"Each child saved with my help is not a basis for glory, but an excuse for my existence on earth."

Irena Sendler

“... the fifth - to the one who will make a significant contribution to the rallying of peoples, the destruction of slavery, the reduction in the number of existing armies and the promotion of a peace agreement.

...My special desire is that the nationality of the candidate should not influence the awarding of prizes, so that the most deserving ones will receive the prize, regardless of whether they are Scandinavians or not.
Paris, November 27, 1895."

Look at this woman - and remember her forever! The world has not become immoral just now - it has always been like this ... The one who deserves it more than others does not always receive the reward.
3 years ago, at the age of 98, a woman named Irena Sandler died. During World War II, Irina received a permit to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumber/welder. She had "ulterior motives" for it.
Being German, she knew about the plans of the Nazis regarding the Jews. At the bottom of the tool bag, she began to carry small children out of the ghetto, and in the back of the truck she had a bag for older children. She also drove a dog there, which she trained to bark when the German guards let the car in and out through the gates of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, did not want to mess with the dog, and its barking covered the sounds that children could make. During this activity, Irina managed to take out of the ghetto and, thereby, save 2,500 children. She recalled: "I witnessed terrible scenes when, for example, the father agreed to part with the child, but the mother did not. The next day it often turned out that this family had already been sent to a concentration camp."
She was caught; the Nazis broke her legs and arms and severely beat her. Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she carried, she kept the lists in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to find all possible surviving parents and reunite families. But most of them ended their lives in the gas chambers. The children she helped were placed in orphanages or adopted.

The world generally knew little about Irena Sendler (Irena Sendler (Krzyzanowska)) until 1999, when several teenage girls from Kansas in the USA, Liz Cambers (Elizabeth Cambers), Megan Stewart (Megan Stewart), Sabrina Koons (Sabrina Coons) and Janice Underwood opened her story.

These high school girls from Uniontown Rural High School were looking for a theme for the National History Day Project. Their teacher, Norman Conrad, gave them an article called "The Other Schindler" about Irena Sendler from the US news and world report in 1994. And the girls decided to explore her life. An internet search turned up only one website that mentioned Irina Sendler (there are now over 300,000). With the help of their teacher, they began to restore the history of this forgotten Holocaust hero. The girls thought that Irena Sendler had died and were looking for where she was buried. To their surprise and delight, they found that she was alive and living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw. They wrote a play about her called Life in a Bank, which has since been played over 200 times in the US, Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they visited Irina for the first time in Warsaw and made Irina's story known to the world through the international press. Since then, they have visited Irina in Warsaw four more times. Last time May 3, 2008, 9 days before her death.

Irina Sendler's life was also the subject of Anna Miskovskaya's biography Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irina Sendler. In April 2009, the television film "The Braveheart of Irena Sendler", filmed in autumn 2008 in Latvia, was released on American television screens.

The story of the Mother of the Children of the Holocaust is described in more detail in the articles by Yarover El P and Alexey Polikovsky .

..Irena Sendler went to the ghetto with an icon that said "I believe in God." With this icon, she ended up in the Gestapo. In the Gestapo, Irena Sendler had her arms and legs broken. The Germans wanted to know how Żegota worked and who was behind it. By the way, any government officials who are obsessed with their power want to know this. They cannot understand that no one stands behind people, that people act of their own free will, at their own discretion. I do not compare anyone with anyone, I do not, in any case, compare the Nazi power in Poland with anyone. I am only talking about some of the mental traits that some people in similar social positions have. When I wrote about the shareholders who went on a hunger strike in Domodedovo, one representative of the authorities convinced me with fervor and fervor that someone was behind the starving people. The fact that people can fight for their rights themselves seemed impossible to him.

..In 2006, when Irene Sendler was 96 years old, the government of Poland and the government of Israel nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. In connection with the nomination for the award, newspapers first wrote about her that year. It was then that Irena Sendler and her story became known to many people. I read several newspaper publications in which they wrote about her as a laureate even before the prize was awarded. But the prize went to US Vice President Al Gore for his lecture on energy conservation.

Of course, it is surprising that in choosing between Irena Sendler and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee chose Gore. It seems to me that after this the Nobel Peace Prize can no longer be awarded. This is a dummy in which there is no point, but there is only money. The award was dishonored. It is even more surprising for me that Al Gore, a respectable man who lives in a big house, does not need anything, belongs, as they say, to the powers that be, accepted the award. The rich became even richer, the well-fed became even more well-fed, the world nomenclature divided one more piece among themselves, and the little quiet woman, as she lived in her one-room apartment in Warsaw, remained there to live.

I knew about Irena Sendler for a long time. I read about it in various sources. And every time I read about her, I told myself that I should write about her, but every time I put it off. Because I felt the discrepancy between this whole story and the arsenal of words at my disposal. I'm not sure I can put it into words. About a young woman who went to the ghetto day after day, about a driver, about a dog, about a glass jar buried in the garden. Before certain topics and events, the human language - at least my language - falls into a swoon.

