel to plant her tree in the alley of memory.

When the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded Poland in September 1939, Sendler was not yet thirty years old. Before the war, she worked in the social welfare department of the Warsaw municipality. And when the invaders introduced new laws against the Jews and separated the Jewish population from the Poles, she could not stand aside and decided to take risks.

The first year, Sendler was literally torn to pieces in order to somehow help the most needy Jewish families from 350,000 prisoners. However, the closure of the entrance to the ghetto in 1940 significantly complicated the situation: there was not enough food, the children were malnourished, and epidemics began. “It was a real hell: hundreds of people died right on the streets, and the whole world silently looked at it.”

With the help of her old teacher, Sendler secured a ghetto pass for herself and several of her girlfriends. The Nazis were afraid of epidemics, so the Poles were engaged in sanitary checks inside the ghetto. Irena organized a whole system of assistance, using the money of the city administration and charitable Jewish organizations. She carried food, essentials, coal, clothes to the ghetto. In the summer of 1942, when the deportation of Jews from the ghetto to the death camps began, Irena decided that there was no time to waste. Together with her friends, she looked up the addresses of families with children and suggested that parents take the children away from the ghetto in order to give them under false names to be raised in Polish families or orphanages.

In 2006, the Polish President and Israeli Prime Minister nominated Sendler for the Nobel Prize. A year ago, Irena Sendler became a holder of the Polish Order of the Smile, the only order in the world that is awarded to adult children.

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski awarded Irene Sandler the Order of the White Eagle in 2003.

Novaya Gazeta about Irena Sendler.

She saved children in the Warsaw ghetto. It was a whole system of salvation in the very center of despair, hopelessness and darkness. Information about this woman was posted earlier in the community. But in this case, there is more complete material.

In 1940, Irene Sendler was thirty years old. She went to the Warsaw ghetto and carried food, medicine, clothes there. Soon the Germans issued a ban on visiting the ghetto. Then Irena Sendler got a job in the municipality and continued to go there as a sanitation worker. At that time, she was already a member of the underground Polish organization "Zhegota", created to save the Jews.

In the ghetto, Irena Sendler went from house to house, cellar, barracks and looked for families with children everywhere. She offered her parents to give her children to take them out of the ghetto. There is no guarantee. She could be arrested when leaving the ghetto, she could be seized on a denunciation later, already outside the walls of the ghetto; the Germans could also find the children on the other side of the wall and send them to Treblinka. But still, parents gave their children to Irena Sendler. Different sources give a different number of children taken by Irena Sendler from the ghetto, but no one gives a figure less than 2400. Age - from 6 months to 15 years.

Irena Sendler, this little round-faced woman, was not only a brave person, but also a very organized, responsible worker. For each child, she started a card, where she wrote down his former name, his new name, as well as the address of the foster family. Much has been written and much is known about Polish anti-Semitism during the war, but there were also families who took their children in during this famine, there was the Żegota organization, and there was Irena Sendler. From Polish families, children were distributed to orphanages as Polish children. Irena Sendler also entered the address and number of the orphanage on the card. It was a whole system of salvation that worked in the very center of despair, hopelessness, hunger, darkness and destruction.

Irena Sendler was arrested on the basis of an anonymous denunciation. Anonymous has not been disclosed so far and will never be disclosed. This person goes into the darkness of time without a name and surname. Just a figure without a face or voice, just a dark silhouette against a bright window.

Remaining anonymous, he refused the reward. So, they were not driven by self-interest.

He was a careful, prudent person. He did not want to prowl with his denunciation in the light of public viewing. He reported where it was necessary, showed vigilance, satisfied his passion for order - and live in peace further.

Irena Sendler went to the ghetto with an icon that said "I believe in God." With this icon, she ended up in the Gestapo. In the Gestapo, Irena Sendler had her arms and legs broken. The Germans wanted to know how Żegota worked and who was behind it. By the way, any government officials who are obsessed with their power want to know this. They cannot understand that no one stands behind people, that people act of their own free will, at their own discretion. I do not compare anyone with anyone, I do not, in any case, compare the Nazi power in Poland with anyone. I am only talking about some of the mental traits that some people in similar social positions have. When I wrote about the shareholders who went on a hunger strike in Domodedovo, one representative of the authorities convinced me with fervor and fervor that someone was behind the starving people. The fact that people can fight for their rights themselves seemed impossible to him.

Irena Sendler buried a glass jar with her card index in the garden of her friend. She did not give the Germans the location of the tree under which the jar was buried, and thus prevented them from finding the children she had saved and sending them to Treblinka. She did not betray her comrades from the municipality, who were doing documents for the children. She did not betray those who helped her to take the children out through the courthouse adjoining the ghetto. Not only did she not betray anyone, she also did not forget how to smile. Everyone who met her writes that she always smiled. In all the photographs that I saw, there was a smile on her round face.

Irena Sendler did not act alone. For example, in all the stories about her activities in the ghetto, a truck driver is mentioned, in the back of which she took the children out. In some sources we are talking not about a truck, but about a cart, and not about a driver, but about a driver. Maybe this is a confusion, or maybe there was a truck, and a cart, and a driver, and a driver.

