Irena Sendler: The Holocaust heroine who saved 2500 Jewish children from Nazi evil

Irena Sendler rescued some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, at the risk of her own life, helped rescue around 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. She is one of the most celebrated of the Righteous Among the Nations – non-Jews honored by Yad Vashem for saving Jews during the Holocaust.

A social worker in occupied Warsaw

Sendler was born in 1910 near Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she was working for the city’s social welfare department, and she began helping Jewish families with food and money as the Nazis stripped them of their homes and livelihoods.

In November 1940 the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto. More than 400,000 Jews were crowded behind its walls, and thousands died every month of hunger and disease. Anyone caught helping Jews faced death.

Irena Sendler

Getting the children out

Using a permit to inspect sanitary conditions, Sendler entered the ghetto regularly. Later she led the children’s section of Żegota, the Polish underground Council to Aid Jews. She and a small network of helpers persuaded parents to let them take their children to safety – one of the hardest decisions any parent could make.

The children were smuggled out in ambulances, hidden in boxes and suitcases, led through sewers and underground passages, or taken through buildings that bordered the ghetto. Outside, they were given false identities and hidden with Polish families, in convents and in orphanages.

Sendler recorded each child’s real name and new identity on slips of paper, which were hidden in jars and buried, so the children could one day be reunited with their families.

“If you had seen the ghetto – it was pure hell beyond description.”
– Irena Sendler

Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo on October 20, 1943.

Arrest and survival

On October 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. She was tortured and sentenced to death, but she never revealed the names of the children or the people helping them. Żegota bribed a guard to free her, and she spent the rest of the war in hiding, continuing her work.

After the war, the lists were dug up. Most of the children’s parents had been murdered at Treblinka.

Her legacy

Yad Vashem recognized Sendler as Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. For decades her story was little known outside Poland, until it was rediscovered and shared around the world. She died in Warsaw in 2008, at 98.

“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory.”
– Irena Sendler

At the March of the Living, the stories of the Righteous remind students that even in the darkest times, individuals had a choice – and some chose to risk everything to save others.

Adapted in part from an article first published in the Daily Express.

Read: Survivors rescued by the Righteous Among the Nations walk in memory and hope