A. Polikovsky

A remark especially for readers who do not like Jews (no matter for what reason, it's an everyday thing), who, reading that Irina Sendler saved Jewish children, will say that, they say, Jewish children need to be saved, but others do not? (I met with such an aberration of perception in one of the readers). So, Irina Sandler saved the children of the Warsaw ghetto without asking if they were Jews or not. She probably saved and placed in shelters many more other children who could have come across to her on the streets and in the bombed-out houses of Warsaw. But in order to save other children, it was not necessary to hide them "in boxes with carpentry tools," and there was no threat of execution for their salvation. Therefore, she and her assistants are honored precisely for saving the children of the Warsaw ghetto, whom the Nazis doomed to destruction only because they were the children of Jews.

And the Nobel Prize - 2007 received, as you know, Al Gore, and that's what: "for his efforts to collect and widely disseminate the maximum amount of knowledge about climate change caused by human activities, and laying the foundation for measures to counteract such changes"

Yarover L P

P.S. It has been 66 years since the end of World War II in Europe. This publication is like a chain of memory - the memory of six million Jews, 20 million Russians, ten million Christians and 1900 Catholic priests who were killed, shot, raped, burned, starved to death and humiliated.

This letter has been circulated on social media.
I just copied it from here http://www.tovievich.ru/news/12.02.2010/1715.htm, because I was inspired by the history of her life, which they began to talk about a lot in the context of receiving / not receiving the Nobel Prize.
And this is also a story that every day someone works miracles and performs feats ...

The fate of Irina Sandler is somewhat close to the fate of Janusz Korczak. Fortunately, unlike Korczak, Irina Sandler was not tortured in a concentration camp, she lived for almost 100 years and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As usual, other people received the award.
But Nobel laureates come and go, but the ascetics and their deeds remain in the historical memory of the saved world. Let this memory become a part of the personal-biographical memory of each of us.
VC.

Recently, at the age of 98, a woman named Irina died. During World War II, Irina received a permit to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumber/welder. She had "ulterior motives" for it. Being German, she knew about the plans of the Nazis regarding the Jews. At the bottom of the tool bag, she began to carry the children out of the ghetto, and in the back of the truck she had a bag for older children. She also drove a dog there, which she trained to bark when the German guards let the car in and out through the gates of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, did not want to mess with the dog, and its barking covered the sounds that children could make.

During this activity, Irina managed to take out of the ghetto and thereby save 2,500 children. She was caught; the Nazis broke her legs and arms and severely beat her. Irina kept a record of the names of all the children she carried, she kept the lists in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to find all possible surviving parents and reunite families. But most of them ended their lives in the gas chambers. The children she helped were placed in orphanages or adopted. Last year, Irina Sandler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not chosen. Al Gore got it for a slideshow on global warming. I am making my small contribution by forwarding this letter to you. I hope you do the same. More than 60 years have passed since the end of World War II in Europe.

