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    Summary and Analysis of Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto: Based on the Book by Tilar J. Mazzeo
    Summary and Analysis of Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto: Based on the Book by Tilar J. Mazzeo
    Summary and Analysis of Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto: Based on the Book by Tilar J. Mazzeo
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    Summary and Analysis of Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto: Based on the Book by Tilar J. Mazzeo

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    About this ebook

    So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Irena’s Children tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Tilar J. Mazzeo’s book.

    Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
     
    This short summary and analysis of Irena’s Children includes:
    • Historical context
    • Chapter-by-chapter overviews
    • Profiles of the main characters
    • Detailed timeline of key events
    • Important quotes
    • Glossary of terms
    • Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
    About Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto by Tilar J. Mazzeo:
     
    Despite great risks, Irena Sendler, known as the female Oskar Schindler, rescued approximately 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto—and death.
     
    Using a secret underground network to place children in foster families and Catholic orphanages, and providing them with new identities through forged paperwork, Irena was able to smuggle the children out of the ghetto and past the Nazis. She was eventually caught and tortured, and the men and women who worked with her risked the same fate every day.
     
    Irena’s Children is the incredible story of a brave woman who would do anything to save the lives of innocent children during the world’s bleakest times.
     
    The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 18, 2017
    ISBN9781504019415
    Summary and Analysis of Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto: Based on the Book by Tilar J. Mazzeo
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      Book preview

      Summary and Analysis of Irena's Children - Worth Books

      Contents

      Context

      Overview

      Summary

      Timeline

      Cast of Characters

      Direct Quotes and Analysis

      What’s That Word?

      Critical Response

      About Tilar J. Mazzeo

      For Your Information

      Bibliography

      Copyright

      Context

      Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic woman who grew up during the pre–World War II era of segregation, a time when Jews and non-Jews did not socialize, marry, or mix in any way due to the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Irena, by then a social worker with friends from all social classes and backgrounds, already had a history of standing up for Jews.

      The backdrop of her life was a battle between Polish nationalists who wanted a free Poland and the Nazis who occupied and ruled the country. Shortly after invading Poland, the German army annexed a huge part of the city of Warsaw and ordered over 400,000 Jews to move there, creating the Warsaw ghetto. The area, which spanned 840 acres, was closed off from the rest of the city, surrounded by walls lined with barbed wire. The Jews residing there were given food rations consisting of a mere 180 calories a day per person as a systematic attempt by the Nazis to starve them to death.

      Many in the Jewish quarter, as the ghetto was also called, attempted to escape to what was known as the Aryan side of the city where they hoped to live in freedom and safety. They used sewage tunnels and tunnels dug by the Jewish residents, and false identification papers and fake birth certificates that declared them Christian. Some were aided by one of the hundreds of resistance groups, including the Home Army that fought for Poland’s freedom from its occupiers, and Żegota, a secret group that ferried those in the ghetto out to freedom.

      Irena was part of a network that worked to save Jewish ghetto dwellers and she soon became one of its leaders. This network was made up primarily of social workers, like herself, as well as doctors, lawyers, nurses, and other civil servants. Irena and her group of about twenty fellow government employees and civilians are credited with saving the lives of over 2,500 children at great risk to their own personal safety. The penalty for saving a Jew was execution for both the Jewish person and the rescuer.

      Irena’s story remained buried for decades, as was the case of many of those she worked with, due to the Russian liberation of Poland that imposed communism on the population. Since Irena had worked with the nationalist Home Army and Żegota, she was considered a subversive by the Soviets and even imprisoned under Soviet Union rule. It was only by chance that she emerged a hero in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a group of American teens discovered her history by chance while working on a class assignment. The students wrote an award-winning play, Life in a Jar, which brought Irena Sendler worldwide recognition six decades after she and others risked so much to save Warsaw’s Jewish children.

      Overview

      Irena Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, because like Schindler, she was a Christian who risked her life to save Jews during World War II. More than 2,500 Jewish children living in the Warsaw ghetto were able to escape, thanks to the efforts of Irena and her resistance network.

      Irena was a young Catholic social worker who, prior to Nazi occupation, already had a history of standing up to the anti-Semitism of prewar Poland, thanks largely to witnessing her father’s compassion and willingness as a doctor to treat Jews when she was a child. She also grew up around a Jewish community, which included Jewish playmates, and later when attending university, she had a large group of Jewish friends, including Adam Celnikier who later became her lover and fellow resistance fighter.

      When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they forced more than 400,000 Warsaw Jews to move to a segregated part of the city surrounded by brick walls. This annexation of the Jewish community was part of the Nazis’ final solution to rid the world of Jews through starvation and brutal slave labor. This annihilation plan eventually progressed to massive deportations to Nazi death camps, random shootings on the street, especially after curfew, and eventually the total destruction of the Jewish ghetto.

      Sendler and her network used their connections in the social work department, hospitals, orphanages, convents, and courts to procure and smuggle medicine, food, money, and forged passports and birth certificates into the ghetto at great personal risk, since helping a Jew was punishable by death. Many parents desperately, but willingly, gave up their children to Irena and her cohorts, in hopes their children would survive. This meant name changes as well as the loss of their Jewish identity. Irena promised these parents she would keep a careful

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