Irena was born in Poland in 1910, and raised by her Catholic parents to respect and love all people regardless of their ethnicity and regardless of their social status. Her father was a physician, and in 1917 when a Typhoid epidemic broke out he was the only doctor who would treat the poor, mostly Jewish victims of this tragic disease. Her father eventually contracted the disease himself, but as he was dying, he told 7-year-old Irena, “If you see someone drowning you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim.”
In 1939 the Nazis swept through Poland and imprisoned the Jews in ghettos where they were first starved to death and then systematically murdered in the consentration camps. Irena, by then a social worker in Warsaw, saw the Jewish people suffering and resolved to do what she could to rescue as many as possible, especially the children.
Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Irena, imagining the horror of life behind the ghetto walls, obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a nurse, allowed to bring in food, cloths and medicine.
By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis had become clear, Irena joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close friends - a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women - and began rescuing Jewish children.
She and her friends smuggled children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, and coffins, sedating the babies to quiet their cries. Some were whisked away through a network of secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. One of Irena’s children told of how he waited by a gate in darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed he counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the center of the street, where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and eventually to safety.
Irena also snuck older children out through secret openings in the wall, through the courthouse, through churches, any clever way she and her network could evade the Nazis. Once outside the ghetto walls, Irena gave the children false names and documents and placed them in Catholic convents, orphanages and or with Polish families. Her hope was that after the war she could reunite the children with surviving relatives, or at least return their Jewish identities. To that end she kept thin tissue paper lists of each child’s Jewish name, their Polish name and address. She hid the precious lists in glass jars buried under an apple tree in the back yard of one of her friends.
In 1943 Irena Sendler was captured by the Nazis and severely tortured for the work she had done. Irena refused to divulge the names of the other members of Zegota or the location of the lists. During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs with wooden clubs, and she passed out under the excruciating pain. She was sentenced to death but a friend in the resistance bribed a member of the German Gestapo to help her escape. Irena’s name was added to a list of executed prisoners, while she went into hiding and continued with her rescue efforts.
Before Irena joined Zegota she had already saved roughly 500 Jews, adults and children. While working in Zegota she saved 2500 children. When the was over Irena worked to return those children to their families. Sadly, most of their families has been killed in the concentration camps but they at least were given the ability to know their real names and who their family was. 3000 people were spared torture and death because one woman had the courage to fight evil.
She was a living saint, a true woman of faith! When she was called a hero Irena said, “We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true—I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.” Irena had with her one item while imprisoned by the Nazi’s: a Divine Mercy holy card with the phrase “Jesus, I trust in thee.” She kept this card with her until 1979 when she gave it to Pope John Paul II as a gift. Irena died on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98. She bore the scars and disability of her torture until the day that she died.
Irena lived her faith in the radical way that the Gospel call for. Irena lived the love that Christ modeled for us on the cross and her example invites us to do the same. Most of us will not have the opportunity to perform such heroic works for Christ, but Irena reminds us that we are called to live the Gospel truth however is needed in our time.
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