This email was sent to me from a very nice older lady on the west coast. I am posting it as I received it with credit due to whoever initiated it.
THE ‘SCHINDLER’ NO ONE KNEW
AND THE NOBEL PEACE PRICE GOES TO THE GENTLEMAN IN THE TIN FOIL HAT; MR. AL GORE!!!
The following is the amazing story of Irena Sendler of Poland, age 97, who was one of Al Gore’s co-nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sure … she didn’t properly capitalize monetarily from her deeds. Sure … she didn’t become a pop icon. But, she did save 2500 Jewish kids from Nazi extermination. Does that count? Nah … films about global warming … that’s what’s it’s all about!!Irena Sendler, a Catholic social worker, rescued 2,500 children from the Nazi death camps. Three Kansas teenagers resurrected her story, writes Marti Attoun in Ladies’ Home Journal.
Irena Sendler keeps a photo of ‘her Kansas girls’ on the bedside table in her nursing-home room in Warsaw, Poland. She rests easier now that her story is in good hands.
And her story is astoundingly awe-inspiring, just as that of Oskar Schindler, whose courageous acts of Nazi resistance became a book and an Academy Award-winning film. But unlike Schindler, who received international acclaim, Sendler had been a footnote in history for over 60 years.
That all changed in September 1999, when three teenagers in a small town in Kansas were looking for a topic for a history project and stumbled upon a short mention of Sendler in an article in a 5-year-old newsmagazine. As a Catholic social worker, the article said, Sendler had organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943.
‘We thought it was a typo,’ recalls Elizabeth Cambers, now 18 and a college freshman. ‘We thought it was supposed to say she rescued 250 children, not 2,500.’
In September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker employed by Warsaw’s social-welfare department. An only child, she had been just 7 when her father, a Catholic doctor, contracted typhus and died after treating Jews during a 1917 typhus outbreak. But she never forgot his sacrifice. ‘I was taught that if a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality,’ Sendler has said. ‘One must help him. It is a need of the heart.’
In the fall of 1940, Sendler watched as the Nazis forced 350,000 Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto, a 16-square-block area that was walled off and guarded. With each passing month of the war, the torment of the people locked inside intensified. They were dying of starvation and disease while unknowingly waiting for the Nazis to herd them into freight cars that would ultimately take them to their deaths in the gas chambers.
Sendler joined Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, an underground network founded in December 1942 by psychologist Adolf Berman and six other prominent scholars, religious leaders, and social activists. The secret organization, which forged thousands of birth certificates and other documents to give Jews safe Aryan identities, asked Sendler to head up their operation to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.
But first she had to get inside. Because the Nazis were on guard against the spread of infections, they allowed the delivery of medicine inside the Ghetto. A Zegota member working inside the Polish disease department forged a permit that allowed Sendler to work undercover as a nurse inside the ghetto. Her code name was Jolanta.
With the help of 10 ‘messenger friends,’ as Sendler called her colleagues, and dozens of volunteers, she organized the effort to sneak the children to orphanages, convents, and private homes in the Warsaw region. Children who were old enough to talk were taught to rattle off Christian prayers and mimic other religious behavior (such as how to make the sign of the cross) so they could live safely without arousing suspicion of their Jewish heritage. Sendler and Zegota devised several routes for smuggling children out of the ghetto. Kids escaped on foot or in the arms of volunteers through sewer pipes or basements with underground passageways. Many also escaped through the courthouse, which had entrances on both the ghetto side and Aryan side. Other methods were more inventive. For instance, a trolley driver and Zegota member, when crossing from the ghetto to the Aryan side, hid little ones in trunks, suitcases, or sacks under his back seat, where the Nazi guards could no not see. Another supporter, an ambulance driver, kept his dog beside him in the front seat and trained him to bark to camouflage any cries or noises from the babies hidden under stretchers in back. Sendler also arranged for babies and children to be sedated and smuggled out with merchants in potato sacks, under their loads of goods. Sometimes, she even sneaked sedated children out in body bags, telling the guards that they were dead.
Day after day, for about 16 months, Sendler persuaded parents and grandparents to hand over their babies and children, to give them a chance to live. ‘There were terrible scenes,’ Sendler says. ‘One mother & I wanted a child to leave the ghetto while the father did not. They asked what was the guarantee? What kind of guarantee could I give them?’ She couldn’t even guarantee that she could get past the guards.
On slips of tissue paper, Sendler recorded the identity of every child she rescued.