_____________________________________________________
Irena Sendler (Irena Krzyzanowska) was born in Otwock on February 15, 1910. Her father was a doctor in charge of a hospital in Otwock.
The daughter of a doctor, she grew up in a home that was open to anyone who was sick or in need, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. In lecture halls at the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish language and literature, she and her associates deliberately sat on benches "for the Jews." (In the 1930s, special benches for Jewish students were installed in the last rows of University auditoriums in Poland in the 1930s (the so-called lavkow ghetto - "bench ghetto"). As a sign of protest, they and non-Jews who supported them listened to lectures standing up. (http:// www.eleven.co.il/article/15411).The university authorities fled "ahead of the father" Adolf Hitler. A few years later he himself came to Poland to personally supervise their amateur activities).
When her Jewish friend was beaten up by nationalist thugs, Irina crossed out the stamp on her student card that allowed her to sit in "Aryan" seats. For this, she was suspended from school for three years. Such was Irina Sendler by the time the Germans invaded Poland.
Irina was, as her friend said, "selfless by birth, not education." Of course, she inherited good genes. Her great-grandfather, a Polish rebel, was exiled to Siberia. Her father died of typhus in 1917, contracted from patients his colleagues avoided treating.
(Irina recalled her father's parting words, spoken shortly before her death: "If you see that someone is drowning, you need to jump into the water to save, even if you can't swim") Many of them were Jews. The Jewish community offered financial assistance to her needy mother to pay for young Irina's education.
Like many socially active people in pre-war Poland, Ms. Sendler was a member of the Socialist Party, not, as she said, because of her political convictions, but because it combined compassion for her with an aversion to the power of money. Her motivation was not related to any religion. She acted "z potrzeby serca", at the call of her heart.
Under the Nazi occupation, the Jews of Warsaw were herded like cattle into the city's ghetto: four square kilometers for about 400,000 souls.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1950450/Irena-Sendler.html
Even before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp began, death in the ghetto was a daily routine. But, paradoxically, there was also a crack for hope. Poverty and a half-starved existence (the monthly portion of bread was two kilograms) created ideal conditions for the spread of typhus, an epidemic of which could also threaten the Germans. Therefore, the Nazis allowed Mrs. Sendler and her colleagues access to the heavily guarded ghetto to distribute medicine and vaccinations.
And this "legal" loophole allowed her to save more Jews than the much more famous Oskar Schindler. It was extremely dangerous. Some children managed to be smuggled out in trucks, or in trams, returning empty to the base. More often, however, they were led through secret passages from buildings in the surrounding ghettos.
Children were given new names and placed in nunneries, sympathetic families, orphanages and hospitals. Those who were older and could speak were taught to be baptized so as not to arouse suspicion of their Jewish origin. Babies were sedated to keep them from crying when they were surreptitiously carried out. A medical van driver taught his dog how to bark loudly to drown out the crying of babies he hauled out under the bottom of the van.
Operations were calculated in seconds. One rescued boy told how he, hiding, waited around the corner of the house until the German patrol passed, then counted to 30, ran headlong into the street to the sewer hatch, which by that moment had been opened from below. He jumped down there and was taken out of the ghetto through the sewer pipes.
According to other sources, She got a job as a plumber welder in the ghetto. First, she went to a plumbing store, where she bought herself a tool. Then I stowed it neatly in my bag so that there was enough space. At the bottom of this bag, she carried the children out of the ghetto. For older children, she had a bag.
Irina Sandler rode in a truck, where a dog was sitting in the back seat, which always barked when the truck was let out of the ghetto gate. The soldiers could not learn anything, because they were afraid of the dog, and because of its barking, they could not learn anything about the children.
Irina Sendler later recalled what a terrible choice she had to face Jewish mothers, whom she offered to part with their children. They asked if she could guarantee that the children would be saved. Of course, there could be no question of any guarantees, not to mention the fact that each time there was no certainty that it would be possible to get out of the ghetto at all. The only certainty was that if the children had remained, they would almost certainly have died. Irina said: "I witnessed terrible scenes when, for example, the father agreed to part with the child, but the mother did not. The next day it often turned out that this family had already been sent to a concentration camp." She calculated that it would take 12 people outside the ghetto working in total secrecy to save one Jewish child: vehicle drivers, priests issuing fake baptismal certificates, employees getting ration cards, but most of all these were families or religious parishes, who could shelter the fugitives. And the punishment for helping Jews was immediate execution.
But what was even more dangerous, Ms. Sendler tried to keep records of the children's origins in order to help them later find their families. These entries were made on pieces of tissue paper, a stack of which she kept on her nightstand so that she could quickly throw them out of the window if the Gestapo were to turn up.
The Nazis did indeed arrest her. 11 Gestapo men raided on the night of October 20, 1943. Irina wanted to throw a pack out of the window, but saw that the house was surrounded by the Germans. Then she threw a pack to her friend and went to open the door herself, and she hid the pack under her arm. They didn't take her.
But they, unable to find the documents that her friend was hiding, considered that she was a small cog, and not the central figure of the ghetto rescue network. Under torture, she did not reveal anything.
The Nazis held Irina in the Pawiak prison, where she was tortured and then sentenced to death. It is also said that in prison she worked in the prison laundry and, together with other similar prisoners, spoiled the linen of German soldiers, which they washed. When the Germans discovered this, they lined up the women and shot every second woman.)
Irina Sendler escaped execution.
Her name was added to the list of those executed; she was officially executed in early 1944.
and all the records of the origin of the children were buried in the ground in glass jars (under the apple tree in her friend's garden)
For the rest of the war, Mrs. Sendler lived under an assumed name.
She never wanted to be called a heroine. She said, "I still feel guilty that I didn't do more." In addition, she felt that she was a bad daughter, risking the life of her elderly mother, a bad wife and mother. Her daughter, in order to be able to see her, once even had to ask to be allowed to visit the orphanage where her mother worked after the war.
She also faced the death penalty in post-war Poland for having been funded by the Polish Government-in-Exile in London during the war and aiding Home Army soldiers. Both the Polish Government in London and the Home Army were then considered imperialist puppets. In 1948, when she was in her last month of pregnancy, interrogations by the secret police cost her the life of her second child, born prematurely. She was "restricted to travel abroad", and her children were not allowed to enter the full-time department of the University. "What sins have you taken on your conscience, Mom?" asked her daughter.
(In the USSR and, apparently, in the countries of "people's democracy", to which post-war Poland also belonged, permission was required from the "security agencies" under the ruling communist parties to travel abroad. And there were black lists of those who were not allowed to leave regardless of what. They were "not allowed to travel abroad")
Only in 1983, the Polish authorities lifted her travel ban and allowed her to come to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her honor at the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum of the Catastrophe of European Jewry in Jerusalem
Many of the children she saved, already elderly people, tried to find her in order to thank her, as well as to try to find out something about their lost parents.
Irena Sendler spent her last years in the Warsaw private sanatorium of Elizaveta Fikowska (Elzbieta Ficowska), whom she rescued from the ghetto in July 1942 at the age of six months: she was taken out in a box with carpentry tools.
In 2003 she received Poland's highest award, the Order of the White Eagle.
The world generally knew little about Irina Sendler until 1999, when several teenage girls from Kansas in the United States, Liz Cambers (Elizabeth Cambers), Megan Stewart (Megan Stewart), Sabrina Koons (Sabrina Coons) and Janice Underwood (Janice Underwood) opened her story. These high school girls from Uniontown Rural High School were looking for a theme for the National History Day Project. Their teacher, Norman Conrad, gave them an article called "The Other Schindler" about Irena Sendler from the US news and world report in 1994. And the girls decided to explore her life. An Internet search turned up only one website, which mentioned Irina Sendler. (Now there are over 300,000) With the help of their teacher, they began to restore the story of this forgotten Holocaust hero. The girls thought that Irena Sendler had died and were looking for where she was buried. To their surprise and delight, they found that she was alive and living with relatives in a small apartment in Warsaw. They wrote a play about her called Life in a Bank, which has since been played over 200 times in the US, Canada and Poland. In May 2001 they first visited Irina in Warsaw and through the international press. made the story of Irina known to the world. Since then, they have visited Irina in Warsaw four more times. The last time was May 3, 2008, 9 days before her death.
Irina Sendler's life was also the subject of Anna Miskovskaya's biography Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irina Sendler. Last year (2007) it was reported that Irina Sendler's exploit was to be the subject of a film starring Angelina Jolly.
In 2007, Irina Sendler was nominated by Poland for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her list of 2,500, twice as long as Oskar Schindler's famous list, won her the Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965. She had to wait 18 years before she was able to travel to Israel to plant her tree in the alley of memory.

