Sendler, a social care nurse for the Warsaw city council, spent the next four years risking her life in the Warsaw ghetto, delivering essential supplies and, when the true purposes of Nazi policy became apparent, smuggling out as many children as she could.
She saved many hundreds of lives — perhaps as many as 2,500. Even under torture and sentence of death, she refused to reveal the whereabouts of the rescued children to the Nazi occupiers, and after escaping captivity went back to the underground, making sure that those she had hidden survived the war.
She was born in Warsaw in 1910, the only child of Dr Stanislaw Krzyzanowski. The family moved to the nearby town of Otwock, where her father had a reputation as the only doctor who would treat Jewish patients during typhoid epidemics; he himself died of the disease in 1917. Irena, unusually for a Catholic child, was allowed to play with Jewish children and said that her father taught her “that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not”.
She married Mieczyslaw Sendler and became a social worker, caring for poor Jewish families in Warsaw. Under German occupation, conditions for the city’s 400,000 Jews deteriorated rapidly, and Sendler, defying Nazi orders, began bringing them supplies. After the Warsaw ghetto was sealed off in 1940, Sendler and some of her colleagues obtained passes from a sympathiser in the city authorities, letting them into the ghetto as sanitation workers.
They carried in food, clothes and medicine — including typhoid vaccinations — sometimes returning several times a day despite the risk to their own health and the horrors they witnessed. Starving children, abandoned corpses and SS officers using skulls for target practice — “I saw all this and a million other things that a human eye should never have to see,” she later said, “and it has stayed with me for every second of every day that God has granted me to live.”
In the summer of 1942 deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka death camp began. Sendler joined Zegota, the Polish organisation set up to help Jews, and began getting children out. “We would go to the ghetto every day and try to get as many children as possible because the situation would worsen every day.”
Smuggling them out was risky, because any Pole caught helping Jews was sentenced to death. Sendler used false documents, hid small children, sedated, in sacks and boxes — even coffins — and sent older ones out through the sewers or basement passageways. One mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Others went through a courthouse which had one entrance in the ghetto and another on the “Aryan side”.
But for Sendler, the hardest part was persuading parents to part with their children. Though the parents knew the children would die if they stayed, Sendler could offer no guarantee that they would be any safer if they left. She later described “infernal scenes. Father agreed but mother didn’t. Grandmother cuddled the child most tenderly and, weeping bitterly, said ‘I won’t give away my grandchild at any price’. We sometimes had to leave such unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I went there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to death camps.”
Once the children were out, Sendler used her network to find them homes in Polish families, orphanages and convents. To help them blend in, the children were taught mainstream prayers and given new identities. Sendler kept a careful list of their real identities in the hope that they could at some point be reunited with their families. But in October 1943, alerted by an informer, 11 German officers arrived to arrest Sendler. She had no time to dispose of the list and gave it to a colleague, who hid it in her underwear while the soldiers ripped Sendler’s house apart. Sendler was taken to the notorious Pawiak prison, where she was methodically tortured and beaten, leaving her permanently scarred. She never revealed the names of the children or of her underground colleagues.
Officially, she was executed in early 1944. But in fact, Zegota had bribed a German guard to let her escape from death row.
Even after this ordeal Sendler continued her work, going back underground with a new identity, bringing supplies and medicine to the hidden children, and moving them on when suspicions were aroused. “I once carried such a tearful broken-hearted little boy to other guardians when he asked me ‘please tell me how many mums you can have, for this is the third one I’m going to’.”
After the liberation Sendler retrieved the list of names from where she had buried it during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, in jam jars under an apple tree in a friend’s garden. She helped Jewish organisations to trace those few children whose families had survived the Holocaust. But even these reunions were painful, for the children had to be uprooted from their homes yet again. Many of the rest were eventually sent to Palestine.
Sendler herself received little recognition immediately after the war. The regime which came to power in Poland had little use for the sufferings of the Jews, nor for non-party war heroes. In a still often anti-Semitic climate, those who had rescued Jews were targets of suspicion or contempt.
After divorcing her husband, Sendler married Stefan Zgrzembski, a fellow underground activist, and continued her work in social care and in the education system.
Her work was, however, known to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, which recognised her as Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. A tree was planted in her honour, but she was not allowed to visit Israel until 1983.
In recent years she had become increasingly well known in her homeland, and she was awarded the country’s highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, by President Kwasniewski in 2003. A biography appeared in Poland and Germany in 2006. Last year the Polish senate passed a unanimous resolution honouring her for “the rescue of the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children”.
She wrote in response: “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.” She was too ill to attend, and this statement was read out by Elzbieta Ficowska, who was smuggled out of the ghetto in 1942, at the age of 6 months.
Sendler described her actions as “a normal thing to do” and refused always to think of herself as a hero. “That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true — I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death.”
She had two sons with Zgrzembski; one of them died in infancy, the other in 1999. She is survived by a daughter.
Irena Sendler, social worker and rescuer of Warsaw’s Jews, was born on February 15, 1910. She died on May 12, 2007, aged 98
