A True Hero - Irena Sendler

I was forwarded an email about this remarkable women. I was so impressed I did a little research and found that the tales of her heroism and charity were true.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13

"But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever, and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him." Moroni 7:47

Irena Sendler

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler)
Irena sympathized with Jews from childhood. Her great-grandfather had been deported to Siberia by Czarist Russia. Her physician father had died in 1917 of typhus contracted while treating Jewish patients. She opposed the ghetto-bench system that existed at some prewar Polish universities, and because of this she was suspended for three years from Warsaw University.

World War II

During the German occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (prior to that, she had lived in Otwock and Tarczyn while working for urban Social Welfare departments). As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began aiding Jews. She and her helpers created over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, prior to joining the organized Żegota resistance and the children's division. Helping Jews was very risky—in German-occupied Poland, all household members risked death if they were found to be hiding Jews, a more severe punishment than in other occupied European countries.

In December 1942 the newly created Żegota (the Council to Aid Jews) nominated her (by her cover name Jolanta to head its children's section. 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 these 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 that was tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys.Irena also smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box that she carried with her. She also had a dog in the back of her truck that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the noises of the kids that she would smuggle out. 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 at the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto (still standing) as one of the main routes for smuggling out children.

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 Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate at Turkowice and Chotomów. Some children were smuggled to priests in parish rectories. She hid lists of their names in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.

In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing 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 attempted to find the children and return them to their parents. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had gone missing otherwise.

In 2007 Irena Sendler was nominated for a Nobel Peace Award. In 2007 the Award did not go to Irena Sendler, it went to Al Gore for his work on Global Warming. Truly one of the greatest injustices on record.