When the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded Poland in September 1939, Sendler was not yet thirty years old. Before the war, she worked in the social welfare department of the Warsaw municipality. And when the invaders introduced new laws against the Jews and separated the Jewish population from the Poles, she could not stand aside and decided to take risks.

The first year, Sendler was literally torn to pieces in order to somehow help the most needy Jewish families from 350,000 prisoners. However, the closure of the entrance to the ghetto in 1940 significantly complicated the situation: there was not enough food, the children were malnourished, and epidemics began. “It was a real hell: hundreds of people died right on the streets, and the whole world silently looked at it.”

With the help of her old teacher, Sendler secured a ghetto pass for herself and several of her girlfriends. The Nazis were afraid of epidemics, so the Poles were engaged in sanitary checks inside the ghetto. Irena organized a whole system of assistance, using the money of the city administration and charitable Jewish organizations. She carried food, essentials, coal, clothes to the ghetto. In the summer of 1942, when the deportation of Jews from the ghetto to the death camps began, Irena decided that there was no time to waste. Together with her friends, she looked up the addresses of families with children and suggested that parents take the children away from the ghetto in order to give them under false names to be raised in Polish families or orphanages.

In 2006, the Polish President and Israeli Prime Minister nominated Sendler for the Nobel Prize. A year ago, Irena Sendler became a holder of the Polish Order of the Smile, the only order in the world that is awarded to adult children.

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski awarded Irene Sandler the Order of the White Eagle in 2003.

Novaya Gazeta about Irena Sendler.

She saved children in the Warsaw ghetto. It was a whole system of salvation in the very center of despair, hopelessness and darkness. Information about this woman was posted earlier in the community. But in this case, there is more complete material.

In 1940, Irene Sendler was thirty years old. She went to the Warsaw ghetto and carried food, medicine, clothes there. Soon the Germans issued a ban on visiting the ghetto. Then Irena Sendler got a job in the municipality and continued to go there as a sanitation worker. At that time, she was already a member of the underground Polish organization "Zhegota", created to save the Jews.

In the ghetto, Irena Sendler went from house to house, cellar, barracks and looked for families with children everywhere. She offered her parents to give her children to take them out of the ghetto. There is no guarantee. She could be arrested when leaving the ghetto, she could be seized on a denunciation later, already outside the walls of the ghetto; the Germans could also find the children on the other side of the wall and send them to Treblinka. But still, parents gave their children to Irena Sendler. Different sources give a different number of children taken by Irena Sendler from the ghetto, but no one gives a figure less than 2400. Age - from 6 months to 15 years.

Irena Sendler, this little round-faced woman, was not only a brave person, but also a very organized, responsible worker. For each child, she started a card, where she wrote down his former name, his new name, as well as the address of the foster family. Much has been written and much is known about Polish anti-Semitism during the war, but there were also families who took their children in during this famine, there was the Żegota organization, and there was Irena Sendler. From Polish families, children were distributed to orphanages as Polish children. Irena Sendler also entered the address and number of the orphanage on the card. It was a whole system of salvation that worked in the very center of despair, hopelessness, hunger, darkness and destruction.

Irena Sendler was arrested on the basis of an anonymous denunciation. Anonymous has not been disclosed so far and will never be disclosed. This person goes into the darkness of time without a name and surname. Just a figure without a face or voice, just a dark silhouette against a bright window.

Remaining anonymous, he refused the reward. So, they were not driven by self-interest.

He was a careful, prudent person. He did not want to prowl with his denunciation in the light of public viewing. He reported where it was necessary, showed vigilance, satisfied his passion for order - and live in peace further.

Irena Sendler went to the ghetto with an icon that said "I believe in God." With this icon, she ended up in the Gestapo. In the Gestapo, Irena Sendler had her arms and legs broken. The Germans wanted to know how Żegota worked and who was behind it. By the way, any government officials who are obsessed with their power want to know this. They cannot understand that no one stands behind people, that people act of their own free will, at their own discretion. I do not compare anyone with anyone, I do not, in any case, compare the Nazi power in Poland with anyone. I am only talking about some of the mental traits that some people in similar social positions have. When I wrote about the shareholders who went on a hunger strike in Domodedovo, one representative of the authorities convinced me with fervor and fervor that someone was behind the starving people. The fact that people can fight for their rights themselves seemed impossible to him.

