'The strength of her spirit' Polish rescuer of 2,500 children gets award
News Editor
More than six decades ago, when the Nazis launched a war of extermination against the Jews of occupied Poland, some Poles fought back.
One young Warsaw woman used her job with the city's Social Welfare Department to get aid -- money, clothing, medicine -- to Jewish residents as the German vise tightened on their community.
After the occupiers walled off the Warsaw Ghetto from the rest of the Polish capital in 1940, Irena Sendler did much more. With a network of others inside and outside the ghetto, she began what would become the rescue of some 2,500 children, two and a half times the number redeemed by the famed Oskar Schindler.
For this feat, the former resistance fighter today receives the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Compassion in a luncheon ceremony at Georgetown University. The American Center of Polish Culture sponsors the award.
Though now a frail 93, the still-peppery Sendler conveys staunch conviction.
"I was afraid for my life every day, but the anger I felt at the Germans, at what the Germans were doing to the Jews, my fellow countrymen, was greater than my fears," Sendler said, through a translator, in a phone interview last week.
For 40 years, Karski taught Eastern European and international affairs, along with comparative government, at Georgetown. Eva Ficowska of Warsaw, one of the children saved by Sendler, will accept this year's award on Sendler's behalf. Poland's first lady Jolanta Kwaœniewska, honorary chair Zbigniew Brzezinski and chair Jeane Kirkpatrick are slated to speak at today's ceremony.
"What we were most impressed by was the strength of her spirit and determination to survive," Kirkpatrick said last week of the award, "and we felt that by selecting her, we could join in a celebration of the triumph of courage, hope and determination over murder."
As Sendler worked feverishly to save the Warsaw Ghetto's children, she risked her own life.
"Poland was the only country in Europe where helping Jews, even giving them a meal or a glass of water, was punished by the death penalty," Sendler recalled last week.
The conditions she witnessed in the ghetto haunt the nonagenarian today.
"It was the most horrifying thing -- I still have nightmares [about it]," said Sendler. "There wasn't a day I didn't find a dead child lying on the street."
Separated from her husband, a prisoner of war, and living with only her sick mother, the young social worker threw herself into the effort to help avert such losses.
As she faced down the Nazi machine, Sendler did not work alone. She partnered with co-worker Irena Schultz in ferrying babies and young children out of the ghetto in everything from shopping bags and crates to ambulances.
Inside the Jewish quarter, Eva Rechtman coordinated her own network of Jewish women, which aided the rescue efforts, according to historians Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt.
Sendler still describes Rechtman, who would die in the ghetto, as the best friend of her life.
"I had a thousand opportunities to get her out [and] provide her with Aryan papers, but she refused," Sendler said of her Jewish ally. "She said 'I'm needed here.' "
Meanwhile, in 1942, two Polish women, novelist Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and activist Wanda Krahelska-Filipowiczowa, launched the Council for Aid to Jews (code-named Zegota). The renowned resistance group would soon include future foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, historian Israel Gutman, Karski and Sendler herself.
Under the nom de guerre Jolanta, Sendler led the group's children's bureau, organizing safe havens for ghetto children in private homes, apartments and convents.
She kept records of the youngsters' true origins in glass jars buried in her neighborhood. Ficowska, for example, came into her rescuer's hands as a baby with just a silver spoon declaring her name and birth date.
"It was my idea to write down the names and where they were placed because I strongly believed some of the parents would survive and they should be reunited with their children," Sendler recalled.
Just two children, out of thousands, managed to find a mother alive at war's end, she relates.
"The others found their heritage," Sendler said.
Meanwhile, the intrepid young woman would pay a price for her activities. Betrayed, she believes, by the owner of the laundry shop where Zegota stalwarts met, she was arrested on Oct. 20, 1943, the day honoring the saint for whom she is named. At the notorious Pawiak prison, she endured interrogation and torture by the Gestapo, but refused to name her resistance comrades.
Slated for execution, Sendler instead found herself walking to freedom: Zegota had bribed one of her guards. She spent the rest of the war living on the run in Warsaw, with false papers and a new name, Clara Dabrowska.
Sendler was not able to stay with her ailing mother, who died among strangers, after being hounded by the Gestapo.
After hostilities ceased, Sendler divorced her first husband and later married a Jewish man, Adam Zgrzemski, with whom she had three children, who were raised as Catholics. One of them survives today.
Sendler also spent years as a teacher of Polish language. In 1965, she won the designation "Righteous Among the Nations" from Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.
Yet her story was little known, except among historians, until a high school history class in Uniontown, Kan., made Sendler the focus of a research project in 1999. With the support of teacher Norman Conard, the students wrote a play about the rescuer, Life in a Jar, and four teenage girls traveled with him and other adults to Warsaw to meet their heroine in May 2001.
"You have Protestant students who discover a Catholic woman who rescued Jewish children," said Conard, noting that the show had 109 performances, about a third of them in front of Jewish audiences. "Out of this story, we have made many, many Jewish friends."
Conard was the first to urge the American Center of Polish Culture to honor Sendler and his nomination was echoed by the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust.
In a twist of history, say awards organizers, it recently emerged that Irena Sendler stood lookout for the Polish resistance on the day in 1942 that Jan Karski was whisked via tunnel to bear witness to the Warsaw Ghetto.