Whenever possible, she wrote down the child’s Jewish name as well as the child’s new Christian name and new address. Sendler buried these names in jars under an apple tree in a friend’s garden. After the war, Sendler hoped, the children would be located and their Jewish identities revealed to them.
On Oct. 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. They had long suspected she was running a smuggling operation, and one of her messengers had been caught and tortured until she gave up Sendler’s name and home address. The Gestapo interrogated Sendler, demanding information about the identities of the other rescuers and the children in hiding. But she refused to talk, even when she was beaten until her legs and feet were broken. ‘I was quiet as a mouse,’ Sendler has said. ‘I would have rather died than disclose anything about our operations.’ She was then taken to Pawiak prison, where she was sentenced to be executed. At the last minute, however, the woman who had rescued so many others was herself rescued. On the day she was to be executed, Zegota paid a hefty bribe to a guard, who allowed Sendler to escape. The guard subsequently posted Sendler’s name on public bulletin boards as one of the executed, essentially rendering her invisible to the Nazis. She then went in to hiding in Poland, just like the children she’d saved.
When Poland was liberated a year and three months later, in January of 1945, Sendler returned to the friend’s garden and dug up the jars. She turned over the rescued children’s names to Zegota’s Berman, and he and other members of the group tried to locate the children’s foster families.
Sadly, most of the children had no parents or grandparents to be found. Less than 1 percent of the Jews inside the ghetto survived the war, most having perished at the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. After the war, Sendler married, raised two children of her own, and continued her career as a social worker in Warsaw. The beatings she had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo left her permanently disabled and she has had trouble walking ever since. But, she never talked openly about her rescue work. Poland was under a communist regime, and the postwar climate wasn’t safe. For almost 60 years, her story was essentially lost to history.
Then, in March 2000, she received a letter from Elizabeth Cambers and two of her classmates at Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kansas. Encouraged by their social studies teacher, the girls had selected Sendler as the subject of their National History Day project. Although information about her was scarce, they had been able to write a 10-minute play, titled ‘Life in a Jar’, that had already won first place at the state level of the national contest.
‘We explained who we were and what we were doing,’ says Sabrina Coons, now 20 and a student at Kansas State University. ‘We told her that we found her story amazing.’
Sendler’s response, handwritten in Polish, arrived in Kansas three weeks later. ‘I am very eager to receive and read your play,’ Sendler wrote. In a series of letters, Sendler answered the students’ questions, and slowly the details of her remarkable story unfolded; an international friend ship was forged.
After an emotional performance of Life in a Jar at Uniontown High, the students were invited to perform the play for church groups, nursing homes, and civic organizations throughout southeast Kansas. Through their correspondence with Sendler, the teens learned that she lived quite meagerly. So at each performance, they set out a donation jar.
Their first gift to Sendler was $3, which they told her to use for postage. ‘We found out later that she gave the $3 away to a children’s home,’ says Coons. ‘That’s just how she is.’
Although the girls didn’t win any awards when they traveled to Maryland in June 2000 to compete in the national contest, their play gained national and international attention, and the students have since given more than 100 performances of the play in eight different states. As a result, Sendler has received numerous awards for her courageous work. After learning she was to be given a $10,000 humanitarian award from the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, she wrote to her girls “My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me…. I can’t find the words to thank you, my dear girls…. Before the day you have written the play ‘Life in a Jar’ — nobody in my own country and in the whole world cared about my person and my work during the war …”
One member of a Kansas City audience was so profoundly moved by Sendler’s story that he raised money to send the play’s three authors to Poland to meet Sendler in May 2001.
‘It wasn’t real until I actually met Irena,’ says Megan Stewart. ‘We all ran up and hugged her. She wanted to just hold our hands and hear about our lives.’ Cambers told Sendler, ‘I love you. You are my hero.’
Sendler, a 4-foot-11-inch woman who now uses a wheelchair, deflected the girls’ praise. ‘A hero is someone doing extraordinary things,’ she told them. ‘What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing to do.’
http://www.irenasendler.org/
http://www.ifsw.org/en/p38000913.html?force_folder=038000059
there is nothing to say except this woman is extraordinarily wonderful.
This woman has passed away. May a thousand others just like her take her place.
To many in this world she was a no body but to each of these 2,500 she was life its self. May God welcome her home with the blessings that she deserves.
al gore would have turned them in to the SS…
A great story – and lady! I heard some of her story on the radio yesterday. I can’t believe she lost to Eco-Al.
