Background

Irena Sendler was born as Irena Krzyżanowska on 15 February 1910 in Warsaw, but spent most of her youth in Otwock, a town with a vibrant Jewish community. Her parents were Dr.Stanisław Krzyżanowski, a physician, and his wife, Janina. They were members of the Polish Socialist Party. At the end of World War I, a typhus epidemic broke out, and Irena’s father, Dr. Krzyzanowski, devoted himself to caring for impoverished Jews suffering from the disease. He contracted typhus from his patients and passed away. Irena was just seven years old. She and her mother eventually returned to Warsaw.

Education

After Dr. Krzyżanowski’s death, Jewish community leaders offered her mother help in paying for Sendler’s education. Irena completed school and in 1927, she enrolled in Warsaw University, where she studied law for two years and then Polish literature. She opposed the ghetto-bench system that existed at some prewar Polish universities and defaced her grade card. As a result of her public protest she was suspended from the University of Warsaw for three years.

Career

In Warsaw, Sendler became a social worker, overseeing the city’s “canteens,” which provided assistance to people in need. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Sendler and her colleagues also used the canteens to provide medicine, clothing and other necessities to the city’s persecuted Jewish population.

In 1940, the Nazis forced Warsaw’s more than 400,000 Jewish residents into a small locked ghetto area, where thousands died every month from disease and starvation.

Almost as soon as the Nazi occupation began, Irena began making forged documents for Jewish friends. She also offered food and shelter to the increasingly persecuted Jewish population. She continued making false documents for those who escaped or had gone into hiding and avoided the Ghetto. Between 1939 and 1942, Irena, with the assistance of a few trusted friends, forged over 3,000 documents to save Jewish families.

In the fall of 1942 two Polish women, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, founded Zegota—the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, a branch of the Polish underground. The members of Zegota asked Irena to head the Children’s Department. She readily agreed. As a social worker, Sendler was able to enter the ghetto regularly to help the residents. Putting themselves at great risk, she and about two dozen of her colleagues set out to save as many Jewish children as possible from death in the ghetto or deportation to concentration camps.

With the assistance of other social workers, as many as 25 at one time, Irena began rescuing the children of the Ghetto. By that time, she was an administrator in the Welfare Department. Taking advantage of both her official position and the Germans’ paranoia of germs, she would go into the Ghetto under the ruse of wanting to stop the spread of disease beyond the ghetto walls. Officially, she was examining Jews for signs of contagious diseases. In reality, she was looking for children to save. At first, Irena and her helpers took orphans living on the streets of the Ghetto. Later, she would meet with parents and ask them to let her take their children out. Irena always made it clear to the families, convents and orphanages who took in children that these children were to be returned to their families after the war. She kept her detailed lists for this reason—so that families could be reunited.

There were two common routes used to smuggle the children out, through two buildings that straddled the border between the Ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. One building was an old courthouse, the other was a church. Children old enough to be taught some basic Catholic prayers would be sneaked into the church from the Jewish side. Once inside, they would remove their yellow stars and take on their new identities as Polish Catholic children. They would exit through the front door of the church, which was guarded by Nazi soldiers who questioned them when they came out. The Nazis used various tricks to try to catch Jews escaping this way. Irena and her helpers trained the children well—they were never caught coming out of the church with Jewish children.

Younger children could not be rescued through the buildings. Instead, Irena would place them in gunny sacks or toolboxes and carry them out of the Ghetto, or she would hide them under potatoes in a cart. Once, she took a child out concealed in a coffin. On other occasions, she was able to legally take seriously ill children out of the Ghetto in an ambulance. At other times, the ambulance was used to conceal healthy children. She had the assistance of the ambulance driver and of a dog. When the children would start to whimper, and she feared detection, she would hit her dog on his paw, and he would begin to bark. This set off a chain reaction among the Nazis’ dogs, and chaos would erupt. At that point, the Nazis would let her pass.

Once on the other side, she would take the children to the home of her friends, the Piotrowski family, where the children would change their clothing, and have a chance to eat and rest after their dangerous journey. It was also at the Piotrowski home that Irena would secretly bury her lists of names, under an apple tree in their backyard. The Piotrowskis lived across the street from a German barrack. Oftentimes the children would also stay by another friend, Maria Kukulska, until they could be safely moved to what would be their home for the remainder of the war.

The people who helped Irena, twenty-four women and one man, all took tremendous risks. There were even ten who alternated entering the Ghetto with her, but it was Irena herself who entered the Ghetto day after day for eighteen months—and walked out each time with a child. Her life was in constant danger. Ultimately, the Nazis began to suspect her. She changed her address numerous times, but continued her work. Her careful list-making almost betrayed her.

Tragically, Irena was arrested by the Germans on October 20, 1943—five months after the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Her address had been revealed by an informer. She was sent her to Pawiak Prison. Irena was tortured and beaten for several days; one leg and one foot were fractured. She refused to reveal the whereabouts of the children, or the names of anyone in the Resistance. She was scheduled to be executed, but members of Zegota found out and bribed a guard to instead leave her in the woods, where they found and rescued her. Her name was printed on public lists of those who had been shot by the Gestapo, and she spent the rest of the war in hiding.

