Born: 15 February, 1910, in Otwock (now in Poland). Died: 12 May, 2008, in Warsaw, aged 98. IRENA Sendler was a Roman Catholic who created a network of rescuers in Poland who smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Wa
rsaw ghetto during the Second World War, some of them hidden in coffins.
Sendler was head of the children's bureau of Zegota, an underground organisation set up to save Jews after the Nazis invaded Poland on 1 September, 1939. Soon after the invasion, around 450,000 Jews, about 30 per cent of Warsaw's population, were crammed into a tiny section of the city and barricaded behind 7ft walls.
On 19 April, 1943, the Nazis began what they expected would be a rapid liquidation of the ghetto. It took them more than a month to quell the Warsaw ghetto uprising. By then, only about 55,000 Jews were still alive; most of them were sent to death camps.
Also by then, however, Sendler's group of about 30 volunteers, mostly women, had managed to slip hundreds of infants, young children and teenagers to safety.
"She was the inspiration and the prime mover for the whole network that saved those 2,500 Jewish children," said Debórah Dwork, the Rose professor of Holocaust history at Clark University in Massachusetts. Prof Dwork said Sendler personally smuggled out around 400 children.
Elzbieta Ficowska, a baby in 1942, was one of them. She said: "Mrs Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come."
There were several ruses by which the children were saved. Sendler was a social worker for the city, with a pass that allowed her to enter the ghetto. "The Jews were all disease carriers, as far as the Nazis were concerned," Prof Dwork said. "They put up quarantine signs throughout the ghetto." Forgeries of the government pass allowed other members of Zegota to enter the ghetto as well. They went in day after day to persuade Jewish parents to let them rescue children.
The most common escape route was through the Warsaw municipal law courts, which abutted the ghetto.
"There were underground corridors that had entrances on the ghetto side," Prof Dwork said. "The Polish police were bribed to allow the traffic. Parents were told to dress the children as well as possible, certainly without a star."
For a time, the ghetto's boundaries extended to the Jewish cemetery. "Some children were placed in coffins, their mouths taped, or they were sedated so they wouldn't cry," said Stanlee Stahl, of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, an organisation that supports rescuers of Holocaust victims. "Other children were smuggled out in potato sacks."
Sometimes an ambulance wagon, with a driver and a dog, took children through the gates. "Children were under the floorboards," Ms Stahl said. "The barking dog would drown out a child's cries."
A church straddled the ghetto border. "Children would be taken into the church, go into the confessional, and come out with papers as a little Catholic," Ms Stahl said. They would be taken to a Christian home, a convent or an orphanage.
In a letter last year to the Polish senate after her country finally honoured her efforts, Sendler wrote: "Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory."
In 1965, Sendler became one of the first of the so-called righteous gentiles honoured by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Poland's Communist leaders did not allow her to travel to Israel; she was presented with the award in 1983.
Sendler once told Ms Stahl that she wanted to write a book about the bravery of Jewish mothers.
Ms Stahl recalled: "She said, 'Here I am, a stranger, asking them to place their child in my care. They ask if I can guarantee their safety. I have to answer no. Sometimes they would give me their child. Other times they would say come back. I would come back a few days later and the family had been deported.'"
Sendler, who was born Irena Krzyzanowskak, married Mieczyslaw Sendler, but was divorced after the Second World War. Her second husband, Stefan Zgrzembski, died before her. She is survived by her daughter, Janka, and a granddaughter.
The full article contains 741 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
