Hi Rick,
Thanks for the post on Irena Sendler. I remember her death on May 12, 2008 cos I celebrate my birthday on that same date and recall the massive coverage of her death in the print media and all the news programs here. You might not know but Irena Sendler was one of the first in 1965 to receive the Righteous Gentiles of the World award from Yad VaShem, in Jerusalem. She was a brave woman and deserves to be remembered.
Yes, she differs greatly from the kook Ron Paul who doesn't think saving the 6,000,000 Jews was reason to enter WW II. But after learning that last week nothing about this guy surprises me anymore.
Below is an article written in the Haaretz newspaper on 5/12/08 reporting on her death and history.
Shalom,
Peter
Sendler organized rescue of Jewish children from Warsaw Ghetto; honored by Yad Vashem and Poland's parliament.
By The Associated Press Irena Sendler - a Polish social worker who helped save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and giving them false identities - has died. She was 98.
Sendler died at a Warsaw hospital on Monday morning, her daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, said. She had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia.
Sendler was serving as a social worker with the city's welfare department during World War II when she masterminded the risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany's brutal World War II occupation.
Records show that Sendler's team of some 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
"A great person has died - a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak," Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, told TVN24 television.
Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto's sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and her assistants went inside in search of children who could be smuggled out and given a chance of survival by living as Catholics.
Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.
In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families - most of whom perished in the Nazis' death camps - Sendler wrote the children's real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.
When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate's yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.
"It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child," Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler's team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.
Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members - a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo.
The Nazis took her to the Pawiak prison, which few left alive. She was tortured and was left with permanent scarring on her body - but she refused to betray her team.
"I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity," she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska's biography, Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler.
Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, for which she worked at the time, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.
After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.
Sendler's daughter once told the AP that during her childhood, the family house was always full of people asking for help, chiefly looking for their lost relatives.
In 1965, Sendler became one of the first Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland's communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.
Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland. Only in her final years, confined to a nursing home, did she finally become one of Poland's most respected figures, with President Lech Kaczynski and other politicians backing a campaign that put her name forward for the Nobel Peace Prize.
That effort came after her name was brought to the world's attention in 2000 by a group of U.S. schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kansas, who wrote a short play about her bravery based on historic records called Life in a Jar.
It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland.
Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, was 2 years old when her family moved from Warsaw to nearby Otwock, where her father, a doctor, directed a spa hospital. He died of typhoid fever in 1917.
Sendler said she lived according to her father's teachings, arguing that people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don't matter.
Before the war, she married Mieczyslaw Sendler, but they divorced when the war was over.
She then married another underground activist, Stefan Zgrzembski, and they had two sons and a daughter. One of the boys died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of a heart failure in 1999.
Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter.
 | Irena Sendler (AP) |
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I ran into this over at FB and after reading the Ron Paul Shares my views...............this will enlighten you spirit of doing the right thing. Irena didn't follow the Ron Paul ideals here but hundreds of children were a Hitler going away party. In the end she was given the party.
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Irena Sendler;Died: May 12, 2008(aged 98)
Warsaw, Poland
During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.
Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids.
Irena kept a dog in the back 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 kids/infants noises.
During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.
Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazi's broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out, in a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and tried to reunite the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.
In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Later another politician, Barack Hussein Obama, won for his work as a community organizer for ACORN.
In MEMORIAM - 65 YEARS LATER
I'm doing my small part by sharing this message. I hope you'll consider doing the same.
It is now more than 65 years since the Second World War in Europe ended.
This a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, Russians, Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!
Now, more than ever, with Iran , and others, claiming the HOLOCAUST to be 'a myth'. It's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.
This is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide...