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* A True Angel has Died *
Irena Sendler, who was only a social worker in Warsaw
when the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, was the woman who
single-handedly rescued over 2,500 Jewish children from the infamous
Warsaw Ghetto. She would literally talk parents into trusting her with
their most prized possessions on earth before the Nazi war machine could
kill them.
Then, because she could move in and out of the Ghetto several times a
day under the guise of providing humanitarian aid, she would smuggle the
children out so they could be "adopted" by Polish families until the war
was over. She and her underground provided new names and identities for
the Jewish children and only Irena knew their whereabouts.
She would carefully write the names on cigarette papers, both the real
name and the aliases, with the idea of reuniting the families when the
horrors would end, and she kept the names in some jars that were
carefully buried in a nearby garden.
She was ingenious in her methods. She even trained a dog to bark so it
would stifle the cries of a scared child when they passed a German
checkpoint. She used the city sewers, underground tunnels and all sorts
of routes to spirit the children to safety.
Eventually she was caught and brutally tortured, but, when the Germans
found there was no way to break her, she was taken to be killed. The
underground paid a huge bribe, and her life was miraculously spared by a
guard who knocked her unconscious, threw her from a truck, and later
said he had shot her.
She then lived in secrecy, daring not even attend her mother's funeral,
until the end of the war and then she dug up the jars and reunited the
children with their families. Many of the parents had died in the
concentration camps and gas chambers, but Irena Sendler got almost all
of them back to extended members of families, so great was her personal
vow.
Curiously most have never heard her story, about how she was never again
able to walk without crutches after the way the German torturers had
crushed her feet and legs, and maybe her own disdain at being hailed as
a hero was the reason.
"Every Jewish child who survived due to my efforts has justified my
existence on this earth, but it is no cause for praise," she once said.
"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 . . this regret will follow me to my
death."
In recent years, as many of the children she saved began to speak out,
she couldn't overwhelm her legend.
Irena Sendler was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the country of
Poland's highest decoration and . . she was a runner-up for last year's
Nobel Peace Prize before she died quietly on May 10, 2008, of pneumonia
at the age of 98.
~ The
Author is Roy Exum from Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose articles and
stories have been featured and shared in both the local and national
media ~
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2008
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