Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler, who has died in a Warsaw hospital at the age of 98, was one of the heroes of the
Nazi occupation ____ Poland. As a member of Zegota, the Council for Providing Aid to the Jews, an
organisation set up by the Polish underground state and financed by the Polish government-in-exile in
London, she succeeded ____ saving around 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto ____ certain
[05] death in the Nazi extermination camps.
Born in Otwock, a resort town near Warsaw much frequented by Jews before the war, Sendler was
the only daughter of a doctor, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, known for his sympathetic approach towards his
Jewish neighbours. Unusually for a Catholic child, Sendler was allowed to play with Jewish children as she
grew up. She studied Polish literature and became active in the Polish Socialist party. At the time of the
[10] Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, she was also working as a social care nurse for the Warsaw city welfare
department.
During the Nazi occupation, conditions for the Jews in Warsaw deteriorated dramatically as more than
400,000 people were confined in the city’s ghetto, an area of perhaps four square kilometres, which was
then, in 1940, sealed off. Sendler was involved in providing assistance to those in need, and in December
[15] 1942 – soon after the deportation of Jews had begun to the Treblinka death camp – she became head of
the children’s department of Zegota. She was motivated, above all, by her sense of social justice and her
feelings of obligation to her Jewish friends.
When the German authorities decided finally to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Sendler was
one of a group of around 20 Zegota members who organised the evacuation of children, placing them in
[20] Polish families, orphanages and convents. She was able to move around the ghetto legally, disguised as
a public-health nurse responsible for investigating a suspected typhus epidemic. Sometimes, the children
were hidden in a lorry driven by a fellow conspirator, Antoni Dzbrowski. A mechanic reportedly hid babies
in his toolbox. At other times, they were given sleeping draughts and transported to what was known as
the “Aryan” side – outside the ghetto – in baskets, or chests in ambulances or streetcars. German officials
[25] were told they had died of typhus.
The escaping children were provided with false identities, and many of those who remained in Poland
were taught Christian prayers, so they would blend into the community more easily. But their real names
and details of their families were written down in code and buried in jam jars, which were dug up after the
war. This meant that once the conflict was over the children were able to discover who they really were.
[30] In October 1943, at the height of this rescue operation, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. She was
brutally tortured in the notorious Pawiak prison and sentenced to death. But she never revealed details of
her contacts and, by bribing her guards, other members of Zegota were able to obtain her release.
After Poland’s liberation in 1945, Sendler returned to the Warsaw welfare department, co-founding an
orphanage and an old people’s home and organising a service to deal with women and children in need.
[35] She stayed in contact with some of the children she had rescued, many of whom eventually found their
way to Palestine.
There was little recognition for Sendler’s work in Poland in the immediate aftermath of the war, but in
1965 she was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial
centre in Jerusalem, and in 1991 was granted honorary citizenship by the state of Israel. In 2006 she
[40] was nominated for the Nobel peace prize by an American teacher, Norman Conrad, whose students had
written a play and made a documentary film about her, entitled Life in a Jar. Her Polish awards included
the Jan Karski award for moral courage (named after a Polish resistance fighter), the Order of the White
Eagle and honorary citizenship of Warsaw. In 2006, a biography of her appeared in Germany and Poland.
The greatness of Sendler’s achievements was widely accepted. According to Elzbieta Ficowska, one
[45] of those saved as a five-month-old baby in July 1942 and now the wife of a leading Polish poet: “It took a
miracle to save a Jewish child. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the
generations to come”.
She died on the same day as a ceremony naming a Warsaw school, Gymnasium Nº 23, in her honour.
Disponível em: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/14/secondworldwar.poland. Acesso em: 16 ago. 18. (Adaptado.)
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