Day 85 - Show your respect. A life less ordinary. I have never been one for idols but there are many who deserve our respect; Mandela, Martin Luther King, Beatrice Webb, Mother Theresa and Ghandi. Today I wanted to find out about someone new and I stumbled across Irene Sendler, about whom I knew nothing. I have read her obituary, extracts from a biography, various web pages, watched a documentary and a film. Frankly she is an extraordinary ordinary human. Sendler was a Polish Social Worker from Warsaw. As a Roman Catholic she was spared the fate of the Polish Jews. In 1943, aged 29 she headed the Jewish Children’s section of Zegota, the resistance movement. She was the mastermind who facilitated the escape of children and babies from the Warsaw Ghetto. The realities of life for those locked inside the Ghetto are, to me unimaginable, their prospects even worse. Sheer inconceivable desperation led to some Jewish parents to entrust their children to Irena who would smuggle them out of the walls. The anguish and despair the decision would have caused the parents, and the children, is impossible for me to comprehend. Over a series of months Irena and a small number of accomplice’s bundled children though secret doors in the Ghetto walls and the sewer system, others were hidden in suitcases, vans, in coffins. Once outside the ghetto walls the children were passed of as Christians and looked after by sympathetic families or by Sisters in convents. All these people risked their lives to protect the innocent. Irena kept a coded list of the children she resettled, intending to reunite them with their family when normal life resumed. Eventually Irena was arrested and savagely tortured, becoming permanently crippled by the beatings. She remained silent not revealing a single name of her accomplices, the children she had smuggled or the people who had taken them in. She refused to betray the trust that desperate parents had put in her. She was sentenced to death. Irena escaped because a Zegota member bribed a guard. Despite the extreme personal danger she assumed a new identity and immediately returned to her work. When the war ended her work of reuniting the families began. In the most part it was futile. Most of the desperate heartbroken mothers and fathers had died. Hundreds of thousands from the Warsaw Ghetto had met their deaths in Treblinka. Irena and her accomplices saved 2,500 children, twice the number of the celebrated Oskar Schindler. Irena died, aged 98, in May 2012 in a Warsaw nursing home cared for by Elzbeita, a woman who herself had been smuggled out of the Ghetto in a carpenters bag by Irena when just six months old. Irena’s reflection on her life? "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." Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She didn’t win.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 22:35:56 +0000
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