A Story Worth Telling

Irena Sendler 1910 to 2007

I discovered today who this sweet little old lady was. She was a heroine. We should all know who this woman was. She was small in stature but large in courage and love. She is Irena Sendler, a Catholic social worker from Poland, who saved 2,500 children from the ghettos of Warsaw during the holocaust. She was nominated for a Peace Prize, but she lost to Al Gore, who made a slide show.

Irena was able to get herself placed in a welfare office inside the Warsaw ghetto. She then convinced the Jewish parents and grandparents to give their children to her, so she could smuggle them out, and save their lives. She then hid them in convents, gave them to people in the country who cared for them as if they were their own, or others who could keep them hidden. She then smuggled them out of the ghetto in gunny sacks, coffins, tool boxes, under the floor boards of the sanitation truck or any other way she could get them past the guards. She trained her dog to bark anytime a guard came near, so the children's cries would not be heard.

She promised that when the war ended that these children would be returned to their families. So she wrote their names down and also their aliases on cigarette paper. She buried the jar under an apple tree so that they would be safe. There were 2500 names in that jar. After the war, she dug up the jar and tried to match the children with any of their family that was still alive.

This woman had been captured during the war and beaten severely. Her legs and feet were broken. She was sentenced to die. A guard was convinced to let Irena go. She was dumped in the woods on her way to her execution. After the war, she was able to dig up the jar and try to reunite the children with their families, if any had survived; at the time over 5,000 people were dying every month in the ghetto. Most of the families were killed by the Nazi or starved in the ghetto.

Her story has been discovered by a group of high school students who wrote a play called "A Life in a Jar." They won a history contest in their home state of Kansas with their story. They traveled to Poland to meet this woman and their lives were forever changed. Years have passed, but they continue to do the play even though they have all graduated, are working and married. Her story is so important to them that they want to continue to tell it.

What a contrast between her and Al Gore. Irena saved the lives of 2500 children! She risked her life and her families in trying to save strangers. She put aside race and religion and saw the human faces of children and she did what she could. Her efforts saved so many. Al Gore on the other hand made a video slide show and made lots of money doing it. How did the selection committee get this so wrong?