The story of a woman who saved 2500 children from the Warsaw ghetto

Before 2007, very few people knew about Irene Sendler, but after her candidacy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the whole world spoke about her.

Unfortunately, she lost then, but this does not diminish the importance of the feat she accomplished, which the project told about. AdMe.ru.

During World War II, Irena Sendler, as an employee of the Warsaw Health Department, visited the Jewish ghetto in the Polish capital, where she monitored sick children. Using her position, she took the 2500 children out of the ghetto and thus saved them from death.

During World War II, she was also a member of the Polish underground organization, the Council of Assistance to Jews (Zegota). To be able to enter the ghetto, Irene managed to get official passes for herself and her accomplice Irena Schulz from the Warsaw Department of Epidemic Control.

Together they visited the ghetto every day, and soon they were able to establish useful contacts there that helped in the future to take the children out of the camp.

Irena Sendler and her friend brought food, medicine, money and clothes to the ghetto.

Later they managed to connect other non-indifferent organizations to this process. Given the terrible conditions in the ghetto, where 5 thousands of people per month died from hunger and disease, they decided to help people, especially children, to get out.

It was not an easy task, and over time it became even more difficult. The Germans sealed all possible exits in all directions: underground passages, holes in the ghetto wall, which Irena used first to pull out the children.

She hid them in ambulances that transported seriously ill patients, but when supervision increased, she had to hide them in bags, garbage cans, and even coffins.

Of all the children, she most of all remembered little Elzuniya. Irena saved this 5-month-old baby by planting it in a wooden box hidden between bricks. The only reminder that the parents handed over with this child was a silver spoon, which the mother hid in diapers.

The woman bribed some guards when there was money, and sometimes she managed to simply throw the children over the ghetto fence. Very often, she hid babies in her drawer from under the tools, and older children in the back of her truck under a tarp.

In the car, she always drove the dog, which she taught to bark at the guards when the car was let into the ghetto or released from it. The barking of the dog is drowned out by the noise or crying of babies.

Sendler always carefully noted on paper, in coded form, the original names of the saved children and kept this information in glass jars, which she buried in her garden. She did this in order to find parents of these children at a certain point in the future and restore families. As a result, the names of thousands of 2,5 children have accumulated in these banks.

October 20 1943, the year the Sandler was arrested by the Gestapo. She was beaten and tortured, during which both her legs and both arms were broken. But the Gestapo never managed to break its spirit: they did not receive any information from her.

Since then, Sendler could only walk on crutches. The Gestapo sentenced Irene Sendler to death, but she was rescued by the Zegota organization, which bribed the guard to put her name on the list of those already shot.

“It’s impossible to describe in words what you feel when you go to your own execution, and at the last moment you realize that you were bought off from it,” the woman said.

Thus, until the end of the war, Irene Sendler had to hide. Much later, after the end of the war, she said: "I could do more, save more children ... and this regret for what I did will follow me to the end of my life."

In addition, she always stressed that she had many assistants in the task of saving children.

“I am the only one who survived from the rescue group, but I want everyone to know: when I coordinated our activities, there were about 20-25 of us. I didn’t do this alone,” Sendler said.

She died in 2008, at the age of 98.

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