During the Warsaw Uprising, Sendler worked as a nurse in a field hospital, where a number of Jews were hidden among other patients. She was wounded by a German deserter she encountered while searching for food. She continued to work as a nurse until the Germans left Warsaw, retreating before the advancing Soviet troops.

Sendler's hospital at Okęcie, previously supported by Zegota, ran out of resources. She hitchhiked in military trucks to Lublin, to obtain funding from the communist government established there, and then helped Maria Palester to reorganize the hospital as the Warsaw's Children Home. Sendler also resumed other social work activities and quickly advanced within the new structures, in December 1945 becoming head of the Department of Social Welfare in Warsaw's municipal government. She ran her department according to the radical for its time concepts that she had learned from Helena Radlińska at the Free University.

After the war, she worked to track down the children and reunite them with relatives, but nearly all of them were by then orphans. Copies were made of the lists and given to officers of Zegota, who helped Irena search, but few relatives were ever found. Only one percent of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto survived the war. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were sent to Israel.

Over the years, among Sendler's social and formal functions were a membership in Warsaw City Council, chairmanships of the Commission for Widows and Orphans and of the Health Commission there, activity in the League of Women and in the managing councils of the Society of Friends of Children and the Society for Lay Schools.

Sendler joined the communist Polish Workers' Party in January 1947 and remained a member of its successor, the Polish United Workers' Party, until the party's dissolution in 1990. In 1947, Sendler was promoted to the party executive by becoming a member of the Social Welfare Section at the Central Committee's Social-Vocational Department. She continuously held a succession of high-level party and administrative posts during the entire Stalinist period and beyond.

Prior to 1950, Sendler was heavily involved in Central Committee work and party activism, which included implementation of social rules and propagation of ideas dictated by the Stalinist doctrine, and policy enforcement; by engaging in such pursuits, she abandoned some of her previously held views and lost some important acquaintances. After the fall of communism, however, Sendler claimed having been brutally interrogated in 1949 by the Ministry of Public Security, accused of hiding among her employees politically active former members of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), a resistance organization loyal during the war to the Polish government-in-exile. But Sendler’s continuing employment in high-level state positions proves against the possibility that she was a subject of serious investigation.

From 1962, Sendler worked as Deputy director in several Warsaw trade medical schools. In 1967, suffering from a variety of health problems, including a heart condition and anxiety disorder, Sendler applied for disability pension. She was dismissed from the school's vice-principal position in 1967. From 1967, she continued working at the same school as a teacher, manager of teacher workshops and librarian, until her retirement in 1983. The antisemitic campaign of 1967–1968 in Poland left Sendler deeply traumatized.

In 1980, Sendler joined the Solidarity movement. She lived in Warsaw for the remainder of her life. She died on 12 May 2008, aged 98.

Achievements

• Irena Sendler was one of the many unsung heroes of the Holocaust era. Dubbed as the “Female Schindler” by those she saved, this amazing woman was able to rescue more than 2,500 Jewish children during her time as a social worker in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department.

Politics

Sendler joined the Union of Polish Democratic Youth (Związek Polskiej Młodzieży Demokratycznej) in 1928; during the war she became a member of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). She was repeatedly refused employment in the Warsaw school system because of negative recommendations issued by the university, which ascribed radically leftist views to her

In January 1947, Sendler joined the communist Polish Workers' Party and remained a member of its successor, the Polish United Workers' Party, until the party's dissolution in 1990. In 1980, Sendler joined the Solidarity movement.

Views

Quotations: “My parents taught me, that if a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality. One must help him.”

“The names of the saved children, I wrote down on thin tissue paper. There were two identical lists in two bottles,” recalled Irena. “When I once had the list at home, that same night the Gestapo arrived. Fortunately, one of my liaison girls demonstrated her presence of mind and hid the list in her underwear. After that, for safety reasons, I never kept the lists at home.”

“I lost no time in reflecting [on the danger], knowing that I and my heart had to be there (Zegota), had to be a part of the rescue.”

Membership

• Zegota (the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland) , Poland

  1942 - 1945

Personality

Those who knew her say that it was always Irena’s nature to help. Though she lost her father at an early age, his dedication to others—reinforced by her mother’s example and words—made a deep impression on her. Though still young, she already had a history of sacrifice on behalf of others, and of defying rising anti-Semitism to reach out to and stand up for Jews.

At every stage of her career, she worked long hours and was intensely involved in various social work programs, such as helping teenage prostitutes in the ruins of post-war Warsaw recover and return to society, organizing a number of orphanages and care centers for children, families and the elderly, or a center for prostitutes in Henrykow. She was known for her effectiveness and displayed a sharp edge when confronted with obstruction or indifference.

