In honor of Yom Hashoah, I want to share with you the story of Irena Sendler.

I learned about Irena from non-Jewish children from rural Kansas.  In 1999, Uniontown High School teacher, Norm Conard, encouraged his students to research a woman he had read about in US News and World Report.  The article claimed that Sendler had saved 2,500 children during the Holocaust.  Thinking it must be a misprint, Conard instructed his students to find secondary sources.

It wasn't a misprint.

The students history project became the play "Life in a Jar" that continues to tour the country, sharing with the world, the story of Irena Sendler.

Irena Sendler is a Catholic woman who was a social worker during World War II.  She went into the Warsaw Ghetto and convinced Jewish parents to entrust their children to her, explaining that if the children remained with their parents, they faced certain death.

Sendler smuggled the infants and children out of the Ghetto in body bags to convince the Nazi guards that they were sick or dead.  She then arranged for them to be adopted into homes of Polish families or safely hidden in convents and orphanages.  She carefully wrote down their Jewish names and placed the lists of names in jars that she then buried in her garden.  Someday she could dig up the jars, find the children, tell them their true identities and give them back their names.

Sendler was eventually captured and severely beaten by the Nazis.  The Polish underground bribed a guard to release her and she continued her work.

Irena is alive today and living in Warsaw, Poland.

Monies raised by the Irena Sendler Project is used to help Irena and other Righteous Gentiles. 

We will forever be grateful to Irena and others like her, who at tremendous peril to themselves and their families, saved our children.  And, we are thankful for students like the children of Uniontown, Kansas, who epitomize the ideals of tikkun olam and help to repair our world.

To learn more about Irena Sendler and "Life in a Jar" please visit www.irenasendler.org. 

(I wrote the above article before I saw the presentation of Life in a Jar.  I watched, holding hands with my 9-year old daughter, with tears streaming down my face.  I was truly overwhelmed.  Overwhelmed by the incredible bravery of Irena, overwhelmed by the generosity of the Polish families who risked the lives of their own children so they could help our people, overwhelmed by these young students from Kansas and all they have done, and overwhelmed by even the briefest thought of what I would have done had I been in the Ghetto.  Would I have been brave enough, unselfish enough, to trust a stranger with my children for the tiniest hope that this would allow them to survive?

If you are able to bring this presentation to your community, I strongly encourage you to do so.  It will be an experience you will never forget.)

 

 

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