Irena Sendler buried a glass jar with her card index in the garden of her friend. She did not give the Germans the location of the tree under which the jar was buried, and thus prevented them from finding the children she had saved and sending them to Treblinka. She did not betray her comrades from the municipality, who were doing documents for the children. She did not betray those who helped her to take the children out through the courthouse adjoining the ghetto. Not only did she not betray anyone, she also did not forget how to smile. Everyone who met her writes that she always smiled. In all the photographs that I saw, there was a smile on her round face.

Irena Sendler did not act alone. For example, in all the stories about her activities in the ghetto, a truck driver is mentioned, in the back of which she took the children out. In some sources, it is not about a truck, but about a cart, and not about a driver, but about a driver. Maybe this is a confusion, or maybe there was a truck, and a cart, and a driver, and a driver.

The driver had a dog, he put it with him in the cab. As soon as he saw the Germans, he would ruthlessly press the dog's paw, and the poor dog would begin to bark plaintively. Lai was supposed to drown out the cry, if at that moment he heard from the body. The dog did not understand why he was guilty and why the owner kicked his leg in a heavy boot on her paw. But dogs learn quickly, and soon she was barking up at the first movement of her master's foot. This dog also participated in the rescue of children.

There were not only the truck driver, and not only the cart driver, and not only the dog, which I imagine to be a mongrel large dog of gray-red color, with a wet nose and shining hungry eyes. There were also people who bought Irena Sendler from the Gestapo. The vaunted German bureaucracy proved corrupt. It is fortunate that bureaucrats can be corrupt, corruption in some conditions is the only way to save lives or to justice.

The amount for which the unknown Gestapo agreed to release Irena Sendler from prison is not indicated anywhere. I think all the paperwork was done correctly. That is, the execution protocol was written flawlessly and went through the authorities. In the accounting department, they put it in the correct folder and wrote out the appropriate amounts. Perhaps someone even received an award for shooting during non-working hours. Some Reichsmarks were also issued for the cremation of the body, which, presumably, a Polish gravedigger or a German soldier put in his pocket with a calm soul and drank it in a pub.

Only the execution itself was not .

The ransomed Irena Sendler with broken arms and legs and a face swollen from beatings, the Germans threw out of the car in the forest.

People from "Zhegota" picked her up. The icon was with her. The underground provided her with documents for a different surname. Until the end of the war, she did not appear in the ghetto. And there was nowhere to appear: in the spring of 1943, the Germans decided to finally liquidate the ghetto. The SS detachments, having entered the ghetto, ran into fire, which was fired from roofs, from windows, and even from underground sewers. This was the first uprising in a European occupied city, and the Germans failed to suppress it for two months. With France, they coped faster.

After the war, Irena Sendler opened her glass jar. She was a very tenacious woman. She took out her cards and tried to find the rescued children and their parents. She was the only one who knew what Polish names the Jewish children brought out of the ghetto had and in what orphanages they lived. Nothing worked, she failed to reunite families. The children no longer had parents.

Irena Sendler lived quietly in her one-room apartment in Warsaw. I was in Warsaw in 1983. Martial law in Poland has just been introduced. I remember wandering the gloomy, snow-covered streets and entering Catholic churches. I remember a pallet in a grocery store, on which a lone bone with growths of meat lay in a pool of blood. I remember the gloomy faces of the Poles. Now I think that during those wanderings of mine in an unfamiliar city, in those shops among gloomy people, in those cathedrals where I stood behind the worshipers as a quiet stranger, I could meet her. What a pity that I did not meet.

On a dark, cold morning, I once stood on a long snow-covered platform - I don’t remember what city it was - and waited for a train. The trains in Poland were either gray or bluish, and their clanging and clattering gave off anguish. I was wandering through the untouched snow, waiting for a train, and suddenly I saw a table with a train timetable, which indicated what time and from which platform the train to Auschwitz leaves.

In 2006, when Irena Sendler was 96 years old, the Polish government and the Israeli government nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. In connection with the nomination for the award, newspapers first wrote about her that year. It was then that Irena Sendler and her story became known to many people. I read several newspaper publications in which they wrote about her as a laureate even before the prize was awarded. But the prize went to US Vice President Al Gore for his lecture on energy conservation.

Of course, it is surprising that in choosing between Irena Sendler and Al Gore, the Nobel Committee chose Gore. It seems to me that after this the Nobel Peace Prize can no longer be awarded. This is a dummy in which there is no point, but there is only money. The award was dishonored. It is even more surprising for me that Al Gore, a respectable man who lives in a big house, does not need anything, belongs, as they say, to the powers that be, accepted the award. The rich became even richer, the well-fed became even more well-fed, the world nomenklatura divided one more piece among themselves, and the little quiet woman, as she lived in her one-room apartment in Warsaw, remained there to live.

