[econoclectic] EclectEcon: Irena Sendler: Talk about Courage!

[Email subscription to blog articles]

Posted by EclectEcon:
Irena Sendler: Talk about Courage!
http://econoclectic.powerblogs.com/posts/1210790694.shtml


   Irena Sendler died at the age of 98 on Monday, May 12th. She was a
   brave Polish social worker who helped save the lives of hundreds, and
   probably thousands, of Jewish children during World War II. From
   Wikipaedia,

     During the World War II German occupation of Poland, Sendler lived
     in Warsaw ... while working for the city's Social Welfare
     Department. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary
     conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto
     and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams,
     sometimes disguising them as packages. She also used the old
     courthouse of the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto (still standing) as one
     of the main routes of smuggling children out. She started helping
     Jews a long time before the Warsaw Ghetto was established. As early
     as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began helping Jews by
     offering them food and shelter. Irena and her helpers made over
     3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, before she joined
     Zegota and the children's division. Helping Jews was very risky â
     in German-occupied Poland, all household members were punished by
     death if a hidden Jew was found in their house. This punishment was
     more severe than those applied in other occupied European
     countries.
     In December 1942, the newly created Children's Section of the
     Żegota (Council for Aid to Jews), nominated her (under her cover
     name Jolanta) to head its children's department. As an employee of
     the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter
     the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the
     Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto. During the visits, she
     wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people
     and so as not to call attention to herself.
     She cooperated with the Children's Section of the Municipal
     Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a
     Polish Relief Organization tolerated under German supervision. She
     organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the Ghetto,
     carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. The children
     were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the
     Sisters of the Family of Mary or Roman Catholic convents such as
     the Sisters Little Servants of the Immaculate Conception of the
     Blessed Mary at Turkowice and Chotomów. Some were smuggled to
     priests in parish rectories where they could be further hidden. She
     hid lists of their names in jars, in order to keep track of their
     original and new identities. Zegota assured the children that, when
     the war was over, they must be returned to Jewish relatives.
     In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured,
     and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing the German
     guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods,
     unconscious and with broken arms and legs. She was listed on public
     bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the
     war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish
     children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the
     children's identities and began an attempt to find the children and
     return them to living parents. However, almost all the children's
     parents had died at the Treblinka extermination camp.