“He who changes one person, changes the world entire”
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| Figure 1: Photograph of Irena Sendler in Poland. Taken from: http://www.irenasendler.org/facts-about-irena/ |
I sat bound to a chair while being interrogated by a German Nazi. He “was young, very stylish and spoke perfect Polish… He wanted the names of the Zegota leaders, their addresses and the names of others involved.”[1] So I fed them the load of nonsense that we had prepared in case of capture. But he had a folder with evidence from people who turned me in.[2]
I had only been captured some odd days ago, around October 20th, 1943 and brought to the Pawiak Prison. The German Nazi claimed that the folder contained evidence that proved I had been helping orphan Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. They had known me as “the woman who knocked on Jewish doors in the ghetto, [trying] to talk the mothers out of their children.”[3] Once the mothers would hand over their children, I would take them through an underground network. I smuggled the children out in ambulance stretchers, sewer pipes, body bags, and even trunks.[4]
When we reached safety, I utilized false documents from the individuals I recruited from the Centers of Social Welfare Departments. “With their help, [I] issued hundreds of false documents with foreign signatures” to thousands of my Jewish children to use as new identities.[5] They would follow me to their new homes and orphanages where they would begin their new life as a Christian. I promised my children to find their mothers and families once the war was over. I knew however, that the fate of their parents would not end well. The majority of the children’s parents would die in the Treblinka death camp.[6]
What the Nazis did not know however, where the jars were hidden, and if I had anything to do with it, they never would find out. My father had always told me “to help anybody in need.”[7] He was a doctor for some of the less wealthy Jewish families. He passed a while back from Typhus when I was 7, which he had caught from one of his patients.[8] He was a brave man and for that I knew I wanted to make a difference in the world much like he did. So I had saved the names and origins of the children on a piece of tissue paper and placed them in a jar.[9] The jars were hidden under an apple tree in one of my neighbor’s backyard.[10] But the German Nazis knew I was still holding back information, so they broke my legs and feet. I didn’t budge. The Nazis probably assumed they could get information out of a weak traditional woman living in Poland. What they did not realize is that they could break any physical part of me they wanted to, “but they would never break [my] spirit.”[11]
The following day the German Nazis issued my death sentence: I was going to be shot.[12] Following my sentence, one of the German executioners entered the room, I figured my fate was coming for me. But as I looked around I noticed he was helping me escape to safety. He told me that Zegota, the Polish Council I had worked with to save the Jewish children, had bribed him to get me out of the Pawiak Prison.[13] “On the following day the Germans Nazis loudly proclaimed [my] execution. Posters were put up all over the city with the news that [I] was shot. [I] read the posters [myself].[14]
“After the war [Irena] dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe.”[15] The majority of the children’s families had passed in the death camps that they had been saved from. “The children had known her only by her code name Jolanta. But years later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her picture appeared in a newspaper. ‘A man, a painter, telephoned me," said Sendler, "`I remember your face,' he said. `It was you who took me out of the ghetto.' I had many calls like that!”[16]
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