Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto
Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jews. (Movie)
Irena Sendler saved 2,500 Jews (No Movie)
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
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Her father treated the poor for free. Most of them were Jewish. When he died of typhus in 1917 — contracted from the patients his colleagues refused to see — the Jewish community of Otwock offered to pay for his daughter’s education. Irena Krzyżanowska was seven years old. She spoke fluent Yiddish by the time she was six.
She grew up and became a social worker. At the University of Warsaw, when administrators imposed a segregation rule forcing Jewish students to sit on the left side of the lecture hall and Catholic students on the right, she sat on the left. She defaced the “non-Jewish” stamp on her grade card. The university suspended her for three years.
By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department. She was twenty-nine years old, and she had already decided what kind of person she was going to be.
Most people know the name Oskar Schindler. Steven Spielberg made sure of that.
Schindler was a German industrialist, a Nazi Party member, and a war profiteer who used Jewish slave labor in his enamelware factory. His transformation from opportunist to rescuer is one of the great moral arcs of the twentieth century. He saved approximately 1,100 Jews by keeping them on his factory payroll and arguing to the SS that they were essential workers.
Irena Sendler saved more than twice as many people — 2,500 children — and she did it not from a position of privilege and party membership but from a social worker’s desk, walking into the ghetto every day with forged papers and no institutional protection.
- Schindler operated inside the German system and manipulated it.
- Sendler operated entirely outside it and against it.
- Schindler bribed officials to keep workers alive in his factory.
- Sendler bribed a guard to escape her own execution.
There is another difference, and it matters. Schindler began as a profiteer who evolved into a rescuer — his moral awakening is the dramatic engine of his story.
Sendler never needed an awakening. She was sitting on the Jewish side of the lecture hall in her twenties. She was forging documents before the ghetto was sealed. Her father’s example was not something she discovered. It was something she inherited.
Schindler got a Spielberg film. Sendler got a play performed in high school auditoriums in Kansas.
This is her story.
In November 1940, the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto. Nearly 400,000 Jews were crammed into 1.3 square miles and walled off behind ten feet of brick and barbed wire. The Germans rationed roughly 200 calories per person per day. People starved in the streets. Typhus killed thousands. Bodies lay uncollected on the sidewalks, and children too weak to stand sat in doorways waiting to die.
By July 1942, the Nazis began mass deportations. Most of the ghetto’s inhabitants were shipped to the Treblinka extermination camp. Within two months, 280,000 people had been murdered. The ghetto that remained was a death sentence on a schedule.
Sendler had already been smuggling food, medicine, and typhus vaccine into the ghetto for months. She carried a pass from Warsaw’s Epidemic Control Department — the Germans feared typhus would spread beyond the walls — and she used it to walk in and out every day, sometimes more than once. She wore a Star of David armband in solidarity with the people inside.
But food and medicine were not going to save the children. The children were going to die. All of them.
So she started taking them out.
Under the code name “Jolanta,” Sendler built a network of twenty-five operatives — mostly women — and organized a smuggling operation that ran for over a year. Infants were sedated and hidden under stretchers in ambulances. Toddlers were carried out in potato sacks, toolboxes, and coffins. Older children walked through a church that had two entrances — one inside the ghetto, one on the Aryan side — and emerged on the other side with new names and forged baptismal certificates. Some escaped through the sewers. Some through the old courthouse on the ghetto’s edge.
The hardest part was not the smuggling. The hardest part was the parents.
Sendler had to stand in front of mothers and fathers and ask them to hand over their children. Desperate parents would ask: “Can you guarantee they will live?” She could not. She could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. Some parents agreed. Some refused. Some changed their minds and ran after her in the street. She came back the next day. And the day after that.
She recorded every child’s real name — the Jewish name, the new Christian identity, the hiding place — on thin strips of tissue paper. She encoded the names and rolled the paper into glass jars, which she buried beneath an apple tree in a friend’s garden. If she was killed, someone would dig them up. Someone would know who the children really were.
Twenty-five hundred names went into those jars.
On October 20, 1943 — her name day — the Gestapo came. Eleven agents pounded on her door in the middle of the night. An informant had broken under torture and given up her name. Sendler heard them coming. She threw a package out the window to a friend waiting below — the encoded list of every child she had saved. The friend caught it and disappeared.
They took her to Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue. Then to Pawiak Prison — the place where most prisoners entered alive and left dead. They tortured her for weeks. They broke the bones in her feet and legs, crippling her for life. She gave them nothing. Not a name. Not an address. Not a single child.
She was sentenced to death.
On the morning of her scheduled execution, a guard led her down the corridor toward the courtyard. Instead of taking her to the waiting room, he walked her out of the prison and into the street. He told her to run. Żegota had bribed him. Sendler’s name was posted on public bulletin boards as among those executed. She spent the rest of the war hiding under a false identity — Klara Dąbrowska — and she kept working.
When the war ended, she went back and dug up the jars.
She used the tissue paper lists to track down every child she could find. She tried to reunite them with their families. But almost all the parents had been murdered at Treblinka. The children had known her only by her code name.
Under Communist Poland, Sendler was branded a fascist for her connection to the wartime underground and the Polish government-in-exile. Her story was suppressed. She kept quiet. She hid her Yad Vashem medal — awarded in 1965 — in a basement drawer and told no one except her husband.
Her story would have died with her if not for four teenage girls in rural Kansas.
In 1999, students at Uniontown High School — Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Cambers, Sabrina Coons, and Jessica Shelton — found a single sentence in a 1994 issue of U.S. News & World Report: “Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto.” They assumed it was a typo. They thought the article meant 250. It was not a typo. They wrote a play called Life in a Jar. The play traveled the world. And a ninety-year-old woman in a Warsaw apartment began receiving phone calls from strangers who said: “I remember your face. It was you who took me out of the ghetto.”
Irena Sendler received Poland’s Order of the White Eagle in 2003. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She died on May 12, 2008, at ninety-eight. She never stopped saying she had not done enough.
“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth,” she said, “and not a title to glory. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”
What sets Sendler apart from the other profiles in this series is time. Petrov had twenty-three minutes. Bonhoeffer had a single decision to board a ship. Hugh Thompson had seconds to land a helicopter. Sendler had years. Every morning for over a year, she woke up and decided to do it again. Every day she walked through the ghetto checkpoint carrying forged papers and knowing that if they searched her — really searched her — she would be shot on the spot. There was no single moment of courage. There were hundreds of them, stacked end to end, ordinary and grinding and sustained by nothing more than the decision to keep going.
Her father had a saying she carried her whole life: “If someone else is drowning, you have to give a hand.”
She gave a hand. Twenty-five hundred times.
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Sources: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, oral history interview with Irena Sendler; Yad Vashem, “Stories of Women Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust”; Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, Irena Sendler biography; Anna Mieszkowska, Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust (2010); Tilar J. Mazzeo, Irena’s Children (2016); Jack Mayer, Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project (2011).
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Next in this series: Bayard Rustin — The Architect Behind the Curtain.
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Charles C. Jett is the author of WANTED: Eight Critical Skills That Bring People to the Top and the creator of the Courage and Consequence series. He writes at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.
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