Wow, how strategic are the pathways of life! Interestingly, why hasn’t the Catholic church or some dynamic Catholic group or wealthy celeb has not made certain that the play about love of our fellow man supercedes self-promotion and thrives in humility. What a loss of dynamic courage, and friendship that lays down one’s life for others.
What a loss of priceless treasure to humanity! Who will step up to fill the shoes of such a diminutive heroine with her heart of grandeur!?
Pingback: This Is Frightening - Cooking Forum
I haven’t heard of any coroner saying that somebody died from breathing too much pollution. The Nazis were murdering these people and she rescued them at the risk of her own life. She was tortured until her legs and feet were broken and some nutcase like Al Gore gets the prize when he has never had to do anything for himself in his whole life, much less others.
I know Irena Sendler is with Jesus singing praises to him. Forget All Gore. He is nothing.
Probably she wasn’t the winner on this one but to me she was one of the winners of the most important one as human. All I know is that for Irena this kind of material prize was nothing compare to what she and her team did. Irena didn’t think of herself as a hero, she didn’t want fame. What she really wanted was to tell the world: Be a good person to everybody without judging religion or race.
Take her life as an example and apply it in your daily live. That would have been more valuable for her instead of a simple prize.
I wonder if winning or not winning any prize mattered to Mrs. Sendler? From her life, character, actions, and the picture by her bedside, I think any prize would cheapen her heroism. I wonder if she would be jealous of Mr. Gore – I rather doubt it. I think she might congratulate him based on the kind of person she was and still is in God’s eternal love.
I watched the Movie last night, I’m deeply touched by the courage of Irena and all those who risked their lives to save so many children. How can this event in human history be denied by so many, when an experience such as Irena’s is brought out into the open.
AND AL GORE WANTED TO BE OUR PRESIDENT.
Dear God. How serene and sweet this face is ( I just can’t say “was”). Can’t keep my eyes off her picture. An angel on earth. Who needs the Nodel prize? she was awarded all along -only by Someone Else….
I agree with the Jan 8, 2009 comment by Mick and believe she would have congratulated Al Gore on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not in competition with him and I doubt that he was competeing with her. We know that she saved 2500 lives, but none of us know how many lives Mr. Gore wil have saved by his ecological efforts.
Most of us could never comprehend what this woman did, and the others who helped.
Just hearing about what she accomplished is amazing.
Let alone having experienced it
an absolute disgrace she did not win, history will always remember her and let us not forget her. Let’s hope the religious and political idiots who are waging todays wars and terrorist campains take note (but I doubt they will understand the true value and perception of what Irena has done). Irena the world will ever be in debt to you for what you have done, a true angel among demons.
For those of you sticking up for Gore – it’s not about him. These “judges” screwed up. Oh, and Gore should have refused the award and insist that this lady receive it.
I read the story that the girl from Kansas sent in to Guideposts magazine. This is an amazing woman. Risking your own life and well being to save others is the most unselfish thing that anyone can do, and she did it many times. She said herself that she was not interested in awards
and I agree she would have complimented Al Gore and his cowinners. Another women who risked a great deal was Corrie TenBoom from Holland. Her book, the Hiding Place is a wonderful story. And there are those who still deny the holocaust. That is a great shame.
I was deeply moved by Irena’s life. She made a difference to 2500 children.
Having lived in Holland as a child during the occupation, I know how dangerous it was, what she did in Poland. Praise the Lord!
I was so appalled after reading Irena’s story and learning GORE (inventor of the internet) won. Who are these idiot judges?? Oh yeah, must be the same ones on the Ethics Committee!!!! What an honor it is just to know her name and what she signifies. There may be hope yet for the human race.
What a true heroine Irena was. I am so sad she had to suffer such torture, but she was so brave. How many today could tolerate it? She wouldn’t care of the Nobel Peace Prize, but she deserved it. If Al Gore or B.O. were real men, they would have made sure she had received the prize. God rest her soul for the life she sacrificed and lived under for so long. Bless you Irena – we all love you and will see you again with the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. Rest in Peace sweet one~
Al Gore or Irena Sendler for the Nobel Peace Prize? To say that one deserves it more than the other is to minimize the contribution of the other. It is more important to understand and realize that there are many ways to save humanity.
It just makes me mad that a hippy who cares too much about global warming gets the Nobel prize, while somebody who saves 2500 lives is forgotten.