As a compatriot of this year’s laureate of the Award, I am proud and greatly moved to participate in today’s ceremony. It seems as if a kind and gentle wave of murmuring cedar were moving toward us from the alley of the “Righteous Gentiles”. “Who so ever saves one life, it is as if he saved a whole world” are the words of the eternal truth contained in the Talmud. The hero of today’s ceremony, an ordinary yet unusual Polish woman, Irena Sendler, has saved two-and-a-half thousand worlds in Warsaw overwhelmed with Hitlerite violence.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Advanced age and health condition made it impossible for Irena Sendler to cover the distance between Warsaw and Washington. If she were with us here today, she would surprise us and receive our well justified admiration for her courageous acts of help extended to Jews in occupied Warsaw, with intimidation and embarrassment. As many of those who acted similarly, she thinks she did what she should have done. She says: “My father taught me to save the drowning even if one cannot swim”. Invited to write about her achievements, she wrote only a few times focusing on facts and always highly appreciating accomplishments of her underground associates. When asked to explain the motivation for such risky activities, she simply concluded: “Our campaign to help Jews started spontaneously during the first days of the German occupation and people who committed themselves to it acted for humanitarian reasons; it was a human reaction that commanded us not to remain passive in the face of a greatest barbarity performed on our co-citizens.”

Hearing these words today we, without a doubt, identify ourselves with them in full solidarity. That was the way, the only right way, to act at the circumstances, following the principle of human dignity. It is important, however, to realize the conditions under which decisions based upon the principle of human dignity were made. Relentless German violence dominated over the entire territory of invaded and occupied Poland in September 1939. European Jews, whose majority lived in Poland at that time, were deprived of all rights. Their extermination had been cunningly prepared by the Hitlerites long before the war started and precisely implemented since the beginning of the occupation of Poland. They were forcibly marked with arm-bands carrying the Star of David, expelled from their homes and closed in ghettos with only one way out to death camps. Poles were severely forbidden to extend any help to Jews. Any support in the form of food, medical treatment, hiding or saving was punished with death. Not only helpers but in most cases also their whole families were endangered with death penalty for helping Jews.
For a period of almost six years in occupied Poland, German aggressors introduced their law and enforced it with utmost severity.
But Irena Sendler feared not. She could not afford not to help. She was raised in a Warsaw suburban town of Otwock where her father, Stefan Krzyżanowski, a physician and activist of the Polish Socialist Party, treated poor Jews throughout his entire life. Her sensitivity to the needs of neighbors acquired at home determined the choice of her job at the Department of Social Welfare of Warsaw’s City Board when she became adult. In 1939 when Germany conquered Poland, many of her friends and acquaintances had no means of subsistence. She never hesitated and used her job position to help them and in each branch office of her Department in the city she had at least one contact person she trusted. Their work started from issuing false documents and falsifying signatures as no Jewish names could enter lists of residents eligible for social welfare. In 1940 Irena Sendler had already nearly 3000 names of people she was helping. When the Jewish Ghetto was established almost all of those people were placed behind its walls.
These walls were no obstacle to Irena Sendler. With an ID card of a nurse from an infectious disease ward received from the most trusted doctors, she would enter the ghetto to continue her help so much more needed now. Passing through the gate she would put on her arm-band with the Star of David wanting to demonstrate her solidarity with the atrociously murdered and humiliated people.
She helped many to escape and found shelter for them in trustworthy families. To others she brought food, clothes, medication and money, all that from her Department of Social Welfare on the basis of false documents. In 1942 mass deportations of people from the ghetto began, which meant one thing only, namely the implementation of “the Final Solution”. Based on the decision of “Żegota”, the Council for Aid to Jews, and with the support of this underground institution, Irena Sendler started a campaign of saving Jewish children by moving them to the Aryan part of the city.
The Polish Council for Aid to Jews, the only organization established for that purpose in occupied Europe at that time, also has a tree on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem.
Twenty five hundred children were put to sleep and smuggled out of the ghetto in potato sacks or dust bins and then led through underground corridors of buildings adjacent to the ghetto. Others were taken in ambulances as victims of putrid fever. In Warsaw and often far away from the city, Irena Sendler found trustworthy families and homes for those children. Many children found shelter in orphanages run by nuns. True names and addresses of those children, known exclusively to her, were carefully recorded on tissue-paper, placed in tightly sealed jars and put in the ground in secret locations. After the war she found the saved children and tried to find their families but in a large number of cases it was impossible.
Both the then children saved by Irena Sendler and adults she managed to hide, remember that whenever she came to an underground place she brought hope with her and a feeling of safety. Jerzy Korczak saved by Irena Sendler, now a writer, who has authored a book about Jan Karski characterizes her acts in the following way:” Everything depended on her right decision and appropriate acting; the hiding of a baited human being, well prepared false documents and a wisely fabricated CV. Irena Sendler keeps defending herself against the recognition of her accomplishments and constantly repeats that a lot of Poles contributed to the great and long-lasting action of helping Jews. To quote her own words: “I would not have been able to do it by myself “.
Hanna Krall, a Polish writer, also saved from the Holocaust, tried to count the number of people who saved her life. She could not recall many as she was a child then but she remembers that in every situation, even under seemingly totally hopeless circumstances, a helping hand was around. “Someone took my hand and led me to a less dangerous place” with these words Krall described her experience in the book called “My Life at Stake”. The author concludes that in “My Life at Stake” the lives of forty-five people were at stake.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
Gathered here at the ceremony, we should ask the following question: How does it happen that acting on the pain of death, people are ready to take risks? What are those people? What is their motivation? What must we have to overcome fear under such extreme circumstances?
Irena Sendler was endangered tremendously. She was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and transported to be executed. Thanks to a gigantic bribe she was saved in the very last moment. On the day following the execution she read her name on the list of executed Poles. What did she do then? She remained in hiding for a short time, managed to get false papers and …with unrestrained energy resumed her underground activity. She became head of the Children’s Department of Żegota, the Council for the Aid to Jews.
Jerzy Korczak says that Irena is a born volunteer who irrespective of the difficulties never refuses to help. Awarding “The Karski Freedom Award for Valor and Compassion” to Irena Sendler adds to our recognition and high respect for her valor and compassion.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Irena Sendler is now ninety-three years old and stays at the Warsaw Nursing Home of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God. She is in good health and is cared for by Elżbieta Ficowska, present here, who was saved as a six-month infant and taken out of the Warsaw Ghetto by a truck in a box between bricks. She worked long years in social welfare and education in postwar Poland and thinks she lived “an ordinary life”.
As humble as she is, she deserves highest respect. Let me share with you my joy and pride connected with that “ordinary life”. On a certain day in distant Uniontown, Kansas, a local High School history teacher read that during World War II someone saved twenty-five-hundred Jewish children from death. The message turned out to be so significant and exciting for three High School students as if it were related to their immediate neighborhood. Liz, Megan, Sabrina and Mr. Norman Conrad, present at today’s ceremony, are certainly ready to prove that thanks to Irena Sendler’s acts, the five-thousand-and-one-hundred-fifty miles that divide Warsaw and Uniontown, Kansas, are no obstacle to tell the world that there is good on our planet. For years these four fantastic people along with their friends have been passionately presenting the life of Irena Sendler to the world. The true story entitled “Life in a Jar” astounds and moves thousands of spectators and, what is equally important, conveys a message that even if man’s fate is tested under most difficult circumstances, valor and courage overcome them. Valor prevails and compassion wins.