I knew about Irena Sendler for a long time. I read about it in various sources. And every time I read about her, I told myself that I should write about her, but every time I put it off. Because I felt the discrepancy between this whole story and the arsenal of words at my disposal. I'm not sure I can put it into words. About a young woman who went to the ghetto day after day, about a driver, about a dog, about a glass jar buried in the garden. Before certain topics and events, human language - at least my language - falls into a swoon.

The other day I received a letter from an unknown addressee. It was a distant echo of a mailing list started by no one knows who and no one knows when. More and more new people were involved in the mailing list, and my address accidentally got into it. The entire letter consisted of a brief summary of Irena Sendler's story. The letter ended like this: “I am making my small contribution by forwarding this letter to you. I hope you do the same. More than sixty years have passed since the end of World War II in Europe. This e-mail is being sent out as a reminder of the millions of people who have been killed, shot, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!

Become a link in the chain of memory, help us spread the letter around the world. Send it to your friends and ask them not to break this chain.

Please don't just delete this email. After all, it will take no more than a minute to redirect it.”

Here I sent you this letter.

Alexey Polikovsky

When the German fascists occupied Poland in 1939, Irena Sendlerova organized the secret transfer of young children from the Warsaw ghetto to freedom. In doing so, she risked her own life, since helping Jews was considered a crime and punishable by death.

In 1942, Irena Sendlerova joined the Żegota resistance movement, which operated in the Polish capital. There were 20 people in her group. In four years, they managed to rescue a total of 2,500 children.

Jews were forbidden to leave the territory of the ghetto under pain of death. The kids were taken out in ambulances, carried out through the sewers, and once Sendlerova even hid the child under her skirt.

In 1943, the Nazis burned down the Warsaw Ghetto, dooming all its inhabitants to death.

Torture in the Gestapo

In October 1943, Irena was arrested. She withstood torture in the Gestapo and refused to give the names of the children taken from the ghetto.

The Nazis sentenced her to death. On the day of the execution, the underground managed to bribe the SS guards and save their comrade-in-arms.

According to BBC Warsaw correspondent Adam Easton, Irena Sendlerova was categorically opposed to her life being called "heroic". She said that she had done too little and therefore her conscience tormented her.

According to her, the hardest thing for her was to persuade her parents to decide to separate from their children in order to save their lives.

In 2007 Sendlerova was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize . However, the awards commission turned out to be utterly corrupt - She was not elected.

Received her award Al Gore - for a slideshow on global warming... in the hope that he will become president of the US. A year later, he received the award Barack Obama for their campaign promises.

The Polish parliament declared her a national heroine - "for saving the most defenseless victims of Nazi ideology - Jewish children." The resolution was adopted unanimously.

In the 1980s, she was awarded the title of "Righteous Among the World" in Israel.

Irena Sendlerova died in a Warsaw hospital at the age of 98. Her daughter announced her death.

http://news.bbc.co.uk

The feat of Irena Sendler

This grandmother - God's dandelion is called Irena Sendler. Do you know who she is? Probably not. Few people knew about it until 2007, when she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But, unfortunately, she lost. And this perfectly described the neglected state of this prestigious award, its politicization and formality. During the Second World War, as an employee of the Warsaw Health Department, she visited the Warsaw Ghetto, where she looked after sick children. Under this cover she, risking her life, took 2,500 children out of the ghetto and thereby saved them from death.

This fact does not fit in my head. This is something unearthly and even mystical. Imagine, one small, very fragile and weak woman, risking everything, saves small children every day from certain death - about 2500 souls in total(in the internet there is information about 3000 rescued people). Yes it love in its purest form! Dimensionless, unrestricted, selfless. We can admire this, but it is difficult for us to understand, because we have long been different.

She was born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw. During the Second World War, she was an employee of the Warsaw Health Department and, in addition, a member of the Polish underground organization - the Council for Assistance to Jews (Żegota).

To be able to enter the ghetto, Irene managed to get for herself and for her accomplice, Irene Schultz, official passes from the Warsaw Department of Epidemic Control. Together they visited the ghetto daily, and soon they managed to establish useful contacts there, which helped them in the future to take children out of the ghetto. Together with a friend, they brought food, medicine, money and clothes to the ghetto. Later, they managed to involve other caring organizations in this process. However, given the terrible conditions in the ghetto, where 5,000 people died a month from starvation and disease, they decided to help people, especially children, get out of the ghetto. 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, etc. - which Irena used in the beginning for the withdrawal of children. She bribed some guards when she had money, and sometimes she managed to simply throw children over the ghetto fence. Very often, she hid babies in her tool box, and older children in the back of her truck under a tarp. In the car, she always carried a dog, which she trained to bark at the guards when the car was let into or out of the ghetto. The barking of a dog drowned out the noise or crying of babies.

sendler always carefully noted on paper, in coded form, the original names of the rescued children and stored this information in glass jars, which she buried in her garden. She did it for to at some point in the future find the parents of these children and restore families. End up in these jars in the garden Sendler has the names of 2,500 children.

On 20 October 1943 sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. She was subjected to beatings and torture during which both legs and both arms were broken. But the Gestapo failed to break her spirit: they did not receive any information from her. Since then, sendler could only walk on crutches. Gestapo sentenced Irena Sendler to death, but she was saved by the organization Zegota who bribed a guard to put her name on the list of those already shot. So until the end of the war Irene Sendler had to hide.