The driver had a dog, he put it with him in the cab. As soon as he saw the Germans, he would ruthlessly press the dog's paw, and the poor dog would begin to bark plaintively. Lai was supposed to drown out the cry, if at that moment he heard from the body. The dog did not understand why he was guilty and why the owner kicked his leg in a heavy boot on her paw. But dogs learn quickly, and soon she was barking up at the first movement of her master's foot. This dog also participated in the rescue of children.

There were not only the driver of the truck, and not only the driver of the cart, and not only the dog, which I imagine is not purebred. big dog gray-red color, with a wet nose and shining hungry eyes. There were also people who bought Irena Sendler from the Gestapo. The vaunted German bureaucracy proved corrupt. It's a blessing that bureaucrats can be corrupt, corruption in some conditions - the only way leading to saving lives or to justice.

The amount for which the unknown Gestapo agreed to release Irena Sendler from prison is not indicated anywhere. I think all the paperwork was done correctly. That is, the execution protocol was written flawlessly and went through the authorities. In the accounting department, they put it in the correct folder and wrote out the appropriate amounts. Perhaps someone even received an award for shooting during non-working hours. Some Reichsmarks were also issued for the cremation of the body, which, presumably, a Polish gravedigger or German soldier with a calm soul he put it in his pocket and drank it in a pub.

Only the execution itself was not .

The ransomed Irena Sendler with broken arms and legs and a face swollen from beatings, the Germans threw out of the car in the forest.

People from "Zhegota" picked her up. The icon was with her. The underground provided her with documents for a different surname. Until the end of the war, she did not appear in the ghetto. And there was nowhere to appear: in the spring of 1943, the Germans decided to finally liquidate the ghetto. The SS detachments, having entered the ghetto, ran into fire, which was fired from roofs, from windows, and even from underground sewers. This was the first uprising in a European occupied city, and the Germans failed to suppress it for two months. With France, they coped faster.

After the war, Irena Sendler opened her glass jar. She was a very tenacious woman. She took out her cards and tried to find the rescued children and their parents. She was the only one who knew what Polish names the Jewish children brought out of the ghetto had and in what orphanages they lived. Nothing worked, she failed to reunite families. The children no longer had parents.

Irena Sendler lived quietly in her one-room apartment in Warsaw. I was in Warsaw in 1983. Martial law in Poland has just been introduced. I remember wandering the gloomy, snow-covered streets and entering Catholic churches. I remember a pallet in a grocery store, on which a lone bone with growths of meat lay in a pool of blood. I remember the gloomy faces of the Poles. Now I think that during those wanderings of mine in an unfamiliar city, in those shops among gloomy people, in those cathedrals where I stood behind the worshipers as a quiet stranger, I could meet her. What a pity that I did not meet.

On a dark, cold morning, I once stood on a long snow-covered platform - I don’t remember what city it was - and waited for a train. The trains in Poland were either gray or bluish, and their clanging and clattering gave off anguish. I was wandering through the untouched snow, waiting for a train, and suddenly I saw a table with a train timetable, which indicated what time and from which platform the train to Auschwitz leaves.

In 2006, when Irena Sendler was 96 years old, the Polish government and the Israeli government nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. In connection with the nomination for the award, newspapers first wrote about her that year. It was then that Irena Sendler and her story became known to many people. I read several newspaper publications in which they wrote about her as a laureate even before the prize was awarded. But the prize went to US Vice President Al Gore for his lecture on energy conservation.

Of course, it is surprising that in choosing between Irena Sendler and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee chose Gore. It seems to me that after this the Nobel Peace Prize can no longer be awarded. This is a dummy in which there is no point, but there is only money. The award was dishonored. It is even more surprising for me that Al Gore, a respectable man who lives in a big house, does not need anything, belongs, as they say, to the powers that be, accepted the award. The rich became even richer, the well-fed became even more well-fed, the world nomenklatura divided one more piece among themselves, and the little quiet woman, as she lived in her one-room apartment in Warsaw, remained to live there.

I knew about Irena Sendler for a long time. I read about it in various sources. And every time I read about her, I told myself that I should write about her, but every time I put it off. Because I felt the discrepancy between this whole story and the arsenal of words at my disposal. I'm not sure I can put it into words. About a young woman who went to the ghetto day after day, about a driver, about a dog, about a glass jar buried in the garden. Before some topics and events human language- at least my tongue - faints.

The other day I received a letter from an unknown addressee. It was a distant echo of a mailing list started by no one knows who and no one knows when. More and more new people were involved in the mailing list, and my address accidentally got into it. The entire letter consisted of a brief summary of Irena Sendler's story. The letter ended like this: “I am making my small contribution by forwarding this letter to you. I hope you do the same. More than sixty years have passed since the end of World War II in Europe. This e-mail is being sent out as a reminder of the millions of people who have been killed, shot, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!

Become a link in the chain of memory, help us spread the letter around the world. Send it to your friends and ask them not to break this chain.