Physical Characteristics: Irena Sendler was just 4′11″ tall, her lively, intelligent black eyes set in a round, smiling face. She was beautiful, and a warm yet quietly determined individual. Her appearance more closely resembled a favorite doll than a fearless resistance leader.

Quotes from others about the person

• Polish teacher Norman Conrad told: “When you look at her, you can’t imagine how she could walk past the Nazi guards, carrying a child in a gunny sack. How did she do it?”

Connections

In 1931 Irena married Mieczysław Sendler, and the couple moved to Warsaw before the outbreak of World War II. After the war, Irena Sendler’s first marriage ended in divorce. In 1947 she married Stefan Zgrzembski, with whom she had three children, daughter Janka, and sons Andrzej (who died in infancy) and Adam. After the death of Zgrzembski, Sendler remarried her first husband, Mieczysław Sendler, but their reunion didn't last and they again divorced.

Father:

Stanisław Henryk Krzyżanowski

Mother:

Janina Krzyżanowska

husband:

Mieczysław Sendler

husband:

Stefan Zgrzembski

References

• Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. In 1942, one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings. But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war. She could not know that more than ninety percent of their families would perish. Irena’s Children, “a fascinating narrative of…the extraordinary moral and physical courage of those who chose to fight inhumanity with compassion” (Chaya Deitsch author of Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family), is a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, and redemption.
• Irena's Children (Young Readers Scholastic Edition)
• Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto IIrena Sendler, a Polish social worker, helped nearly four hundred Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and into hiding during World War II.
• The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler: John Kent Harrison
• Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project
• Irena Sendler: Bringing Life to Children of the Holocaust (Crabtree Groundbreaker Biographies) Irena Sendler was born into a Catholic family in Poland in 1910. Throughout the German occupation in World War II, Irena worked tirelessly to help save Polands Jews from the Nazi horror. Irena saved at least 2,500 Jewish children from certain death during the Holocaust. By the time of her death in 2008, Irena had been honored by the governments of Poland and Israel, Pope John Paul II, and many of those she had rescued.
• Uncommon Character: Stories of Ordinary Men and Women Who Have Done the Extraordinary A captivating non-fiction anthology filled with heroic profiles, epic tales, and timeless parables. Each chapter introduces a memorable hero who challenged and changed the world in remarkable ways. You'll meet personalities who are historical and living, unknown and familiar, domestic and foreign. Prepare to encounter pilots, farmers, immigrants, missionaries, engineers, martyrs, businessmen, lawyers, pioneers, presidents, soldiers, writers, and scientists their dynamic legacies are destined to become part of us and our heritage. Collectively, their stories answer the pertinent questions of our time: What makes a genuine hero? How does a hero personify favorable character? Why is personal character so vital for our families and country? These are unique tales told with zest; these are unforgettable tales to long treasure. Enjoy the exciting portraits; then share them in family, church, workplace, outreach, and educational settings because that's where they began, and that's why they were written. The 26 stories will quickly find special places in heart and head, dwelling there to influence life's crucial choices. There's not another book like this one. Every story advocates making a positive impact on others and mastering the days we are given. Readers depart with an abiding conviction of the vital difference one committed life will make. No matter our past or where we find ourselves today, we will be inspired to finish well.
• Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust This book offers the first English translation of the compelling heroine story of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic who organized the rescue of more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. • Based on sound scholarship and research while also being easy to read and accessible to a wide readership • Provides a complete, chronological presentation of Sendler's life, from her childhood, education, and wartime humanitarian efforts to her postwar experiences, including her professional and personal life and her visit to Israel • Presents unique information from letters and interviews with the now-elderly children Sendler rescued over 60 years ago, illuminating the dramatic influence she had upon their lives • Contains several sections written in the voice of Irena Sendler, resulting in a lively, conversational first-person narrative that gives a reading experience akin to sitting with Sendler and hearing her story firsthand
• The Story of World War II Hero Irena Sendler Irena Sendler, born in 1910 to a Polish Catholic family, was raised to respect all people regardless of their race or religion. As an adult she became a social worker, and after the Germans occupied Poland during World War II, Irena knew she had to help the Jews who were packed into the Warsaw Ghetto. She began by smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghetto, then turned to smuggling children out of the ghetto. Using false papers and creative means of escape, Irena risked her own life to rescue Jewish children and hide them safely in orphanages, convents, and foster homes. Hoping to reunite the families after the war, Irena kept secret lists of the children s identities, which were buried in jars under an apple tree. Motivated by her humanity and armed with compassion and a belief in human dignity, Irena Sendler proved to the world that an ordinary person can accomplish extraordinary deeds. This new chapter book format includes illustrations as well as sidebars on related subjects, a timeline, a glossary, and recommended reading.
• The Strange Ways of Providence In My Life (An Amazing WW2 Survival Story (A Jewish Girl's Holocaust Book Memoir))
• Irena's Children: Young Readers Edition; A True Story of Courage