Much later, after the end of the war, she said: “I could have done more, saved more children .. and this regret for not done will follow me until the end of my life.” Well, what can I say. Irena Sendler is a saint!

She died in 2008, at the age of 98, shortly after losing the Nobel Peace Prize, which the Nobel Committee gave to US Vice President Al Gore, who lost the presidential election. Circus.

The life of Irena Sendler is a very difficult, but surprisingly beautiful story. A story of great love, incredible courage and extraordinary valor.

http://adsence.kiev.ua

, Irena Sendlerova(Polish Irena Sendlerowa(full name Irena Stanislava Sendlerova(Polish Irena Stanisława Sendlerowa), born Krzyzhanovskaya(Polish Krzyzanowska)); February 15, 1910, Warsaw - May 12, 2008, Warsaw) - Polish resistance activist who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.

Early life

Irena was born in the family of Stanisław Krzyżanowski (1877-1917) and Janina Karolina Grzybowska (1885-1944). Before the birth of Irena, her father participated in underground activities during the 1905 revolution, was a member of the teaching staff and was a socialist doctor who treated mainly poor Jews, whom other doctors refused to help. He died of typhus, caught in patients. After his death, members of the Jewish community offered to help his wife pay for Irena's education. Sendler entered the University of Warsaw to study Polish literature and joined the Polish Socialist Party.

The Second World War

During World War II, Irena Sendler, an employee of the Warsaw Health Department and a member of the Polish underground organization (under the pseudonym Iolanta) - the Council for Helping Jews (Zhegota), often visited the Warsaw ghetto, where she monitored sick children. Under this cover, she and her comrades took 2,500 children out of the ghetto, who were then transferred to Polish orphanages, private families and monasteries.

The babies were given sleeping pills, placed in small boxes with holes to prevent them from suffocating, and taken out in trucks that delivered disinfectants to the camp. Some children were taken out through the cellars of houses directly adjacent to the ghetto. Was used for escapes and drain hatches. Other children were taken out in bags, baskets, cardboard boxes.

She hid babies in a toolbox, older children under a tarp in the back of a truck. In addition, a dog was sitting in the back, trained to bark when the car was let into or out of the ghetto; according to another version, the dog was sitting in the cab, and the driver, when leaving the gate, stepped on her paw so that the dog would bark. The barking of the dog drowned out the noise or crying made by babies.

Irena Sendler wrote down the data of all the rescued children on narrow strips of thin paper and hid this list in a glass bottle. The bottle was buried under an apple tree in a friend's garden, with the aim of finding the children's relatives after the war.

On October 20, 1943, she was arrested on an anonymous denunciation. After torture, she was sentenced to death, but she was saved: the guards who accompanied her to the place of execution were bribed. In official papers, she was declared executed. Until the end of the war, Irena Sendler was in hiding, but continued to help Jewish children.

After the war

After the war, Sendler unearthed her cache of data on rescued children and handed them over to Adolf Berman, chairman of the Central Committee of Polish Jews from 1947 to 1949. With the help of this list, the committee staff tracked down the children and handed them over to their relatives. Orphans were placed in Jewish orphanages. Later, a significant part of them was transported to Palestine, and eventually to Israel. After the establishment of the communist regime in Poland, Irena Sendler was persecuted by the authorities of the Polish People's Republic for her cooperation with the Government of Poland in exile and the Home Army. When Sandler was interrogated in 1949, she was pregnant. The boy (Andrzej) was born (November 9, 1949) prematurely and died 11 days later.

Due to political disagreements with Israel, the Polish government did not let Irena Sendler leave the country at the Israeli invitation. She was able to visit Israel only after the fall of the communist regime and the change of the Polish government.

Irena Sendler has been married twice. In 1932, she married Mieczysław Sendler (1910-2005), but before the start of the war they separated, although they did not file a divorce. During the war Mieczysław was taken prisoner. After his repatriation in 1947, they divorced and in the same year Irena married Stefan Zgrzhembsky (in reality, a Jew Adam Zelnikier, 1905-?), whom she met in her student years and an affair with whom she began just before the German attack . They had three children: Andrzej, Adam (1951-1999) and Janina. They divorced in 1959.

The last years of her life, Irena Sendler lived in a one-room apartment in the center of Warsaw.

Awards

• In 1965, the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena Sendler the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

• In 2003 she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle.

• In 2007, the Polish President and Israeli Prime Minister nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize for saving nearly 2,500 children's lives, but the award was given to US Vice President Al Gore for her work in the field of global warming, as the prize is awarded for actions committed in over the past two years.

• In 2007, she was awarded the international Order of Smile, becoming the oldest recipient.

• Honorary citizen of the city of Warsaw and the city of Tarczyn.

perpetuation of memory

In art

• In April 2009, the television film "The Braveheart of Irena Sendler", filmed in autumn 2008 in Latvia, was released on American television screens. The role of Irena was played by New Zealand actress Anna Paquin.
• Irena's life was also reflected in the songs. For example, the Irish group Sixteen Dead Men in 2009 performed the song "Irena" (HFWH Records).

