Rubicon3: She Did Not Wish to Be Called a Hero

May 14, 2008

She Did Not Wish to Be Called a Hero

But what else could we call someone who cared enough to save 2500 children despite great danger to herself? Who, after escaping punishment which included imprisonment, torture and a death sentence, continued to help under a different identity?

Irena Sendler, Polish Woman Who Saved 2,500 Jewish Children in Warsaw, Dies at 98 (Telegraph-UK)

Irena Sendler was a Polish Roman Catholic social worker with links to Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, and in December 1942 Zegota put her in charge of its children's department. Wearing nurses' uniforms, she and Irena Schultz were sent into the Warsaw ghetto with food, clothes and medicine, including a vaccine against typhoid. It soon became clear that the ultimate destination of many Jews was to be the Treblinka death camp, and Zegota decided to try to save as many children as possible.

One baby was spirited away in a mechanic's toolbox. Some children were transported in coffins, suitcases and sacks; others escaped through the sewer system beneath the city. An ambulance driver smuggled infants beneath the stretchers in the back of his van The children who were taken by Irena Sendler were given new identities and placed with convents, sympathetic families, orphanages and hospitals.

In later life Irena Sendler recalled the heartbreak of Jewish mothers having to part from their children: "We witnessed terrible scenes. Father agreed, but mother didn't. We sometimes had to leave those unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I'd go back there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to the death camps." Irena Sendler kept a list of the names of all the children she saved, in the hope that she could one day reunite them with their families.

On October 20, 1943, her house was raided by the Gestapo and the Nazis took Sendler to the Pawiak prison, where she was tortured; although her legs and feet were broken, and her body left permanently scarred, she refused to betray her network of helpers or the children whom she had saved. Sentenced to death, she escaped thanks to Zegota, who bribed a guard to set her free. She immediately returned to her work using a new identity.

In her later years Irena Sendler was cared for in a Warsaw nursing home by Elzbieta Ficowska, who - in July 1942, at six months old - had been smuggled out of the ghetto by Irena in a carpenter's workbox.

In 2005 Irena Sendler reflected: "We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true - I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death."