As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, Irena began aiding Jews. Initially she and her helpers created more than 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families avoid detention, and then later organized the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Sendler was a registered nurse, and under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhus outbreak, Sendler and her co-workers visited the Ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages. During this time, she and about two dozen other members of the Polish Underground managed to smuggle some 2,500 Jewish children out of the Ghetto, and then provided them with false identity documents and with housing, saving those children from directly experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. They brutally beat her, fracturing both her feet and both her legs in the process. Despite the immense pain & trauma of this torture-session, Irena refused to betray any of her friends or the children they had rescued. She was thereafter sentenced to death by firing squad, but the Underground saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued to work for the safety of Jewish children until its end.

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the other wonderful secret messengers is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory … I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality, even if you yourself cannot swim. ” ~ Irena Sendler

 

Filed under: In LOVE with Humanity by Scaughdt