In numismatics

• The portrait of Irena Sendler, together with Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Matilda Getter, is placed on the Polish silver coins of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations (see image).

Irena Sendler (Sendlerova, nee Krzyzanowski) is an underground activist who rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. The Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena the title of Righteous Among the Nations, along with Nikolai Kiselyov and Oscar Schindler. This woman, with the help of the Zegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw, provided the children with forged documents and, with a team of like-minded people, smuggled them out of the ghetto, giving them to shelters, private families and monasteries.

Irena Sendler was born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw into a Polish Catholic family, but grew up in the city of Otwock. Her father, Stanislav Krzyzanowski, was a doctor. Stanisław died of typhus in February 1917, contracted by a patient of his who had been refused treatment by his colleague. Many of these patients were Jewish. Stanislav taught his daughter: if a person is drowning, you should try to save him, even if you yourself cannot swim.

After the death of her father, Irena moved to Warsaw with her mother. The leaders of the Jewish community offered Irena's mother to pay for her daughter's education. The girl from childhood sympathized with the Jews. At that time, in some universities in Poland, there was a rule according to which Jews were supposed to sit on the benches reserved for them at the end of the lecture hall. Irena and some of her like-minded people, in protest, sat at such benches together with the Jews. In the end, Irena was expelled from the university for three years.

In 1931, Irena married Mieczysław Sendlerov, an employee of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Warsaw. However, later she will divorce him and marry Stefan Zgrzembski, from whom Irena will have a daughter, Janka, and a son, Adam.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (before that she worked in the city departments of Social Security in Otwock and Tarczyn). In early 1939, when the Nazis took over Poland, she began helping the Jews. Irena, along with assistants, created about 3,000 fake documents to help Jewish families before joining the underground resistance organization Zegota. Helping the Jews was extremely risky; all household members would have been shot immediately if a hiding Jew were found in their dwelling.

In December 1942, the newly formed Jewish Relief Council "Zegota" invited Irene to head their "children's unit" under the assumed name of Iolanthe. As a social worker, she had special permission to enter the Warsaw ghetto. According to her position, she had to check the inhabitants of the ghetto for signs of typhus, because the Germans were very afraid that the infection could spread beyond its borders. During these visits, Irena wore a Star of David headband as a sign of solidarity with the Jews, and also in order not to draw unnecessary attention to herself.

She carried children out of the Jewish ghetto in boxes, suitcases, and also on carts. Under the pretense of checking sanitary conditions during outbreaks of typhus, Sendler went to the ghetto and took small children out of it in an ambulance, sometimes disguised as luggage or carry-on luggage. She also used an old courthouse on the outskirts of the Warsaw ghetto (which still stands) as her main transfer point.

Children were left in Polish families, Warsaw orphanages or monasteries. Sendler worked closely with social worker and Catholic nun Matilda Getter.

Irena wrote down the data on the children taken out and put them in jars, which she buried under a tree in her friend's garden. These banks contained information about the real and fictitious names of the children, as well as data on where they were taken and to which family they originally belonged. This was done so that after the end of the war, children could be returned to their families.

In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured and sentenced to death. She didn't betray anyone. Luckily, "Zegota" saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution site. Irena was thrown into the forest, unconscious, with broken legs and arms. Sendler's name was on the lists of the executed. Until the end of the war, she had to hide, but she continued to save Jewish children. After the war, Irena took out buried jars, which contained 2,500 records of children. Some children managed to be returned to their families, but, unfortunately, many of the parents were destroyed in concentration camps or went missing.

After the war, Irena Sendler continued to be persecuted by the secret police, as her activities during the war were sponsored by the Polish government. Interrogations of the pregnant Irena eventually led to the miscarriage of her second child in 1948.

In 1965, Sendler was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem. Only this year, the Polish government allowed her to leave the country to receive an award in Israel.

In 2003, John Paul II sent a personal letter to Irene. On October 10, she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor; and the Jan Karski Braveheart Award given to her by the American Center for Polish Culture in Washington DC.

In 2006, the Polish President and the Prime Minister of Israel nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the prize was awarded to US Vice President Al Gore.

Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008 in her room at a private hospital in Warsaw. She was 98 years old.

In May 2009, she was posthumously awarded the Audrey Hepburn Philanthropy Award. Named after a famous actress and UNICEF Ambassador, this award is presented to people and organizations that help children.

Sendler was the last survivor of the "Children's Section" of the Zegota organization, which she led from January 1943 until the end of the war.

American filmmaker Mary Skinner began working on a documentary based on the memoirs of Irena Sendler in 2003. This film will include the last interview of Irena herself, made shortly before her death. Three assistants of Irena and several Jewish children, whom they saved, took part in the shooting of the film.

The film, shot in Poland and America with cameramen Andrey Wulf and Slawomir Grünberg, will recreate the places where Irena lived and worked. This is the first documentary on Sendler's exploits. Mary Skinner recorded about 70 hours of interviews for the film and spent seven years poring over the archives, talking to experts in the story, as well as witnesses in the US and Poland, to unearth previously unknown details about Irena's life and work. The film will premiere in the US in May 2011.