Please don't just delete this email. After all, it will take no more than a minute to redirect it.”

Here I sent you this letter.

Alexey Polikovsky

Irena Sendler (Sendlerova, nee Krzyzanowski) is an underground activist who rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. The Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena the title of Righteous Among the Nations, along with Nikolai Kiselyov and Oscar Schindler. This woman, with the help of the Zegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw, provided the children with forged documents and, with a team of like-minded people, smuggled them out of the ghetto, giving them to shelters, private families and monasteries.

Irena Sendler was born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw into a Polish Catholic family, but grew up in the city of Otwock. Her father, Stanislav Krzyzanowski, was a doctor. Stanisław died of typhus in February 1917, contracted by a patient of his who had been refused treatment by his colleague. Many of these patients were Jewish. Stanislav taught his daughter: if a person is drowning, you should try to save him, even if you yourself cannot swim.

After the death of her father, Irena moved to Warsaw with her mother. The leaders of the Jewish community offered Irena's mother to pay for her daughter's education. The girl from childhood sympathized with the Jews. At that time, in some universities in Poland, there was a rule according to which Jews were supposed to sit on the benches reserved for them at the end of the lecture hall. Irena and some of her like-minded people, in protest, sat at such benches together with the Jews. In the end, Irena was expelled from the university for three years.

In 1931, Irena married Mieczysław Sendlerov, an employee of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Warsaw. However, later she will divorce him and marry Stefan Zgrzembski, from whom Irena will have a daughter, Janka, and a son, Adam.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (before that she worked in the city departments of Social Security in Otwock and Tarczyn). In early 1939, when the Nazis took over Poland, she began helping the Jews. Irena, along with assistants, created about 3,000 fake documents to help Jewish families before joining the underground resistance organization Zegota. Helping the Jews was extremely risky; all household members would have been shot immediately if a hiding Jew were found in their dwelling.

In December 1942, the newly formed Jewish Relief Council "Zegota" invited Irene to head their "children's unit" under the assumed name of Iolanthe. As a social worker, she had special permission to enter the Warsaw ghetto. According to her position, she had to check the inhabitants of the ghetto for signs of typhus, because the Germans were very afraid that the infection could spread beyond its borders. During these visits, Irena wore a Star of David headband as a sign of solidarity with the Jews, and also in order not to draw unnecessary attention to herself.

She carried children out of the Jewish ghetto in boxes, suitcases, and also on carts. Under the pretense of checking sanitary conditions during outbreaks of typhus, Sendler went to the ghetto and took small children out of it in an ambulance, sometimes disguised as luggage or carry-on luggage. She also used an old courthouse on the outskirts of the Warsaw ghetto (which still stands) as her main transfer point.

Children were left in Polish families, Warsaw orphanages or monasteries. Sendler worked closely with social worker and Catholic nun Matilda Getter.

Irena wrote down the data on the children taken out and put them in jars, which she buried under a tree in her friend's garden. These banks contained information about the real and fictitious names of the children, as well as data on where they were taken and to which family they originally belonged. This was done so that after the end of the war, children could be returned to their families.

In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured and sentenced to death. She didn't betray anyone. Luckily, "Zegota" saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution site. Irena was thrown into the forest, unconscious, with broken legs and arms. Sendler's name was on the lists of the executed. Until the end of the war, she had to hide, but she continued to save Jewish children. After the war, Irena took out buried jars, which contained 2,500 records of children. Some children managed to be returned to their families, but, unfortunately, many of the parents were destroyed in concentration camps or went missing.

After the war, Irena Sendler continued to be persecuted by the secret police, as her activities during the war were sponsored by the Polish government. Interrogations of the pregnant Irena eventually led to the miscarriage of her second child in 1948.

In 1965, Sendler was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem. Only this year, the Polish government allowed her to leave the country to receive an award in Israel.

In 2003, John Paul II sent Irene a personal letter. On October 10, she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor; and the Jan Karski Braveheart Award given to her by the American Center for Polish Culture in Washington DC.

In 2006, the Polish President and the Prime Minister of Israel nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore.

Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008 in her room at a private hospital in Warsaw. She was 98 years old.

In May 2009, she was posthumously awarded the Audrey Hepburn Philanthropy Award. Named after a famous actress and UNICEF Ambassador, this award is presented to people and organizations that help children.

Sendler was the last survivor of the "Children's Section" of the Zegota organization, which she led from January 1943 until the end of the war.

American filmmaker Mary Skinner began working on a documentary based on the memoirs of Irena Sendler in 2003. This film will include the last interview of Irena herself, made shortly before her death. Three assistants of Irena and several Jewish children, whom they saved, took part in the shooting of the film.

The film, shot in Poland and America with cameramen Andrey Wulf and Slawomir Grünberg, will recreate the places where Irena lived and worked. This is the first documentary about the feat of Sendler. Mary Skinner recorded about 70 hours of interviews for the film and spent seven years poring over the archives, talking to experts in the story, as well as witnesses in the US and Poland, to unearth previously unknown details about Irena's life and work. The film will premiere in the US in May 2011.