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Remembering Irena Sendler

PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle 16.05.2013 13:26
A lane between the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the monument to the heroes of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw has been named after Irena Sendler, who saved some 2, 500 Jewish children from the Holocaust.

President
President Komorowski opens Sendler's Lane in Warsaw: PAP/Jakub Kamiński

President Bronislaw Komorowski recalled during the ceremony on Wednesday that Irena Sendler pursued her activity in extremely difficult conditions, as head of the Jewish Children’s Section of the Polish Council to Aid Jews ‘Żegota’, which functioned as part of the underground Polish state during the German occupation.

As an employee of the Social Welfare Department of the city of Warsaw, Irena Sendler had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus, thanks to which she was able to smuggle the children out of the Ghetto and find Christian families and monasteries to take care of them.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and sentenced to death. ‘Żegota’ saved her by bribing German guard prior to the execution.

Irena Sendler’s daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, said during the ceremony that till the end of her life her mother kept saying that helping Jewish children was a need of her heart.

“After the war, however, she did all she could not to pass through the site of the former Ghetto, the cries of murdered Jews and the stench of burning corpses having never left her,” she said.

Irena Sendler died five years ago, on 12 May 2008, aged 98. She held the Righteous Among Nations title from the Yad Vashem Remembrance Institute in Jerusalem and the honorary citizenship of Israel. Her honours include the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state distinction.

She also received a personal letter from Pope John Paul II praising her wartime efforts. On 30 July 2008 the US House of Representatives adopted a resolution in remembrance of Irena Sendler and in 2009 she posthumously received the Humanitarian of the Year Award from The Sister Rose Thering Endowment in the United States and the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award.

Irena Sendler’s story was re-discovered in 1999 by three American high-school girls who wrote and produced a documentary play about Irena Sendler entitled ‘Life in a Jar’.

The title refers to the fact that Irena Sendler kept the only record of the identities of the Jewish children saved from the Ghetto in jars buried beneath a tree.

After the war she was able to recover her notes and track down the children she placed with adoptive families in order to reunite them with their parents and relatives, but most of them had perished in extermination camps.

The play ‘Life in a Jar’ has been performed almost 300 times in the United States, Canada and Poland.Last week, a Polish translation of Jack Mayer’s book about Irena Sendler and the American girls’ effort to spread her message of love and respect, also entitled ‘Life in a Jar’, was launched in Poland. (mk/pg)

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