The Gestapo broke her legs and feet, crippling her for life, before sentencing her to death but Woman of the Day and Polish Resistance and social worker Irena Sendler, born OTD in 1910 in Warsaw, escaped and continued to save Jewish babies and children for over a year until Warsaw was liberated on 17 January 1945. Codename: Jolanta.
Using her position in the city's welfare department, she began by smuggling food, medicine, and supplies into the Warsaw Ghetto and forged documents to help Jews.
The Warsaw Ghetto, the largest Nazi ghetto during WW2 and set up in Occupied Poland from 1940 to 1943, crammed in 460,000 Jews in such confined and brutal conditions that an average of nine people lived in each room. They suffered from starvation, disease, and brutal conditions, but ironically saw it as the safer option rather than take their chances outside. That was until the mass deportations to extermination camps started. In the summer of 1942, over 254,000 people were sent to die in Treblinka, and another 300,000 people died from bullets, gas, starvation, and disease within the Ghetto or during deportation.
The Germans demolished the ghetto in May 1943 after the fierce but doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, marking a devastating chapter of the Holocaust.
From late 1942, Irena was the head of the children's division of Żegota (the Council for Aid to Jews, the only state-sponsored organisation in Occupied Europe dedicated to rescuing Jews). She posed as an infection-control and typhus inspector - the Germans feared the spread of typhus from the Ghetto - and made multiple visits to persuade desperate parents to hand their children over to her.
"I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality."
She smuggled the children out by hazardous but ingenious means - hiding them in bags, coffins, ambulances with false bottoms, potato sacks, sewers, even a carpenter's toolbox - with the help of 25 young women. Working together, they secured safe hiding places for them by finding willing Polish families, orphanages, convents, or hospitals to shelter them, giving them false identities as Catholics.
The risks were enormous. After the ghetto was walled off in November 1940, entry was nearly impossible without official permission. Guards shot escapees on sight, and the area was heavily patrolled. From October 1941, German law made helping Jews punishable by death for the rescuer and their entire family and household, creating constant mortal risk for Irena, her network, foster families, and institutions. Every time she extracted a child, she risked discovery by guards or informers in a filthy, overcrowded, and dangerous environment where random beatings and humiliations occurred daily.
Nevertheless, she persisted, even meticulously recording each child's birth name, Jewish identity, and new location on slips of paper, which she buried in jars in a friend's garden to preserve the information for postwar reunions.
The Gestapo had suspected Irena’s involvement in Żegota, and when the interrogation and torture of a woman running a launderette used as a drop-off point for Resistance messages yielded a number of names including hers, they ransacked her home on 18 October 1943.
Irena was able to toss lists of the rescued children's names and locations to her friend, Janina Grabowska, who hid them, but was taken to Gestapo HQ on Szucha Avenue (Aleja Szucha) where she was badly beaten. A transfer followed to the notorious Gestapo-operated Pawiak Prison in Warsaw where she was tortured for several weeks and sentenced to execution. She revealed nothing, absolutely nothing.
"I still carry the marks on my body of what those 'German supermen' did to me then."
Żegota bribed guards to slip her out of the prison the day before execution and although Irena was badly injured, indeed crippled for life, she went underground using an alias and carried on her lifesaving work.
This remarkable woman saved about 2,500 children and babies. After the war, she used her hidden lists to help reunite them with relatives.
"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."
Irena was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1965 and awarded Poland’s highest honours. She died in 2008 aged 98. She never saw herself as a hero.
"Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal…The term ‘hero’ irritates me greatly. The opposite is true — I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little."
