By Marc Sheppard
Monday night, CBS aired the Hallmark Channel presentation of The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, the amazing story of the Polish Roman Catholic nurse and social worker who smuggled thousands of Jewish children to safety from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Before being captured by the Nazis, Irena Sendler managed to deliver 2,500 children and infants to Polish Catholic families who kept them from the gas chambers by raising them as though their own. She even supplied the false documents necessary to sustain the new identities. Hopelessly optimistic, she actually buried records associating each child's assumed and birth identities in glass jars, hoping to one day reunite children with parents.
But in 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo, who tortured and beat her to the point of breaking her arms and legs, but never her loyalty to her humane cause. Refusing to betray accomplices, she was sentenced to die. Fortunately, by bribing a few German guards, Sendler's underground organization managed to rescue her while keeping her name on Nazi bulletin board execution lists. Believed dead, she managed to live in hiding until the fall of Berlin, reportedly continuing her work keeping Jewish children out of Hitler's ovens.
After the war she stuck to the plan and unearthed the jars, hoping to return the children to their parents. But as nearly all of the Ghetto's 400,000-plus population had perished from starvation, disease, random sadistic killings, or mass deportations to the extermination camp at Treblinka, few, if any, such reunions ever took place.
The fact that she risked her life daily to save thousands from Hitler's Final Solution is nothing short of gallant and that she did so under the scrutiny of the Gestapo is nothing short of momentous.
In 2007 and at the age of 97, the brave and selfless hero was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A post in response to the above article:
She would take Jewish children by the hand, and risking her own life, would secure not only their life, but also the lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It is necessary to remember this to understand the words of the Talmud: “He who saves one life, saves the entire world.”
Irena Sendler saved this world day-by-day, child-by-child.
Monday night, CBS aired the Hallmark Channel presentation of The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, the amazing story of the Polish Roman Catholic nurse and social worker who smuggled thousands of Jewish children to safety from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Before being captured by the Nazis, Irena Sendler managed to deliver 2,500 children and infants to Polish Catholic families who kept them from the gas chambers by raising them as though their own. She even supplied the false documents necessary to sustain the new identities. Hopelessly optimistic, she actually buried records associating each child's assumed and birth identities in glass jars, hoping to one day reunite children with parents.
But in 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo, who tortured and beat her to the point of breaking her arms and legs, but never her loyalty to her humane cause. Refusing to betray accomplices, she was sentenced to die. Fortunately, by bribing a few German guards, Sendler's underground organization managed to rescue her while keeping her name on Nazi bulletin board execution lists. Believed dead, she managed to live in hiding until the fall of Berlin, reportedly continuing her work keeping Jewish children out of Hitler's ovens.
After the war she stuck to the plan and unearthed the jars, hoping to return the children to their parents. But as nearly all of the Ghetto's 400,000-plus population had perished from starvation, disease, random sadistic killings, or mass deportations to the extermination camp at Treblinka, few, if any, such reunions ever took place.
The fact that she risked her life daily to save thousands from Hitler's Final Solution is nothing short of gallant and that she did so under the scrutiny of the Gestapo is nothing short of momentous.
In 2007 and at the age of 97, the brave and selfless hero was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A post in response to the above article:
She would take Jewish children by the hand, and risking her own life, would secure not only their life, but also the lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It is necessary to remember this to understand the words of the Talmud: “He who saves one life, saves the entire world.”
Irena Sendler saved this world day-by-day, child-by-child.
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